John Goodman is sharing rare insight into his weight loss transformation.
The 74-year-old Roseanne star said that it was a long road that led him to focus on his health, which started with changing his self-destructive habits and getting sober.
However, after he stopped drinking in 2007, he turned to eating instead, which is when his weight climbed to nearly 400 pounds.
“I would overeat, because that was comfort,” Goodman told The New Yorker in a new interview. “Trying to fill up whatever hole that was. Same thing for drinking. It’s been better said before by other people, but just trying to fill up that vacuum with kicks.”
The Golden Globe winner said that he was motivated to keep his healthy habits because it was a matter of life and death. “I got sick and tired of being sick and tired,” he recalled.
“The thing about instant gratification is you don’t really care what’s going to happen right after it—which always led to bigger hangovers or me getting the shakes, and having to drink to get rid of the shakes, and that vicious cycle,” he said about his alcoholism. “I was in a position, when I quit, where I had to be hospitalized one way or the other. I just was tired of it, and I wanted to stop.”
He continued: “I was delaying my maturation by drinking, and I had a lot of catching up to do, just realizing how selfish it made me. I was overlooking real life. And it was great to see there was a life where I didn’t have to use anything to enjoy it.”
The Digger actor told the outlet that he had tried to lose weight before he quit drinking, but that it was a futile cycle.
“I’d lose sixty pounds in a summer, gain it all back,” he said of the months in between filming seasons of Roseanne. “Seventy pounds, eighty pounds. And that got tiring. I took steps so I wouldn’t have to do that anymore. I was almost four hundred pounds. I was eating alcoholically after I stopped drinking.”
In a 2017 interview with ABC, Goodman said his previous attempts at losing weight would end up with him falling into old habits.
“This time, I wanted to do it slowly,” he said at the time. “Move, exercise. I’m getting to the age where I can’t afford to sit still anymore.”
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