'Home Improvement' star warns of dieting dangers after dropping 30 pounds
"Home Improvement" star Richard Karn is happy with his weight loss but doesn’t want it to become the whole focus of his life.
Karn, who has partnered with the DIY lawn care company, DoMyOwn, lost 30 pounds last year with his wife, and the couple are still following their diet "as much as we can."
"When something’s that strict, it can't, for me, become a whole lifestyle," he told Fox News Digital. "I mean, you have to go, ‘Well, you know what? I really would enjoy this piece of cake, or I would like a slice of pizza.’"
He continued, "So it's like everything within moderation, obviously. I mean Oscar Wilde said anything worth doing is worth doing to excess. But I think that can get a lot of people in trouble. It becomes manic in a sense, but you do feel better. Your doctor is happier, and your clothes fit better when you do pay attention to certain things."
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The 69-year-old’s diet focused on "staying to smaller amounts of food that you realize you don't really need more than four or five ounces of meat, and then vegetables, and drinking water."
But he warned, "You can get in trouble with drinking too much water."
"That flushes out some of the salts and things in your system, so when you take things too far, you just have to pay attention, kind of like with your yard."
The former "Family Feud" host has also been incorporating Pilates into his fitness routine.
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"Pilates helps me a lot with golf, because you need to turn," he said. "You need to be able to have your hip flexors and your knees and everything working, and that helps me with golf. And that's one of the things that keeps me going as far as keeping in a routine. Routines are important, but you have to find the nucleus of why you're creating and keeping that routine."
Karn is maintaining his health but also shifting his focus to his new partnership with DoMyOwn, the DIY lawn care company that gives homeowners access to professional-grade products as well as advice and guidance with videos, step-by-step instructions, and seasonal advice.
The actor is the company’s new spokesperson and, for a limited time, will be on hand as a resource for lawn care advice.
"I've always appreciated beautiful, beautiful landscaping, gardens, things like that. I grew up in Seattle. Seattle is a big town for that, taking care of your lawn, taking care of the flowers and around your house. I think that's important because it shows that you care, that you're making an effort keeping that routine," he said.
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As a landscape fan, Karn said the biggest thing people can do to keep their yard in good shape is to understand what they’re actually growing.
"Probably more than three-quarters of the people that have lawns don't really know what kind of grass they have," he explained. "They don't know if they have Kentucky bluegrass or tall fescue or Zoysia or St. Augustine. I mean, these all different types for different types of places you are around the United States."
He continued, "What's really cool about DoMyOwn.com is that these guys, it's a store, obviously, to buy product to help you around your yard, different pesticides, different lawn-growing things like that. But they're also a free service for information, so you can use them without having to pay for it to say, 'Listen, I have this problem with my lawn. I've got shade tree here and the lawn isn't growing well' or this and that. So it's like you know what you want to do with your own yard."
Karn’s onscreen persona of Al Borland, the reliable handyman sidekick to Tim Allen’s enthusiastic but haphazard "Tool Time" host on "Home Improvement," led to his new role with the company.
"That kind of highlighted my skills as far as that's concerned," he said. "I mean, my dad was a builder. My grandfather was a builder. I became an actor, but I grew up around builders and knew how to do stuff. And, you know, I'm mowing my own lawn. Growing up, that was one of my chores. And now that ‘Home Improvement’ has afforded me to buy a home, I now have a yard to keep up also. So that's kind of why I'm excited to be their spokesperson."
"Home Improvement" remains one of the most popular and beloved sitcoms of the '90s, and Karn looks back on it just as fondly as fans do.
"I remember laughing a lot," he said of his co-star Allen. "It was just a joy to go to work."
Landing the role on the sitcom was a major career shift in more ways than one.
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"Before ‘Home Improvement,’ all of my work had been in theater. I was in New York. I was in Manhattan for like 11 years, and I would do theater Broadway, off Broadway, off Broadway regional theater. And you go into these little, kind of, companies or groups of people for a few months, and then you move on. And with ‘Home Improvement,’ we had eight years. I'm 25 weeks out of the year of being together and having fun. That was really a joy."
Karn also got to impress his builder dad with his character’s onscreen know-how.
"That was a learning experience," he said of the different "Tool Time" set pieces. "My dad, being a builder, he just looked at me one day, and he goes, ‘My gosh, you really look like you know what you're doing.’ And I do. I do know what I'm doing. But dads think of us as [being] 12 [years old] and we can't pound a nail in straight. But I learned that because I now have a 33-year-old son. So, we learn and hopefully we learn from those experiences."
His son, Cooper, wants to be an actor, and Karn is happy to guide him as much as he can, but the acting world has changed since he began his own career.
"The whole world of how that is processed or how you go about doing that has changed because you now can just make your own little movie. You can make your little ideas. You can have your own website or whatever, which was not something that was available to me to do when I was growing [up], unless I had my own, you know, camera, but I wasn't that industrious," he said.
Karn continued, "I liked having a script, working on the script, and doing it on stage. That was my routine. That's what I like to do. But, you know, actors today now have to navigate a lot of things. And, you put something out there, and it's out there. Whether it's good or bad."
"So you just have to be careful," he added. "And that's what I keep telling him. I mean, it's fine that you have a lot of likes, but you also have to know what to do when you get that opportunity. When I got the opportunity for ‘Home Improvement,’ I was 35. So I had a lot of things under my belt that I could pull from that I didn't have at 25."