Posted by on February 18, 2020 4:52 am
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Categories: µ Newsjones

Ethan Suplee stopped taking his shirt off at the beach around age five. “Suddenly my body was not good,” the actor recalled in a recent interview. Instead, he told me, he would watch his friends play on the beach as he sat frozen and clothed. He wanted to join them, but wondered, “How do I get to the playing with them without people seeing me?”

Suplee has been a TV and film regular since the ’90s, in projects like Kevin Smith’s Mall Rats and ABC’s Boy Meets World. He played Seth Ryan in American History X and then, in 2000, came Remember the Titans. Since then he’s starred in series including My Name Is Earl and The Ranch, and in March, he’ll appear in the controversial Blumhouse pic The Hunt. But last month everyone was talking about Suplee for a different reason: his body transformation. After all, he did just launch a new podcast, American Glutton. 

Suplee was five years old when he first learned that people tend to worry about and judge fat bodies. He’d gone to visit his grandparents in Vermont—and when he arrived, “there was this moment for them of going like, ‘What the hell has happened to this kid?’” He wasn’t even severely overweight at the time, he noted, so much as chubby-cheeked.

Read more at The Daily Beast.