Kelly Ripa revealed the reason she decided to stop drinking nearly three years ago and it was basically because she looked and felt a whole lot better.
“Ryan [Seacrest] likes to blame himself for me stopping drinking, he’s like, ‘I got here and you stopped drinking,'” the 49-year-old “Live With Kelly and Ryan” co-host shared with PEOPLE magazine in a piece published Wednesday. “It really was not that. I did a sober month — all my girlfriends did it, we all did it together — and I just never went back to it.” (RELATED: Celebrate Samantha Hoopes’ Birthday With Her Hottest Looks)
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“It wasn’t even really a thought process,” she added. “It felt great, I felt like I looked great, I felt like I didn’t feel hungover. Not that I was a heavy drinker — I wasn’t someone who got drunk — but even like two glasses of wine at a girl’s night out dinner; I would feel it the next morning.” .(RELATED: Kelly Ripa Might Have Already Found Her Next Co-Host For ‘Live’)
“I just didn’t really feel the need or desire to go back to it,” Ripa continued. “It wasn’t really a choice or a thought, it was just, ‘Yeah, I guess I don’t drink anymore.'”
At one point in the interview, the talk show host admitted that quitting smoking is much harder than not drinking.
“Quitting smoking I really had to think about,” Kelly explained. “I was like: ‘Smoking leads to cancer and it will kill you.’ It was a thing I had to tell myself. And I was like, ‘It gives you wrinkles.’ And that was the thing that was really terrifying [laughs]. But you don’t want to die early, needlessly, over cigarettes. Over something you don’t even like that much anyway. But drinking was very easy I didn’t really think about it at all.”
And the reaction from people over her decision to stop drinking versus quitting smoking was very different.
“Nobody ever asked me why,” Ripa shared. “But I quit drinking and everyone’s like, ‘Why did you quit drinking?’ I’m not comparing cigarettes to alcohol, but for me it was just like, I don’t do that anymore. I felt better so I just stopped.”
Ripa is married to actor Mark Consuelos and the pair have three children together.