Tom Arnold: How I Lost 89 Lbs!
NOW 198 LBS.
BEFORE: 287 LBS.
APRIL 2013
It was 2 a.m. and Tom Arnold was at the L.A. hospital where his son Jax was born on April 6. But instead of hovering around his little boy, Arnold couldn’t stay away from the congratulatory cake. “Night and day I kept going back into the second room where the cake was and eating it,” admits the new dad. Just as he was about to dive into the frosting that read, “Congratulations! Jax Copeland Arnold,” the actor says, “I looked at my perfect little baby and stopped. Something inside of me changed. I decided I didn’t want to live that way. I need to stretch fatherhood out as long as I can for my boy’s sake.”
To do so, Arnold, 54, put down the cake and swore off bread in favor of more whole grains and lean proteins. “I have the same thing for dinner every day: chicken and couscous,” says the 6’2″ Arnold. “Fruit has started tasting good! For the first time in my life, I don’t think eating it is a punishment.” Thanks to all the healthy changes, the actor lost 89 lbs. in the past nine months. Now in their family’s L.A. home, “I get to see him roll around with our son and not break a sweat or be out of breath,” says his wife of four years, Ashley, 38. Adds Arnold: “I have tons more energy to play with my son.”
For years Arnold feared he would never be a father. Over the course of four marriages, Arnold, who has openly talked about having a low sperm count, admits he has endured 20 failed attempts at in vitro fertilization. “I saw what that did to my relationships, what it did to my life, and that leads to depression,” he says. “The only comfort that I could think of was eating.” But even after Ashley discovered she was pregnant after a fertility treatment, an anxious Arnold could only be calmed by calories. “I was so nervous about the pregnancy, and stuffing myself with food somehow made it tolerable,” says Arnold, noting that Ashley gained 35 lbs. during the pregnancy and he gained 45 lbs. “Ashley grew up in Philly, so she found a cheesesteak place, and five times a week I would eat two 12-in. turkey cheesesteaks and one real one. I knew I was getting huge, but I didn’t care.”
Meeting Jax changed that. “My dream had come true, so I didn’t need to gorge,” says Arnold, whose cardio workouts twice a day help him squeeze into a trim size-36 pants. “If one day Jax realizes, ‘My dad changed a lot of things when I was born,’ that’s really cool,” says Arnold, who stars next in the comedy Any Day. “It will hopefully make him feel even more loved.”
