Watch: John Goodman, 74, Looks Unrecognizable After 200-Pound Weight Loss in New Photo
While everyone loves a reboot, there’s one character John Goodman hopes to never return to.
Ahead of the 2018 premiere of the Roseanne spinoff The Conners, the actor acknowledged that, yes, he had shed half of the weight from his formerly 400-pound frame, but he saw no point in talking it up.
“It was basically just portion control, and ‘I don’t need it,'” The Righteous Gemstones star explained to AARP The Magazine in 2018 of cutting down on his food consumption. “I was just shoving everything into my mouth. But I don’t want to be an example to anybody when the weight comes thundering back on—when I start eating Crisco out of the can with a spoon and a side of confectioner’s sugar.”
Of course, nearly a decade later, he still remains righteous, most recently showing off his decidedly slimmer frame on social media.
And for the 74-year-old, it all started with getting off that proverbial couch.
When Roseanne‘s OG iteration went off the air in 1997—Goodman’s Dan initially dying from a heart attack that was walked back for the reboot—”There was an emptiness inside me,” the actor noted to AARP. “I still have it, but I know what it is now. You recognize it and go, ‘There it is.’ You don’t have to fill it with another pork chop or another drink.”
He’d made the decision to get sober in 2007, following a three-decade battle with alcoholism—”It was 30 years of a disease that was taking its toll on everyone around me and it had got to the point where, every time I did it, it was becoming more and more debilitating. It was life or death,” he expressed to The Guardian—yet he still struggled with a feeling of emptiness.
“But instead of filling it with booze or cocaine or food, you just acknowledge that it’s there,” he explained to ABC’s Peter Travers in 2016 of changing his eating habits. “You can’t fill it. And you go on and live with it.”
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Quite simply, he’d grown sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.
“You’re shaving in the mirror and you don’t want to look at yourself,” he continued. “It gets dangerous.”
Determined to ditch his couch potato nature—”It takes a lot of creative energy to sit on your ass and figure out what you’re going to eat next,” he reasoned to People in 2010—he hired health coach Mackie Shilstone to lead him through workouts six days a week and help him cut the sugar from his diet.
“I’m breaking a sweat,” he acknowledged of his initial 100-pound weight loss, “but I’m not going nuts.”
More importantly, he stopped running around in circles.
“In the old days, I would take three months out, lose 60 or 70 pounds,” he recalled to ABC, “and then reward myself with a 6-pack of Bud or whatever and just go back to my old habits.”
So for this go-round, “I wanted to do it slowly, move, exercise,” he continued. “I’m getting to the age where I can’t afford to sit still anymore. And it gives me the energy to work, ’cause work is very draining.”
His new workouts packed quite the punch, though.
Sharing his boxing routine with Rolling Stone in 2023, Goodman said, “It’s usually just an hour, hour and a half of hitting the mitts, hitting the bags, learning footwork. It’s great.”
And combined with a Mediterranean-style eating plan filled with fish, vegetables, olive oil and nuts, it proved to be a solid one-two.
But on days when Goodman wasn’t feeling up for getting in the ring (“I never got good enough where I would trust myself to spar because once I get whacked in the face, I don’t know if I wouldn’t lose it,” he told Rolling Stone), he didn’t beat himself up.
Rather, he’d stay active by walking his dogs or hopping on an elliptical.
Now he’s feeling stronger than ever.
“I’ve got bionic parts,” he joked to AARP of his titanium knees. “You live through enough and survive, you have to make peace with your flaws and your broken pieces.”
He joins a long list of stars who approached getting healthier with a steely resolve. See what they’ve shared about their wellness journeys.
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