Rosie O'Donnell Weight Loss: Rosie O'Donnell returned to The View on Monday on ABC and she was a changed woman. Rosie debuted her much-talked-about 50-pound weight loss.

"It's filled with emotional turbulence," Rosie O'Donnell explained at debut on the new season of The View.

The actress and talk show host once weighed 237 pounds. O'Donnell estimates that she dropped 53 pounds since she had gastric sleeve surgery in July 2013.

"I'm not used to it yet," O'Donnell told her co-hosts. "I still buy the wrong-sized clothes."

Rosie got the surgery after she had a life-threatening heart attack in 2012.

At an appearance on Monday in New York for the Rosie's Theater Kids gala, Rosie told People Magazine "In my opinion, [this surgery is] something that needs a little more attention for people who have suffered with morbid obesity their whole lives," she said of the vertical gastric sleeve surgery she had in July 2013. "This has really, really helped [me]."

"Everyone has to approach it in a way that feels right with them, [but] once you have the surgery, it's not a magic pill," the talk show host continued. "It's still hard. You have to risk your life, and you're in severe discomfort for a couple of months, and it forces you to modify your behavior when you haven't been able to before."

In an interview with Access Hollywood, Rosie O'Donnell said " I had a thing called the vertical gastric sleeve. It's very different than when you think of bypass surgery. It's newer. They remove two-thirds of your stomach, but everything else stays intact, and as a result of that, you can't hold as much food. You don't want as much food, either. "The very interesting part is that in that other two-thirds are where all the hunger hormone lives. That's the biggest surprise, that you're not hungry, right?"

According to reports O'Donnell underwent weight-loss surgery in 2013 after a series of health issues including a heart attack in 2012.

During an American Heart Association luncheon speech she admitted "I did what many woman do, and I did not take care of myself. And that's why I'm here, to try to get women to know you're worth it, take care of yourself and know the symptoms."

O'Donnell cautioned that the surgery should be used along with a healthy diet and exercise. She said "Now it's a tool, it's not an answer. You can't just get surgery and go 'I'm done' and keep eating the way you did. You have to change the way you eat, you have to exercise."