Here's how I lost 80 pounds, and I've kept it off now for over seven years. If you're struggling with your weight, if you're feeling powerless, like it's hopeless, I hope my story will be really helpful here, because I remember feeling like that. I remember feeling like all I ever do is gain weight. I tried a bunch of diets. And what I'm doing now is very easy. It works, and in my experience anyone can do it. This is one of the stories in my life people are most interested in, because there's something like a third of the population that is overweight today. I've told the full story of how I lost 80 pounds and transformed my health before, and this is me sharing it again in my own words.
The first step is being honest about it
The first thing with being overweight is to be honest about it. To be like, yes, I'm not at the weight I want to be at. Yes, I'm fat. Yes, I'm not happy being this way. That's where the gateway was for me: looking at it and saying, I don't want to look like this, I don't want to feel like this. A lot of people who are overweight, like I was for quite a while, are in denial.
I remember doing personal training to try and lose weight. Meanwhile, the personal trainer told me that 80% of your weight is your diet, and then 20% is based on your exercise. Now, of course, that's her opinion, and there's debate about it. But basically, in my experience, your diet is what's most important for your weight, unless you just do huge amounts of exercise. And even then, it depends on how much you eat.
I remember them taking my body fat, and it said obese. It didn't say big-boned, or really muscular and fit. I remember looking at this thing they give you to put your hands on, and it said I was obese. And I'm denying it. Like, no, I'm just a bigger guy, I'm muscular, I can bench press. It wasn't even a big number, like 180 pounds, then 200 and something. I remember looking at clear evidence saying you are overweight, and blatantly just trying to push it away and being like, no, I'm not.
How I got to be overweight
So how did I get to be overweight, and how long was I overweight? As a kid, I always had a little bit of extra belly fat, but I was not a fat kid. My kids are actually thinner than I was. I had a pretty regimented eating routine. I had Cheerios or Lucky Charms for breakfast every day. My dad would make us a sandwich or something for lunch, and then we'd have a bigger dinner that was well rounded. We'd have some meat, potatoes, a vegetable, and a little treat or something, like a popsicle or a little bit of ice cream. That was what I ate almost every day when I lived at home.
When I got to be a teenager, my brother and I went on this kick to lose weight and be a little bit thinner. When I was in high school, senior year, I was five foot eleven and I weighed like 180 pounds. I did enough to be active and play sports quite a bit during the day. I could go out and play a pickup football game for hours, come home, and still have energy. I wasn't exactly a jock, but I was in average, maybe above average, physical shape. I could go do a good bit of physical activity and still have energy all day. And I weighed about 180 pounds. So I was not overweight. I was at a very healthy weight. My body looked attractive, girls found me attractive, and I didn't appreciate how good I looked a lot of the time, but I also knew I wasn't ugly and I wasn't fat.
When I started drinking, I started getting fat
So what happened? Well, I started drinking. That's when I started getting fat. I was never fat until I started drinking alcohol. So the first key piece to take from my weight loss journey: if you take alcohol or other mind-altering substances, which can include marijuana or even medication, anything that leaves you feeling out of control, then if you're like me, you may lose control of your weight. And to me, losing control of your weight is a foundational sign that your life is out of control.
In fact, according to studies that have been done, most people would rather be discriminated against for their race than for their weight. And yet, how many people are overweight today? It's nuts. So you could assume many times people are overweight because they feel out of control with their life, like they can't decide to be thinner and actually do it.
What happened with me is my life started to get out of control when I started to drink alcohol. When I went to college, I weighed like 180, 190, and I was doing army physical fitness tests, playing basketball and football and ultimate frisbee. I was very active and very full of energy. Then when I started drinking, I also started eating more unhealthy. I would drink this thousand-calorie Oreo smoothie every day, which wasn't that filling. My eating in college didn't have the regimented routines I had when I lived at home. I started eating more chaotically and at night, and I started eating less nutritious foods, more junk food. I remember in college I used to just eat a box of goldfish as my food, and then I would drink a bunch of alcohol.
What happened is, as soon as I started drinking a good amount, like every day or even every other day, I started to consistently put on weight. Before I drank I was 170 to 190. At the end of my drinking, 11 years later, I weighed 248 pounds on the scale.
248 pounds, and finally out of denial
I finally came out of the denial. It's like, no, you are not big-boned, you are not muscular and in better shape than everybody. You are fat, and you can't choose not to be fat. You're powerless. I was eating junk food pretty consistently. And by junk food, I mean a lot of processed food, tons of different foods. But more importantly, I was not eating very many healthy foods. I didn't even know how to eat healthy. I remember buying a bunch of farmed salmon and thinking that was healthy. I ate a lot of meat. I ate a lot of animal products. And I ate either lots of sweets if I was sober, or lots of liquor. Then I would eat total junk food, fast food.
