Comedian and actress Donna D’Errico didn’t always look the way she does today.
When she was a little girl, her mother put her on a diet so she could slim down. By the time she was 10, she weighed around 160 pounds.
“I was very tall,” the “Baywatch” star admitted to FOX411. “So she said, ‘You’ve got to lose weight. You’re looking too fat and flabby.’ That led to this e-mail. She was a friend of mine. She wrote to me and said, ‘I hate seeing your body.’ That was scary. I’m an adult, I’m a little bit older, but this is a 12-year-old girl, a 10-year-old girl.
“I remember the bullying, and there was a lot of people telling me how horrible and ugly I looked at that age,” D’Errico explained. “And I couldn’t understand it. It was almost very complicated. It didn’t mean I didn’t love myself. I still love myself. I just needed to really, really love myself and not be influenced by others that were telling me, ‘You have to do this. You have to eat that. You have to wear these clothes.’”
So D’Errico began her quest to look great.
“I remember going on a crash diet, and then I went on the diet, but it didn’t work,” she said. “After the crash diet was so exhausting, I just hit rock bottom and I was like, ‘All right, I need to figure this out. I need to try other things.’ And I was like, ‘I’ll just go vegan.’ I was like, ‘I’ll just go vegan.’”
Now the vegan actress, who was on the red carpet at the 20th anniversary screening of “Baywatch” and held a meet-and-greet with her fans, is often called the new Pamela Anderson because of her remarkable youthful looks.
“People say to me, ‘You look like Pamela Anderson.’ Which I think is incredible,” D’Errico told us. “In a way it’s flattering because she is a friend and a mentor and I am such a huge fan of her and I adore her and I love what she stands for.”
When she isn’t spending time with her husband of eight years and 4-year-old son, D’Errico is working on her new book, “You Adore Me, But Can’t Have Me.”
“It’s about everyday lessons of how I relate to my children and how they relate to me and of the relationship we have and what we’re trying to figure out as life goes on,” she told us. “Every day I look at my son and think about what could be out there to make him better.”
She also has lots of fun at home.
“My husband and I laugh and just play games. Just make memories,” she said. “Watch movies. He’s interested in music. We’ll just play a game and I bring his guitar and we’ll sing along with some songs on the side. Just making memories, making memories is really important.”
Happy summer!
“Baywatch” airs on Mondays on CBS.