Vito wants back in the thin club.
“Sopranos” actor Joe Gannascoli is mirroring the healthy lifestyle his hefty mobster alter ego ended up embracing on the show — doing everything he can to whack his current extra pounds with a special fitness regimen and strict diet featuring made meals to get fit for an upcoming TV project.
“I don’t actually like baby carrots,” the TV Mafia heavyweight recently quipped to The Post, referencing Vito’s hilarious stress-eating scene in the HBO hit’s final season, which included him filming an ad for a weight-loss company, the Thin Club.
At 67, the chef-turned-“Vito Spatafore” actor is shooting to shed 40 pounds, dropping from 250 to around 210, so he will be camera-ready for a new TV project based on his Mafia-themed cookbook, “A Meal to Die For.”
“That’s when I’m going to be at my goal, which is now four months away,” said Gannascoli, who moved from Brooklyn to East Rockaway about 20 years ago, around when “The Sopranos” finale aired.
Gannascoli starts with a 6 a.m. early-bird round of golf on the south shore of Long Island and usually hits a local pickleball court by 8 a.m. either with friends or for a pickup game with strangers.
The on-screen racketeer is often in the gym right after putting down his racket.
“I just started hitting every body part, and I’m doing that four times a week,” Gannascoli said.
“Now I’m doing heavier weights and less reps. … I like to get a good sweat going.”
The calorie-counting camera-loving capo, meanwhile, goes on “salad binges,” eats little red meat and employs intermittent fasting, rarely eating after 2 p.m., to complement his physical-fitness push.
The regime is a far cry from when he was at his heaviest at 400 pounds during the “Sopranos” early season, thanks to bad hips and sleep apnea.
Fans can recall Tony Sirico’s character, Paulie “Walnuts,” referring to Vito and Steve Schirripa’s Bobby “Bacala” characters as the “before and way before” in the weight-loss commercial.
Gannascoli said his first major health kick, which occurred during filming for “The Sopranos” and included both lap band and hip surgeries, led the writers to turn his substantial weight loss into the plotline in season six.
But keeping his weight off afterward was a back-and-forth battle as he worked as a private chef, doing home parties for fans and becoming an ambassador for various brands.
He said this current effort to slim down is different from those past because of better nutrition and a much more consistent athletic lifestyle.
“I feel better and look better than I did back on the show,” he said.
Gannascoli said he also just beat another arch-nemesis.
“I quit gambling,” Gannascoli said. “After 50 years, a switch went off in my head.”
The addiction cost him his Bay Ridge restaurant, 101 Seafood, in the early 1990s after an ill-fated weekend of betting on the Giants, Jets and a few other NFL teams that put Gannascoli in a hole for $60,000.
The silver lining was how that debt spurred him to move to Los Angeles to pursue acting, he said.
“Life has been great,” he said. “I’m not a religious person, but God has always looked out for me.”
Gannascoli is notably responsible for getting the show to greenlight Vito’s best-known character arc of being a closeted gay Mafioso, which he pitched after reading about a similar real-life case.
Scriptwriting brass mulled it over and didn’t tell him much until he showed up for a table read, he said.
“They stopped me in the hall and said, ‘Oh, by the way, you’re giving a b–wjob this season,” he recalled.
“I said, ‘I wasn’t expecting to be on this end of the b–wjob. I didn’t think it would go that way.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source celebrity.land ’
