Joe Manganiello’s new memoir, “Bloodlines,” details his 7-year battle with chronic autoimmune issues, and journey of spiritual discovery.
Joe Manganiello
Actor Joe Manganiello spent seven years battling chronic autoimmune issues in secret.
In his new memoir, he shares how he’s recovering, including enlisting a shaman to take him floating.
He shared his health habits with Business Insider, including a testosterone-free workout strategy.
For seven years, actor Joe Manganiello lived in a world of secret pain. In his new book, “Bloodlines,” he describes it as a “10-out-of-10 pain” that felt like “someone was raking my intestines with a metal wire grill brush.”
From the outside, things looked great. He’d just retired his title as People’s “hottest bachelor alive,” and was newly wed to actress Sofía Vergara. He was looking forward to playing what he considered the role of a lifetime, having just been cast as a villainous “Deathstroke” in Ben Affleck’s new “Batman” movie (later canceled).
Behind the scenes, he was breaking out in itchy bulbous hives, dealing with autoimmune issues affecting his lungs, his thyroid, and his intestines. At a low point, he had to be quietly hauled off the set of the TV series “Six” in an ambulance and rushed to the hospital, pumped full of painkillers.
He kept it all a secret — the surgeries, the relationship struggles , the distance he developed from his new wife, and the near-death moments. His new memoir pulls back the curtain on his years of chronic pain, and details the “journey of spiritual discovery” he went on to understand his illness, his family’s traumatic past , and the complex, interconnected nature of mental, physical, and emotional health.
“I open up to the idea that maybe this thing that’s going on with me can’t be solved by physical cure,” Manganiello told Business Insider. “The root can’t be pulled out that way; there’s some sort of spiritual means.”
Now that the pain is over, he tells us he’s developed some new healthy routines including a mind-clearing floating activity and early dinnertime. He’s also back in the gym, adhering to some of his old go-to formulas for muscle-building , which he says are critical for learning how to inhabit the role of a “big, strong person” on screen.
No testosterone, just training
Joe Manganiello says he’s “never touched a steroid.”
John Parra/Getty Images for Sandals Resorts
Manganiello lost 59 pounds when he was sick, shriveling to a size he hadn’t been since middle school. At one point, he became so emaciated that he didn’t have the strength to communicate at more than a whisper. He remembers shoveling down donuts and slurping “peanut-butter enhanced protein shakes,” even hiring a chef to feed him protein-heavy meals every 90 minutes, just to try to regain some weight.
“I’m so happy that I can keep weight on now,” he said. “My strength came back fully.”
Manganiello — who struggled with addiction in his teens and early 20s — doesn’t drink alcohol, and says he’s also maintained a hardline abstinence toward performance-enhancing drugs throughout his career.
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With starring roles including a topless werewolf in True Blood and Big Dick Ritchie in Magic Mike, he says the training he does, including lots of heavy deadlifts and squats with hundreds of pounds, is a key part of getting into character.
“There are certain characters that I think would never touch a steroid because they don’t need to, and so I would think that if I went down that road in order to try to put on muscle that way, that it would be in conflict with the soul or the spirit or the nature of that character,” he said. “Thank God I made those choices because when I got sick, had I taken all of those things, I think it would have complicated my situation a lot.”
Floating for mental clarity
Sensory deprivation tanks are filled with body-temperature saltwater, making your body even more buoyant and weightless.
John Leyba/The Denver Post via Getty Images
Under the tutelage of Australian gold medalist and spiritual mentor Peter Evans, the man he refers to as his “shaman,” Manganiello started a “float club” a few years back. The “club” isn’t huge; it’s really just his name for the two-hour sessions that he and Evans embark on together at a dungeon-esque underground spa called the Float Lab in Los Angeles.
Sensory deprivation floating is designed to help people with sleep, pain, and stress. During the therapy, floaters are immersed in a shallow, body-temperature tub filled with epsom salt — which makes floating even more effortless than plain water.
Then, they close the lid, and you’re weightless. Large-scale studies on the benefits of this type of relaxation is lacking, but small studies suggest it can help ease stress, lowering blood pressure, slowing down heart rates, and reducing the stress hormone cortisol .
During his first float, Manganiello said he experienced a new kind of clarity, “neutralizing” his overthinking. Inside the dark tank, he became an observer of his life and his loved ones, and then entered a deeply meditative state. His feeling of mental clarity lasted until the next day, when he was a guest star on the TV game show “Password.”
“I could read every little bit of emotion and information coming off everyone around me and could sense what was in their minds,” he wrote in the book. “At one point I saw that my partner was second-guessing the thought I had implanted, and as he tried to move on from it to explore a new thought, I snapped at him before he could, forcing him to blurt out the correct answer that I had given him.”
Manganiello says he continues to employ the relaxation strategy whenever he’s going on a game show, including the night before his winning 2025 appearance on “Celebrity Wheel of Fortune.” He won both games that night and solved both of the final “bonus” puzzles, netting nearly $200,000 for a Pittsburgh children’s hospital.
Finish dinner early
Manganiello says he likes to finish dinner early, since he doesn’t have a large intestine to hold food anymore.
filadendron/Getty Images
Physically, the most enduring legacy of Manganiello’s chronic health issues is in his stomach. He has a long scar below his belly button from the operation to remove his large intestine, and is missing several feet of his digestive tract.
As a result, he says he has to work harder to stay hydrated and remember to eat enough salt to keep his electrolytes in balance . He also tries to finish eating earlier in the evening than he used to, since food goes through him quickly. It’s an eating strategy borne of necessity, but it’s also one many longevity experts and intermittent fasters swear by, for better sleep and (in many cases) more nutritious choices by default.
Manganiello isn’t an absolutist about his early dinner and still recognizes the social benefits of enjoying late meals with friends sometimes, even though he knows he’ll pay for it later.
“You’re hanging out, and it’s like, ‘oh man, I’m not going to have good sleep tonight because I was out so late and I’m still eating — my body’s going to process it while I’m sleeping and it’s going to wake me up,'” he said. “But I swore that if I survived this whole thing and I could do something useful, I wouldn’t complain about it. So I try not to complain about it. I just manage it and work around it.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
