Heavy HGTV star Ty Pennington has said he no longer parties and rarely drinks alcohol.
After nearly 25 years of being known as the high-energy host of America’s biggest home improvement shows, from TLC’s “Trading Spaces” in the early 2000s to starring on current HGTV hit “Rock the Block,” Ty Pennington says he’s a changed man.
Pennington told longtime friend and former HGTV star Sabrina Soto — on the May 31, 2024, edition of her podcast — that as he approaches his 60th birthday this fall, he’s prioritized finding himself and taking care of himself, including rarely drinking alcohol anymore.
Soto, who has worked with Pennington on multiple shows over the last dozen years, told him, “I’ve also seen you evolve in such an amazing way. I do feel like you are just, I don’t know, like you just seem softer. You seem more authentic. You seem more vulnerable. You seem more comfortable in your skin.”
Ty Pennington Has Prioritized His Health & Says Partying Isn’t Fun Anymore
As Pennington ages, he told Soto he’s grown much more conscious of taking care of his body, working out and playing sports, especially after a life-threatening abscess in his throat required emergency surgery in 2023.
The star has noticed fans have grown much more critical of his physical appearance as he ages. In February 2022, Pennington made headlines when he clapped back at social media comments about his body.
“Thoughts on aging, he wrote on Instagram. “I posted a video recently of myself dancing on the beach, with my shorts hiked up. What was an honest moment of just trying to make my wife laugh, was then picked apart by strangers — with a lot of views, comes a lot of hate! Comments like ‘disgusting,’ ‘gross,’ ‘omg he’s so old now,’ ‘grandpa,’ ‘he got fat’ (which btw I’m pushing my stomach out but ok). And I wondered, if I was still young and fit, would I be getting the same comments? 🤔”
But for as much as he pays attention to his own physical health, he told Soto he’s worried about some of his peers.
“What is crazy is, like, how my friends are looking that are my age,” he said. “I’m like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ People gotta just put down the vices, man. You can’t smoke and drink (forever). It’s called oxidation, people. Look at an apple, just shave it and leave it on the counter, and then realize what aging actually does.”
As for his own vices, Pennington told Soto the reputation he developed from old headlines about his partying days — which included a 2007 DUI, per CBS News — are far from accurate anymore.
“What people don’t realize is I don’t even drink anymore,” he said on the podcast. “It’s not that I won’t, like on the holidays or whatever, because I love wine, but I just don’t party anymore. Like, I don’t get out of control to the point that I’m like, you know, just belligerent.”
“It’s just not fun,” Pennington continued. “I’m fun for 35 minutes, but then I’m like, out of commission for two days. And I’m like, ‘Hey, that’s not who I want to be.'”
Ty Pennington Says at Height of Fame, He Sometimes Felt Like the ‘Loneliest Human on the Planet’
Reflecting on his early years of fame, when he became a household name on shows like “Trading Spaces” and ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” which will soon get a 2024 reboot with new hosts, Pennington told Soto that it was easy to lose himself in the process.
“You work every single day,” he recalled. “Like, I think I had two days off. You get disconnected from everything that’s living in your life — your plants, your pets, and whoever’s waiting for you at home. When you lose all of that, you become the loneliest human on the planet. And you look for, like, love in all the wrong places and you get really lost.”
Pennington, who’s been happily married to wife Kellee Merrell since November 2021, told Soto he spent years trying to prove that he was more than “just” a fun host, wishing people saw and knew about all the design work he’s done behind the scenes.
He said, “I stopped trying to prove that I’m amazing. I just realized, okay, nobody saw the cool things I was doing…but you know what? I did (do) them, and the people that work with me know. It’s sort of like … (being) cool is when you stop trying to prove that you are cool, or when you stop trying to prove that you have a gift or a talent.”
When he was younger and at the height of fame, Pennington told Soto, the thrill of feeling seen by everyone wore off when he realized, “Nobody really sees (me). Like your authentic self. They just see like, the (TV) version of you. Like, ‘This guy is, you know…just a hunky handyman’ or whatever. But nobody knew, like, the layers of what I can do. But it doesn’t matter. Like, I don’t have to prove that to anyone because I’ve lived it.”
Pennington pointed to how classic spiritual tomes “like ‘Siddhartha'” frequently point to the wisdom gained by learning from life’s ups and downs.
“It’s the path, it’s the journey — that is, like, the lesson,” he explained. “It’s like, you have to go through it all to finally get to the point you’re like, ‘Oh, right!'”
“All that time you’ve been trying to tell somebody about what you did and what you’re doing, and blah-blah-blah narcissism,” Pennington continued, “if you took a moment (for) silence, and just sort of observed what’s happening in the room and listened to other people’s stories, you’d realize that they’ve got really cool things going on in their life too, and that your life isn’t any more important than theirs.”
Pennington currently stars on “Battle on the Beach,” airing Monday nights on HGTV.