JD Vance turned a routine White House press briefing into a personal confession on Thursday, saying his recent weight loss began after advice from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Peter Doocy asked him about the change, and Vance replied that the vice president of the United States was being pressed on how much weight he had lost because he must have gotten very fat.
The exchange came during the first White House press briefing since July 23, and the first since Karoline Leavitt's departure last month, giving the question extra lift in a briefing that also covered the Iran war, oil and gas prices, inflation and Republican messaging ahead of the midterms. Vance said his weight loss journey started around Lent in February, after he called Kennedy and said he was thinking of giving up sugar.
He said Kennedy had a better answer, one that was “way better than that and way more intense.” Vance said he ended up eating a lot of high-protein food and a lot of sauerkraut. He joked that if the old routine was Fat Tuesday, Fat Wednesday never came. For readers wondering what changed, the answer was not a miracle plan or a formal program, just a sharper diet pushed by Kennedy's advice and followed by Vance.
That answer still leaves one obvious gap: Vance did not spell out the exact rules Kennedy gave him. He added that some of the benefit could have been the placebo effect, which undercut any neat claim that the diet alone explained the result. In January, Kennedy had already said in a 's The Excerpt podcast interview that he was on a carnivore diet, and Vance later said on that podcast that he lost 40% of his visceral fat within a month and 20 pounds in 20 days after switching to the diet.
Vance closed the exchange with advice of his own: if you want to lose weight, call Bobby Kennedy, and if you want to enjoy what you eat, do not call him. What remains unresolved is whether that mix of protein, sauerkraut and discipline was Kennedy's prescription or just the version Vance chose to follow.
