Kelly Ripa Says She Gained 12 Pounds After Quitting Drinking Alcohol: ‘I Don’t Understand’

Kelly Ripa got candid about her weight with guest cohost Andy Cohen during an episode of Live With Kelly and Mark.

Kelly’s husband, Mark Consuelos, was out shooting a movie, so Andy, 56, stepped in to cohost the show on Wednesday, January 22. The Watch What Happens Live host revealed that he is doing Dry January, and therefore not consuming alcohol this month.

Andy said that Dry January is “boring” but that he is still taking edibles. Kelly, 54, said that’s “not really dry.” The All My Children alum then shared her experience with quitting alcohol years ago.

“I told you, when I quit drinking, I expected there to be this windfall of weight loss, because everybody’s like, ‘Well, you are gonna get too skinny, and you can’t afford to lose it,’” Kelly told Andy.

He then asked her what happened after she gave up alcohol.

“I gained 12 pounds. I don’t understand this magical weight loss that people apply,” Kelly remarked. “I think I just took to eating the sugars.”

Kelly previously revealed that she was sober in February 2020. She said that she was inspired to be sober after a conversation with her friends, which was around the time Ryan Seacrest became her cohost on Live. Initially, she planned to be sober for only a month.

“Ryan likes to blame himself for me stopping drinking, he’s like, ‘I got here and you stopped drinking.’ It really was not that. I did a sober month — all my girlfriends did it, we all did it together — and I just never went back to it,” Kelly told People. “It wasn’t even really a thought process. It felt great, I felt like I looked great, I felt like I didn’t feel hungover. Not that I was a heavy drinker — I wasn’t someone who got drunk — but even like two glasses of wine at a girl’s night out dinner; I would feel it the next morning.”

“I just didn’t really feel the need or desire to go back to it,” Kelly, who shares kids Michael, Lola and Joaquin with Mark, told the outlet about why she continued sobriety. “It wasn’t really a choice or a thought, it was just, ‘Yeah, I guess I don’t drink anymore.’”

Kelly said that giving up alcohol was much easier than giving up smoking, which she did more than two decades ago.

“Quitting smoking I really had to think about,” the podcast host revealed. “I was like: ‘Smoking leads to cancer, and it will kill you.’ It was a thing I had to tell myself. And I was like, ‘It gives you wrinkles.’ And that was the thing that was really terrifying. But you don’t want to die early, needlessly, over cigarettes. Over something you don’t even like that much anyway. But drinking was very easy I didn’t really think about it at all.”

She admitted that many people have questioned her decision to stop drinking but not her decision to stop smoking.

“Nobody ever asked me why. But I quit drinking and everyone’s like, ‘Why did you quit drinking?’” she revealed. “I’m not comparing cigarettes to alcohol, but for me it was just like, I don’t do that anymore. I felt better so I just stopped.”