For most of his career, John Goodman’s size was part of how audiences saw him, from Dan Conner’s recliner on Roseanne to Walter Sobchak’s bowling-alley rants in The Big Lebowski. Goodman, born June 20, 1952, in Affton, Missouri, is now 74 and roughly 200 pounds lighter, a change so dramatic that fans sometimes don’t recognize him. Mostly, he has let the photos do the talking.
That changed in a long conversation with The New Yorker, published Sunday, October 18, in which he talked plainly about how he got heavy, how he finally got the weight off and one side effect nobody warned him about.
Why Did John Goodman Say He Was “Eating Alcoholically”?
Goodman has never separated the food from the drinking. He quit alcohol in 2007, when he was 55, and he told the magazine the habit moved straight to his plate. “I was almost four hundred pounds,” he said. “I was eating alcoholically after I stopped drinking.”
The drinking had followed the same pattern. “The thing about instant gratification is you don’t really care what’s going to happen right after it,” he explained, describing a cycle that led to “bigger hangovers or me getting the shakes” and then drinking to make the shakes stop. By the end, he said, he was going to wind up in a hospital one way or another. What finally turned him around was a phrase every recovering alcoholic knows. “There’s a saying in the rooms: I got sick and tired of being sick and tired,” he said. “I just was tired of it, and I wanted to stop.”
Sobriety stuck, and it changed small things too, as he once explained when he revealed why staying sober meant giving up the backyard grill. The weight was a much longer fight.
What Did He Try Before The Weight Finally Stayed Off?
Goodman lost big amounts of weight for years and then watched it come right back. “I’d lose sixty pounds in a summer, gain it all back. Seventy pounds, eighty pounds,” he told The New Yorker. “And that got tiring.” In a 2016 interview with ABC News he used almost the same words he uses now, saying, “I just stopped eating all the time,” and admitting that he had been “eating alcoholically.”
He worked with trainer Mackie Shilstone, cut back on sugar and leaned on a Mediterranean-style diet, and by 2023 the results were impossible to miss. Readers who followed our earlier look at John Goodman’s weight loss saw the transformation in pictures. What he hadn’t spelled out until now was that diet and exercise weren’t the whole story, and that one of the steps he took to end the cycle involved a surgeon. Before we get to what that cost him, there’s the other part of his past that came roaring back this week.
Where Do Things Stand With Roseanne Barr?
Goodman played Dan Conner from 1988 to 1997, then again in the 2018 revival and in The Conners, the spinoff ABC built after firing Barr, which ended in 2025. Barr has now made a sitcom of her own, called Meemaw, which has been filmed but doesn’t have a network yet. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published October 20, she said she tried to bring her old TV husband along. “My son called Goodman and asked him to do a cameo on Meemaw and he declined,” she said, as People and TMZ reported. Asked whether she is in contact with Goodman or Laurie Metcalf, she answered, “Of course not.”
Goodman hasn’t responded, but he addressed the distance in July 2025, when he told the same outlet that the two hadn’t spoken in about seven or eight years. “I’d rather doubt if she wants to talk to me,” he said, while still remembering how it started. “We hit it off from jump street. She made me laugh, and I made her laugh, and wow, it was so much fun.”
What Was The Unexpected Downside Of John Goodman’s Weight Loss?
Here’s the part that surprised readers. Goodman told The New Yorker he had stomach surgery, though he didn’t say what kind or when, and that the results came with a lingering price. “I had an operation on my stomach. But I also turned anemic and lost a layer of fat under my skin, and I’m cold all the time,” he said.
The man who spent years sweating under studio lights now can’t get warm. As The Daily Beast noted, citing the Cleveland Clinic, anemia limits how much oxygen reaches the body and fat under the skin works as insulation, so losing either can leave a person feeling the cold.
He’s also working on staying upright. In early 2025 he fell and hurt his hip at Pinewood Studios while filming Digger, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s satire starring Tom Cruise, in which Goodman plays the president. “I was walking on set in my stocking feet, which was very stupid,” he admitted. He had surgery the next day and was functional again within about a month, and these days his workouts are about “building up the core, balance, strength training, stuff like that, so I don’t fall down.” He told the magazine that living in Charleston, South Carolina, helps, with a trainer nearby and weather made for long walks.
For all the hard things he discussed, Goodman sounded like a man at peace with where he landed. “There’s been a lot of therapy. I’m happy now,” he said. “I just wish I was better spoken and I could relax more.” Then he added the line any actor would understand. “The best stuff happens when I’m relaxed.”