Live! With Kelly and Ryan host Kelly Ripa revealed the real reason she decided to stop drinking alcohol – and it was not her co-host Ryan Seacrest.

Ripa told People that her initial decision to give up alcohol around three years ago started out in a simple way, “I did a sober month — all my girlfriends did it, we all did it together — and I just never went back to it. Ryan likes to blame himself for me stopping drinking, he’s like, ‘I got here and you stopped drinking.’ It really was not that.” 

“I just didn’t really feel the need or desire to go back to it,” Kelly Ripa continued, “It wasn’t really a choice or a thought, it was just, ‘Yeah, I guess I don’t drink anymore.’ ”

The 49-year-old host then explained, “It wasn’t even really a thought process. It felt great, I felt like I looked great, I felt like I didn’t feel hungover. Not that I was a heavy drinker — I wasn’t someone who got drunk — but even like two glasses of wine at a girl’s night out dinner; I would feel it the next morning.” 

The mother of three, which she shares with her husband Mark Consuelos added that sobriety came easier than quitting smoking 25 years ago. 

“Quitting smoking I really had to think about. I was like: ‘Smoking leads to cancer and it will kill you.’ It was a thing I had to tell myself. And I was like, ‘It gives you wrinkles.’ And that was the thing that was really terrifying.” she revealed, “But you don’t want to die early, needlessly, over cigarettes. Over something, you don’t even like that much anyway. But drinking was very easy I didn’t really think about it at all.”