Zac Efron looks great on the cover of the October issue of Men’s Health. He’s got the guns out. His eyes are smiling. He’s playing with those paint-smoke-thingy thingies. He’s posing next to headlines about men’s physiques and whether dropping acid can ease your anxiety. Although we’d love to read the findings on the latter topic, we know the former one is a source of struggle for many men dealing with body-image issues, including Efron. Efron was already certifiably jacked in the Neighbors movies, but in 2017’s film remake of Baywatch, Efron said he pushed his body to unhealthy extremes. “That Baywatch look, I don’t know if that’s really attainable. There’s just too little water in the skin. Like, it’s fake; it looks CGI’d,†he told the magazine. “And that required Lasix, powerful diuretics, to achieve.â€
Lasix is the type of diuretic better known as a water pill, meaning Efron was, to put it plainly, pissing his brains out to push his physique over the edge. In addition to the expected side effects like loss of electrolytes, Efron says he developed insomnia from his 4 a.m. wake-up workouts and “fell into a pretty bad depression, for a long time.†Something about that experience burned me out,†he went on. “I had a really hard time recentering. Ultimately they chalked it up to taking way too many diuretics for way too long, and it messed something up.†Efron says it took six months to feel like himself again. No movie with a Tomatometer percentage below 20 percent is worth getting your body-fat percentage below 5 percent.