His Body of Work
Tom Arnold built nothing less than a cathedral of a gym at his West Valley home.
He filled the 2,500-square-foot room with every kind of heavy duty, commercial exercise equipment, stereos and televisions, a wet bar, saunas, mirrors, windows offering views of mountains and his tennis court, vaulted ceilings and expensive flooring.
All this, and not just because Arnold is easily bored one moment and all keyed up the next--more so than usual with “The Tom Show” starting up Sunday at 9 p.m. on the WB Network.
There’s more to it, and Arnold (formerly married to Roseanne) knows this better than anyone.
He had this homage to exercise built to his needs, his specifications because exercise helps the 38-year-old actor stay sober and clean. Away from drugs and caffeine and sugar. Wake up to a cartload of can’ts every morning--can’t have this, can’t have that--and a handy sanctuary makes sense. Makes for sanity.
Question: How did you get to this point, from sobriety to working out seriously?
Answer: I got sober in December 1989, and that first year I just wanted to concentrate on being sober and not what I ate or anything. So just after New Year’s 1991, I put a small gym machine in my garage--the cars had to be parked outside--and started working out.
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Q: How hard was it to get there?
A: I resisted because I had played sports and worked hard when I was younger, and I was pretty trim. I worked in the fields as a kid baling hay. I worked at a meat-packing plant.
Without physical labor out here, I kind of let myself go. But your body, mind and spirit are all important. So, after my first year of sobriety, I thought now I have to do body and, boy, I remember the first time I worked out. I just did some squats and I could hardly walk for the next two weeks. I mean, I was in pain but I just kept at it.
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Q: And now you’re working out a couple of hours a day.
A: Six days a week. I’ll tell you what, if I don’t do cardio, I mean, I get kind of crazy.
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Q: Crazy, how?
A: I mean, I just feel bad. I have attention deficit disorder and [I’m] hyperactive. One thing about cardio is that it just slows you, takes some of the craziness, some of the fight out of you. It’s a fight in your head because you’re tired, you know?
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Q: Getting that kind of result, cardio alone saves your butt.
A: Yeah, definitely it does. You know, I could do everything overboard, so I have to be very careful. I’ll say, “Well, I got time to run eight miles,” and end up running 16 and then I’m just exhausted so I have to be careful. It’s just . . . managing everything. I also eat too much, but I really enjoy eating and good food and sugar.
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Q: Your voice changed completely when you said “sugar.”
A: I have to be careful. Last summer I weighed 286 pounds. Now I weigh about 220. I’d like to get to 200. I don’t know if it’s going to happen. I fluctuate a lot. That’s been my pattern. The one thing I haven’t fluctuated on, though, in the last 6 1/2 years is working out.
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Q: Go back to the sugar for a moment.
A: Sugar is something else I have to watch out for--for two reasons. One, there’s the weight and such, but it also affects me differently.
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Q: What do you mean?
A: The effects could be like, I don’t drink any caffeine, period, because caffeine makes me tired. When you have attention deficit hyperactive disorder, everything is the opposite. When I was a drug addict, I liked cocaine and everybody goes, “Well, I bet you’re really amped up,” but I was pretty mellow. It mellowed me out. Alcohol was, yeah, was crazy and you have to be careful about it. With sugar, it can crash me.
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Q: Sugar makes you tired?
A: Yeah, right away, and so I’ve got to be careful about that. And it kind of ruins your day if you eat it too early in the day--you’re just zonked out.
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Q: So, you do diet or not?
A: As far as watching my diet, I know what I should and shouldn’t eat. I know enough about it. I’ve gone to a good nutritionist who’s given me advice, but I also feel . . . I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I don’t smoke cigarettes. I like to eat.
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Q: Well, yeah, especially when everything else is off limits.
A: Now, you can use food as another drug, but we all have to eat food so it’s a little tricky. But I do enjoy good food. And I do know when I’m eating something bad and I enjoy it. There are times when I get run-down, when I’ve been traveling a lot, it’s hard but I make a point of doing the workouts--but it’s hard to maintain your diet.
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Q: Maybe you’re just resisting having to be more disciplined.
A: There really has to be a way to eat what I want to eat and use some common sense and moderation. There is. I have a hard time in restaurants. I shouldn’t because, like I say, my nutritionist gave me a list--if you go to the Dome order this or that--but I want their desserts. I want to try the fabulous, beautiful dessert. I want red meat. You know, chicken is fine and I love fish, but occasionally you need a big, greasy cheeseburger. . . . If I obsess on it, I’ll eat everything but the cheeseburger so I might as well just get it over with.
My friends are big eaters. There’s a lot of guys I hang out with, big guys, from Iowa and from here. We will hook up wherever we are and, I mean, I eat. It’s not about being full. It’s about, “Can I possibly eat another bite? Well, then, I’d better do it.” I have to be careful about that.
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Q: That’s from growing up in the Midwest. My cousin Marvin’s a farmer in Missouri, so I know about that good eating.
A: Yeah. Oh, yeah. It could be your last meal so you stuff yourself.
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Q: And afterward a good game of pitch or poker.
