Billy Gardell has spent decades making people laugh, but his latest headlines are about the fight to stay around long enough to keep doing it.
The MIKE & MOLLY and BOB HEARTS ABISHOLA star told PEOPLE that after losing 170 pounds, “they want me around longer, God bless them,” referring to his wife, Patty, and 22-year-old son, Will, whose steady presence gave him a reason to change.
Gardell, 56, described a transformation four years in the making that began with a health scare he couldn’t joke his way out of. By 2020, his weight had climbed to between 370 and 380 pounds, and he was living with type 2 diabetes right as COVID-19 arrived.
“When the first wave hit, and they punched up that list of high-risk conditions, I had all of them,” he told PEOPLE. “Overweight, sleep apnea, smoker, type 2 diabetes, asthma…It was really the perfect storm.”
That storm pushed Gardell toward a decision he’d circled twice before and backed away from: bariatric surgery. He went through with it in July 2021, but he’s quick to say the operation only worked because of a second, quieter surgery he performed on his own thinking.
“It really came down to a shift in everything I think about food,” Gardell said. “Food is fuel. It’s not reward, it’s not soothing, it’s not medication. I had to get beyond my emotional relationship with food.”
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He called his surgeon, Dr. Philippe Quilici, and his nutritionist, Teri Hlubik, his “dream team” and said the harder work happened in weekly sessions where he learned to untangle food from feeling.
“Every change you want to make in your life starts between your ears,” he said. “You have to learn to love yourself. You have to look at why you react the way you do to food and heal that, and then love yourself enough to do something good for yourself.”
Four years later, Gardell holds a weight between 210 and 215 pounds through a steady routine: a turkey sausage breakfast sandwich, cottage cheese and fruit at midday, a light dinner, 75 ounces of water a day, and workouts three to four times a week, according to Extra’s recap of the interview. His diabetes is gone, and so is the fear that used to sit beside him.
“I fluctuate between 210 and 215,” Gardell said. “And that’s comfortable for me…My diabetes is gone. I feel strong. I have energy. Losing weight saved my life.”
What comes through in Gardell’s account isn’t triumph for its own sake. It’s gratitude and a sense that the years he’s bought back belong to someone besides himself.
“When a man knows what he’s fighting for, he’s capable of doing some amazing things,” he said. “And those two are worth fighting for,” he added, referring to his family.
That instinct to point past himself isn’t new for Gardell. Movieguide® previously praised his performance in DANCER AND THE DAME, a Pure Flix comedy built around prayer and quiet redemption, noting that its themes of loyalty and grace “will touch the heart of families.” A decade later, Gardell’s own story plays like an unscripted version of the same idea: a man who ran out of road, got humble enough to ask for help and found that the asking was where the healing actually started.
For families watching Gardell’s journey from the outside, there’s a simple lesson worth sitting with. Real change rarely starts with willpower alone. It starts with humility, the kind that admits a person can’t out-muscle everything on their own, and needs both people and a purpose bigger than the mirror to hold onto.
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