Amy Robach & T.J. Holmes Have a Refreshingly Honest Take on Their 'Appalling' Alcohol Habits
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About 1 in 5 Americans lie to their doctor about how much alcohol they drink, according to surveys, so it’s refreshing when we see people — and especially celebrities — get truly honest about their drinking habits. It’s been a rough decade so far, after all, and let’s not pretend like alcohol isn’t a coping mechanism for a lot of us. In fact, it turns out that Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes — the former Good Morning America co-hosts who were ousted following the messy public reveal of their relationship — used alcohol as exactly that, a coping mechanism, during their highly stressful 2023. Like many of us, they’re now starting 2024 by committing to dry January, and in doing so, they’re owning up to their drinking habits with a kind of honesty we rarely see around alcohol, especially from celebrities.
On the new episode of their iHeartRadio podcast, Amy and T.J., the couple said they wanted to look deeply at the role of alcohol in their lives. That included sharing estimates of how much they drank, which for Robach, was “over 30 drinks a week.”
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“That is appalling to me. That is embarrassing to me,” Robach said. “That is not what I wish it were.”
Holmes, meanwhile, said he could “easily go through 18 drinks a day,” and he explained just how that might happen. He might be “two drinks in” at 10 a.m., after a run, before having two drinks at lunch with Robach. From there, he continued, “I could easily have a drink in my hand from 2 in the afternoon until 7, 8, 9, 10 o’clock a night.”
All that drinking was adding up, literally. The couple calculated that they spent over $2,800 on alcohol in the month of December, a number Holmes thought would be higher, he said.
And the cost wasn’t just financial. Robach said her drinking was “weighing heavily” on her in particular as a breast cancer survivor concerned about recurrence, because consuming “even small amounts of alcohol is linked with an increased risk of breast cancer in women,” according to the American Cancer Society. That’s because alcohol can increase estrogen levels in the body, and estrogen is known to cause some types of breast cancer to grow, per the ACS.
Robach’s doctors gave her this information early on in her breast cancer journey, she said, and it was on her mind because “I’m someone who lives with recurrences. All breast cancer survivors do.” While Robach says she’s changed many other aspects about her life to reduce her risk of recurrence, “alcohol has been something that I haven’t fully committed to reducing — and in fact, as I pointed out last year, I increased.”
Part of the reason they drank more in 2023, Robach said, came down to stress. “I didn’t have a job to go to. I was staying away from a lot of friends and family. We were laying low. So what did I do? I drank a lot, a lot more than I ever have,” she explained. The journalist said she had a drink “every single day” of 2023, noting that while she wasn’t getting “wasted,” it was more about “keeping a buzz going all day or at least keeping a relaxed state of mind in a heightened, anxious year.”
Now, the couple are committing to dry January to ease back on the booze, and so far, it sounds like it’s going well.
“We feel amazing,” Holmes said, adding that Robach “was walking today into the studio and said, ‘I’ve got some pep in my step.'” They’ve even experienced some weight loss so far, with Robach losing two pounds and Holmes dropping “three to five” since avoiding alcohol. They’re also assessing the role alcohol plays in their lives in a broader sense. “I am certainly somebody who right now and in years past needs to reexamine my relationship with alcohol,” Holmes said, “and that’s what we are doing.”
Doing dry January? Swap out your alcohol for this hydrating drinks:
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