A: Right, right. You know, I won an eating contest for my charity against Hulk Hogan, and Hogan’s a giant, man, and this other guy that weighed about 450 pounds, Sumo wrestler. I beat them easily because it was a pie-eating contest, pieces of pie. Those guys started off big--”Yeah, yeah!”--and I just kept eating. I ate 14 pieces of pie. Now, you can’t stop for a second because if you have a chance to think, then you won’t do any more. Those guys pooped out after seven or eight pieces and I just--goodbye, 14 pieces of pie, yeah.
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Q: Now, what about when you’re trying to be good about food and dieting.
A: Right. Well, something I got to watch out for, too, in my middle [pats his tummy] is bread products. In the morning I like Met-Rx shakes with apple juice. But I also need to eat something. I’ll have a bagel that I’ve scooped out and some honey. I drink a glass of orange juice every day, and about 2 1/2 gallons of water a day. I drink a lot of water. I mean a lot of water.
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Q: You scoop your bagel? You take out the best part.
A: Yeah, I know. But, then, when you’re really hungry it all tastes good. And I get to use all natural peanut butter, which we drain out, and an all-fruit jelly and it’s very good. And I eat as much fruit as I want.
And lunch I may make a salad and I try to eat that first because once I’m hungry, I’ll just start eating so quick. Then I’ll eat a turkey or tuna sandwich and nonfat soup. And as far as snacking during the day, I mean, you’re down on the set with all that food around and, I’ll tell you, muffins can be a lot of calories. Have you ever had Mrs. Beasley’s?
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Q: No.
A: Oh, the best thing you’ve ever eaten. These beautiful baskets of muffins--so tasty. They aren’t healthy at all. And then there’s cookies and brownies. Oh, it’s the best. I sent one to my buddy Mo in Chicago who I grew up with, and his wife called and told me he got it in the morning and when she came out of the bedroom he was naked, hunched over the basket, going through it, eating thing after thing after thing. He was so happy and I know that feeling.
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Q: Now I want some Mrs. Beasley’s muffins.
A: I’ll tell you, you’ve got to get some. Me, too, but also you got to remember, there’s some real prejudice about people that are overweight. There is such a prejudice, you don’t realize.
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Q: Out here in L.A. it’s the worst.
A: Yeah, and you know what, I had it myself. I had to stop myself from going--”That person is fat. Must be something wrong with them.”
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Q: I think you have to be careful with that. . . .
A: Well, you know, the truth, when you see somebody on “Oprah” that weighs 400 pounds and they say they’re happy, I know it’s bs. Yeah, yeah, they’re happy. There’s no way. Because the fact that I’m overweight, I mean, that has to do with certain things inside of me, sort of addictions to certain things and I think you see that with a lot with people. If they’re having a tough time in life or if I’m stressed, I tend to gain weight.
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Q: Because. . . .
A: Because food is comforting. The whole thing is to be aware of what you’re eating. If you’re aware that you’re eating a piece of mousse pie--if you’re aware of that in your mind--and you eat it anyway, it’s OK. But if you lie to yourself--I’m not eating this--then there’s a problem. I mean, I know what I eat and I know how many calories are in it. I know how many calories I burn, and my body has a very high metabolism because I’m so hyper. You’d think I’d be thin. But I am aware of the bad stuff I eat.
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Q: What do you do about dinner?
A: I like to grill chicken or turkey burgers and have a salad and vegetables. The scary part is between dinner and bedtime. That’s why we don’t keep anything really good in the house.
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Q: No muffins stashed anywhere.
A: Exactly. But we do keep fat-free, sugar-free frozen yogurt in the fridge, but compared to having Ben and Jerry’s, the real stuff, you go--”Well, it’s not worth walking upstairs for.”
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Q: How do you handle that scary part you mentioned?
A: Well, I smoke a cigar or two. And I’ll tell you what, if you smoke a cigar before you eat you can’t possibly eat as much, I don’t think. I like the real harsh ones that make you a little sick. That really works for your diet. But you know, if you can do some kind of an activity like romance. I keep telling my wife, we need to do this all the time, maybe three times a day before each meal.
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Q: And she tells you to keep walking.
A: Exactly.
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Q: Earlier, you were talking about quieting down the fighting in your head?
A: Normally, I sit here and there’s a million thoughts going through and it just comes at me, comes at me, just moving so fast, but I forget when I’m working out. It slows everything down so you can just kind of feel it. You know, if I work out I’m a better husband, I’m a better actor, I’m a better friend.
* Starting Monday, Guest Workout will run every Monday in a new section of The Times called Health.
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On the 7th Day, Arnold Rests
Six days a week, Tom Arnold starts each morning on one of his eight cardiovascular machines.
After that first hour, he’s joined by Gina Meyer, a fitness specialist from the Warner Bros. Fitness Center, about four times a week. They might start off the second hour with some aerobics--Arnold’s wife, Julie, joins in occasionally--but the norm is 20 minutes of stretching.
After the warmup, if Arnold is on the mark, he does a lot of weights. A typical drill concentrates on three body parts per session--for example, chest, back, thighs. If he can do the weights only two or three times a week, he’ll make sure to include a full-body workout on one of those days.
He also concentrates on his “big stomach” with a lot of abs and 200 sit-ups a day.