John Goodman compares relationship with food to alcohol addiction

John Goodman says he was “eating alcoholically” after he quit drinking, and that this is how he came to weigh nearly 400 pounds. 

The 74-year-old actor opened up about his weight and sobriety in an interview with The New Yorker, published on 18 October.

Goodman got sober in 2007, at 55, but said his relationship with food then mirrored his relationship with alcohol. 

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“I was almost four hundred pounds. I was eating alcoholically after I stopped drinking,” he said. He described a pattern of weight swings before he decided to act. 

“I’d lose sixty pounds in a summer, gain it all back. Seventy pounds, eighty pounds. And that got tiring,” he said. “I took steps so I wouldn’t have to do that anymore.”

He drew a direct line between the two. 

“The thing about instant gratification is you don’t really care what’s going to happen right after it,” he explained, which with drinking led to bigger hangovers, the shakes, and having to drink to stop them, “that vicious cycle”.

Goodman said alcohol also kept him from growing up. 

“I was delaying my maturation by drinking, and I had a lot of catching up to do, just realizing how selfish it made me,” he said. “I was overlooking real life.” 

He said he was glad to find there was a life in which he didn’t have to use anything to enjoy it, and has described getting sober as a life-saving decision.

He also said he had an operation on his stomach, but that it came with problems. He became anemic and lost a layer of fat under his skin, he said.

Goodman first told David Letterman he was “pushing 400” pounds, and later said he hit that peak in 2011. 

In 2016 he told ABC News he was “sick and tired” of looking at himself. He has worked with health coach Mackie Shilstone and is estimated to have lost about 200 pounds over the years. 

He appears in The Righteous Gemstones and Digger, and played Dan Conner on Roseanne.

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