NEED TO KNOW
- Jenny McCarthy says her gut health used to be so bad, she’d only poop every 14 days
- She worried she’d need a colostomy bag, but a dietary change fixed everything
- She says her acne cleared up, she dropped 15 lbs. and had the energy of a 25-year-old
Jenny McCarthy isn’t shy about discussing her gut health, which she says used to be in shambles even though she thought she was “eating clean.”
“My bloat was so bad that it always made me feel like I was about three months pregnant,” the Formelss Beauty founder tells PEOPLE of following a strict vegan diet.
“And I’m sorry if this is too TMI, but I was a complicated person who only went to the bathroom once every 14 days.”
McCarthy, 52, says it got so bad that her functional medicine doctor told her she might need a colostomy bag if things didn’t improve. She decided to make a drastic change to her diet.
“I went on the carnivore diet,” she says, laughing at how it’s a complete reversal from her former vegan diet. “I was so against it, but my doctor was like, you’ve tried everything but this, so you’re going carnivore.” She says it’s given her a whole new lease on life.
“I’ve got to tell you, it saved my gut. I go to the bathroom every single day now — and it made me feel like I was 25 again.”
She says the diet consists mostly of grass-fed meat.
“I also include an avocado because I’m a menopausal woman, so I would have avocado because I need the fiber, but I mostly had grass-fed beef, sometimes grass-fed kidneys and liver mixed together, which sounds gross, but you can’t tell.”
She adds, “And all of my acne has cleared up. In one month, I lost 12 to 15 pounds. And I would have 120 grams of protein a day, a hundred grams of fat. That’s how much I was eating. I’m a Chicago girl — I can’t starve myself!”
But she admits that it takes discipline. “You can’t half-ass it,” she says of the diet. “But if I showed you a picture of my face from even a year ago, it’s so different. I didn’t realize how swollen I was all the time.”
McCarthy has long paid attention to what she puts in her body due to health issues over the years.
“I have so much kind of s— wrong with me,” she says with a laugh. “I’m like, I have Hashimoto’s, Candida, leaky gut, celiac disease, and a histamine intolerance.”
She says she took great care to monitor what she was eating and drinking (she doesn’t drink alcohol), but then she began realizing that the drugstore products she was using on her body were full of ingredients she couldn’t pronounce.
“I was like, why am I cleaning up my food, my water, my air, and then I’m going to put this garbage on my face? And then that’s when I went down the major rabbit hole of looking at ingredients and said,’ I need to start my own company.'”
Formless Beauty boasts a line of blush, lip glosses, faux eyelashes and a 12-piece master makeup brush set, and they just launched two new products — Silk Moisturizer and Renewal Cleanser — that are made with non-toxic ingredients.
“It’s taken me years to get here,” McCarthy says of remaining committed to creating products that don’t contain toxins.
“My chemist, I think, has a bullseye picture of me in his office because I am so particular when it comes to having everything be clean, fragrance-free, vegan, and paraben-free.”
She says she’s proud of how far the brand has come.
“I had someone come up to me at the dentist and tell me, ‘I haven’t been able to wear makeup in 10 years because mascara usually makes my eyes burn, and I can wear your makeup,'” she says.
“So I feel like we’re absolutely making a difference. It’s just a matter of getting the word out there that we are strict and true to our meaning behind clean and performance.”
