Rosie O’Donnell drops 50 pounds, posts before-and-after pictures

Rosie O’Donnell has lost almost 50 pounds, she announced Thursday on Twitter, posting a before-and-after photo comparison showing how much progress she’s made since last year’s gastric-sleeve surgery.

“Almost 50 lbs off - I can see it,” she wrote, captioning the side-by-side shots. In the “after” shot, her face and neck are noticeably thinner.

Her significant weight loss was inspired by a brush with death. The former co-host of “The View” had suffered a life-threatening heart attack in August 2012 after helping an “enormous” woman get out of a car.

“A few hours later my body hurt, I had an ache in my chest both my arms were sore, everything felt bruised,” she wrote on her blog at the time. Though she felt clammy and threw up, she took aspirin and waited until the next day to see a cardiologist. An EKG then revealed a nearly completely blocked artery in her heart.

“I almost died — and that’s not an over-exaggeration,” O’Donnell told People that October. “That’s a fact.”

After the incident, a doctor later advised the 5-foot-7 comic to lose weight, and O’Donnell aimed to get below 200 pounds. With a starting weight of 230 pounds, she tried dieting, People reported, but was still struggling after a year of trying. That’s when she got the gastric sleeve, which reduced the size of her stomach by 80%.

O’Donnell, 52, made the procedure public in February while addressing an audience at an American Heart Assn. event (she’s now a heart-disease advocate). She’d lost 40 pounds at that point, according to the magazine.

“Since my mom died of breast cancer when I was 10, I assumed that’s what would kill me,” she told Detroit’s WJBK in February, noting that she’d ignored heart-attack symptoms.

“I didn’t take care of myself.”

O’Donnell, who married Michelle Rounds in June 2012, right before Rounds’ first of several surgeries to remove gastrointestinal desmoid tumors, now walks an hour daily with her wife, the comic told WJBK.

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