Billy Joel Shows Off 50-Pound Weight Loss: Transformation Photos

He’s in a new state of mind! When Billy Joel took to the stage at Madison Square Garden as part of his ongoing residency on November 5, 2021, the piano man not only brought down the house, he also showed off an impressive 50-pound weight loss, and the reason behind his transformation depends on his appetite (to paraphrase “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant”) and is something that he “embraced.”

In a recent appearance on The Howard Stern Show, the singer-songwriter revealed that the pain he experienced following a surgery left him with a substantially lower appetite.

“I had back surgery early this year, and the pain afterwards was so bad, I lost my appetite,” he told the host. “I embraced that, I said, ‘OK, I won’t eat as much,’ and I ate less and less and less and less, and then, there was just life aggravation and that tends to, you know, impact your appetite too.”

Adding that it was not an intended alteration in his lifestyle that he had planned to make, he was feeling positive about it. “I had gotten kind of chunky,” Billy, 72, told Howard, 67. “I was happy to lose the weight.”

And while Billy previously told The New Yorker magazine in 2014 that he thought there was nothing “more pathetic than a man on a diet,” he told Rolling Stone in 2020 that he saw “pictures of myself at the Garden recently, and I go, ‘That don’t look right.’ I got old, I lost my hair.”

He also added that he felt he had “always been a schlubby-looking guy, and I ain’t about to change.”

In 1998, Billy opened up about having a severe asthma attack on stage, telling the BBC in a joint interview with Elton John, “In the old days I could scream and punch my way through it, but now it wouldn’t be fair to my fans”.

Scroll through the photos below to see his impressive 50-pound weight loss at his recent concert.