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.”