bollywood

Updated: Jul 11, 2016 18:16 IST

Anupam Kher is giving us some serious fitness goals! The veteran actor, who was secretly working towards losing weight, and is now 14 kilos lighter, surprised his fans on Twitter with before-and-after pictures, recently. There’s no doubt he’s proud of himself, but admits the journey was “torturous”.

“I knew I had to get rid of three things in my diet — potatoes, rice and sweets. I didn’t touch any of these for six months. Along with this, I walked for, at least, an hour every day. In fact, I walk 10,000 steps daily,” says Kher.

We all know, weight loss requires quite some motivation. For the 61-year-old, it was the desire to reinvent himself that kept him going.

Actor Anupam Kher with his trainer Anthony Jadhav.

“Every few years, I decide to do something different, be it with my work or this. When I turned 60, I wanted to do something impossible. My challenge was to make this possible. When I was 28 years old, I played a 60-year-old man in one of my films (Saaransh; 1984) and I now want to do an action film. This is just my desire; it’s not like I’ve been offered anything as yet,” says Kher, who hadn’t even told his family about his wish to “reinvent” himself.

“I thought that if I told them that this was what I had planned, they would laugh at me. Plus, they did not notice for a while. I was never fat, so the idea was to be thinner…My mother, of course, is not very happy,” says Kher, who deliberately decided to cut down on his films to achieve his goal.

Read: Anupam Kher backs Rishi Kapoor on renaming assets

“This was an interval of my life. I took my trainer, Anthony Jadhav, with me to America, where I was touring for my play. I feel that the process of losing all this weight helped discipline me as a person as well. I got time for myself. I would not walk on the treadmill; I would take a walk on the street. I accompanied this with light exercise. All I can say is, there is no bigger high than seeing the change for yourself,” adds the actor.

Ask Kher how he plans to maintain this new physique, and he shares, “Now, I have put a horrendous, fat picture of myself right next to my bed. Every morning, I get up and look at that picture and that motivates me! I have put the picture so that I get stressed looking at it and maintain my weight.”