Billy Gardell Says Bariatric Surgery Probably Saved His Life After Losing 170 Pounds & His Honesty About the Journey Is Deeply Moving

Oct 07, 2026 by apost team

Billy Gardell weighed between 370 and 380 pounds when his doctor sat him down and said: "You have to do something." He had type 2 diabetes. He had hurt his knee so badly he could not walk for exercise. He had spent years losing and gaining the same 30 pounds in an annual cycle that had not, over time, been moving in the right direction.

On July 17, 2021, he had gastric bypass surgery. And on the "Breaking Bread with Tom Papa" podcast, he said what the surgery amounted to.

"I got the surgery, and it's been a couple of years now, and I probably saved my life."

Gardell, best known for playing Mike Biggs on CBS's "Mike & Molly" alongside Melissa McCarthy, and more recently for playing Bob on "Bob Hearts Abishola," has lost approximately 170 pounds since his surgery. His weight now fluctuates between 210 and 215 pounds. He is not on any medication. His type 2 diabetes is gone.

He had also, it turned out, been taking Ozempic before the surgery — prescribed for diabetes, at a time when it was not yet publicly understood to be a weight-loss drug. He lost 12 pounds on it. He stopped before the surgery. "Had I known it was a weight loss drug, I probably would have ridden that out," he told the podcast. But the surgery happened. And he believes it saved his life.

"It's just those little freedoms," he said of what the weight loss has given him. Hiking with his wife. Buying something off the rack at the mall. Going on vacation with his family.

Freedoms, by his account, he did not previously have.

The surgery was not, Gardell has been careful to say, the whole story. It was the beginning of it. He changed his eating habits. He began exercising consistently. He has described working on what he calls his emotional relationship with food — the part of the equation that no operation can fix on its own. "Surgery wasn't a finish line," he told Men's Journal. "You have to do the work."

The work included an unexpected professional dimension. Gardell spent years as a stand-up comedian whose physical presence — his size, his self-deprecating humor about his weight — was central to his act. After losing 170 pounds, he had to figure out how to be funny in a different body. He has described returning to open mic nights to rebuild his material from the ground up.

What motivates him, he told the podcast, is not abstract. It is his wife Patty Knight and their son William, now 22. "They're my motivating factors," he said. He worried, in his heaviest years, about not being there for them. He made a decision. He had a surgery. He did the work.

His diabetes is gone. He is off all medication. He hikes with his wife. He buys clothes off the rack. He sits down on a podcast and says: I probably saved my life.

He said it simply, the way people say things they have had time to fully understand — not for effect, not for drama, but because it is true. He is 57. He has more energy than he did at 45. He wanted to be around for his family. He did something about it.

apost.com

Are you a fan of Billy Gardell? Do you think his honesty about his weight loss journey and what it took to get there is something more people in Hollywood should model? Let us know in the comments and pass this on to your family, friends, and other fans out there!