Tom Hanks Blames Being ‘A Total Idiot’ For His Diabetes Diagnosis

Tom Hanks has put all the blame squarely on himself for his Type 2 diabetes diagnosis in a recent interview.

Tom Hanks On His Diabetes

“I’m part of the lazy American generation that has blindly kept dancing through the party and now finds ourselves with a malady,” Hanks told the Radio Times, referring to the cause of his diabetes. “I was heavy. You’ve seen me in movies, you know what I looked like. I was a total idiot.”

Hanks first opened up about having diabetes while promoting Captain Phillips back in 2013. At the time, he revealed that he’d been battling high blood pressures since his mid-thirties.

“I went to the doctor, and he said, ‘You know those high blood sugar numbers you’ve been dealing with since you were 36? Well, you’ve graduated. You’ve got Type 2 diabetes, young man,'” Hanks told David Letterman on The Late Show.

“My doctor said, ‘Look, if you can weigh as much as you weighed in high school you will essentially be perfectly healthy and not have Type 2 diabetes.’ and I said to her, ‘Well, I’m going to have Type 2 diabetes.’ I weighed 96 pounds in high school. I was a very skinny boy.”

Hanks has tried to shed some of the weight in the last couple of years, but the actor admits that he could be working a bit harder at it. “I thought I could avoid it by removing the buns from my cheeseburgers,” Hanks told Radio Times. “Well, it takes a little bit more than that.”