The actor, who is currently preparing for an unnamed role, said preparing to play Olympian-turned-lifeguard Matt Brody “required Lasix” and “strong diuretics” to pull it off.
“So I don’t need to do that,” Efron said. “I would much rather have an extra, you know, 2-3% body fat.”
He also said he was training too much, eating the same food for all three meals and not sleeping well.
Efron said he is speaking out about it now, not to complain, but to let people know “how devastating the process was for him and how long the ill effects of his training lasted.”
“I started developing insomnia and fell into quite a severe depression, for a long time. Something about that experience wore me out,” said Efron, who added that it took him six months to start feeling better. “I had a really hard time refocusing. In the end, they assigned too many diuretics for too long, and that messed something up.”