Zac Efron reveals he used ‘strong diuretics’ to get his ‘Baywatch’ body

Zac Efron has opened up about the extreme diet required to produce his “Baywatch” body and warned others of the devastating effect it had on his long-term wellbeing.

In an interview with Men’s Health, the actor said getting the shredded look in the 2017 action-comedy came at a cost to his physical and mental health. Efron played Matt Brody, an Olympic swimmer who becomes a lifeguard to restore his image after a controversy.

“That ‘Baywatch in Malibu’ look, I don’t know if it’s really doable,” he told the magazine. “There is too little water in the skin. Like, that’s wrong; it looks like CGI. And it required Lasix, powerful diuretics, to achieve it.

Efron said he took diuretics, over-trained, and ate the same three meals every day while not getting enough sleep due to filming and his intense training schedule.

“I started developing insomnia,” he said. “And I fell into a pretty bad depression, for a long time. Something about this experience burned me.

“At the end of the day, they assigned too many diuretics for too long, and that messed something up,” he added.

It took six months after filming for him to feel better.

He said he was talking about it now because he wanted people trying to get that body to know how damaging the process was and how long it took him to recover.

He’s currently preparing for a new, unnamed role, he said, but he’s taking a different approach to his training this time and won’t try to get into the same shape he did in “Baywatch.”