I remember one day sitting in a fast food restaurant, and I remember looking around there and thinking, I noticed that people were even more overweight than usual. I mean very overweight, like 350-plus. And the thought came to me: if you eat where they eat, you will look how they look. That was a wise thought. And then I remember debating it, like, no, no, I'm different, I can get away with it, I can get away with eating here and they can't. Really? You're special? And then I'd look in the mirror.
The last day I drank, I weighed 248 pounds. I had lots of things like back pain, neck pain, headaches. I had health problems. My body hurt all the time. I often would get headaches and take Advil and stuff for them. I had health problems from drinking.
Getting sober took off the first 20 pounds
Then I got sober, and just by getting sober, I lost 20, 25 pounds. But I was very disappointed that that's all I lost after about six months sober. I was not losing any more weight. I was juicing. I was eating lots of even more sweets and junk food. And then I realized, now that I'm sober, now I can really go after my weight and be the weight I want to be. I was born in 1984, so it's been almost 40 years since I was born, and I do not have any health problems now from alcohol or from being overweight. They are all gone, in my experience.
Once I realized that, since I was able to get sober and make a life change that big, I knew I could do the same thing with my weight, but I'd have to put in the same effort. So I started reading books and asking for advice. I share a lot of these everyday sobriety and plant-based moments in my Life playlist, and you can see how it all fits together in this Legoland vlog about sobriety and plant-based living.
Accountability was my secret: MyFitnessPal
Before I found the book that changed everything, I realized that accountability was the secret of my success getting sober. By showing up to Alcoholics Anonymous five to seven days a week at the time, I was being accountable to staying sober. I was transparent about my thoughts about drinking. Everybody in my life knew I was sober, so my accountability was the key to staying sober. I realized I needed accountability for my diet too.
So the first thing I did after getting sober that dramatically helped me with my weight is I got an app called MyFitnessPal. To be fair, there are lots of things that could do the same job. But what I did is, for one year, I put in every single food I ate, every single day, for a year. Because I was sober, I could actually do this without quitting on it. Before I got sober, I tried all kinds of different diets.
The most effective diet, honestly, was when I got into this really toxic relationship with a girl and I literally lost my appetite for weeks. I dropped like 15 pounds in 2009 in just a few weeks from losing my appetite, which was amazing to see. It was the first time ever in my life I had not been hungry. I would mechanically eat like one meal a day because I knew it was a good idea, but I was shocked that I could eat one meal at the beginning of the day and not be hungry the whole rest of the day. Thankfully, my appetite came back, but so did my weight. I'd also lost weight by being mostly sober living at home with my parents, but as soon as I moved out from them, I started eating out and eating all this junk food and drinking more, and I put it all back on.
So I'd been through a cycle. I'd been through a bunch of ups and downs with my weight, but drinking would always sabotage, at some point, any efforts I made. And I'd tried these unsustainable diets. So I knew going in, at about a year sober, that I could not do something unsustainable, and I knew that if I was accountable I could do anything.
So I got MyFitnessPal, and every single day I put in every single food I ate. I set a goal of like 2,500 calories a day, and I also set a goal to work out and burn like 500 or 1,000 calories a day at the gym. I was doing these intense hour-long workouts on the elliptical with my heart rate way up there, so I'd burn a good bit of calories, have an active lifestyle, and then set a goal for like 2,500 calories a day. Now, it was just a goal. The only hard rule was that I had to put in every single thing I ate that had any meaningful amount of calories, and look at what I was eating. That is where I lost 30 more pounds, over the course of a year.
Keep in mind, I wasn't dieting. I was just being accountable. There were lots of times I wouldn't eat things because I'd seen I already had 2,800 calories that day. I'd had ice cream at lunch and dessert, and it's like, all right, I'm not going to eat anything else now. Just doing that, I lost 30 more pounds. Tracking calories took me a long way, but it's not the whole story for me, and I dig into where calorie tracking and plant-based eating part ways separately.
Hitting a plateau, and reading ingredients
Then I hit another plateau where I was like 190 pounds. At that time I had some yeast in my skin, like these red spots on my chest and back, and I was trying to figure out what was causing it. I was feeling kind of helpless because I'd tried these things. I tried these elimination diets, because I noticed the things I was eating were impacting the spots on my chest and back. Some of those elimination diets made me physically ill. They say you should check with a doctor, and I'm like, F that, and some of them made me physically ill. I did this turkey, rice, and green peppers diet, and I got sick two days into that one and stopped it.
I finally got to feeling so powerless. I started reading ingredients, and I'm like, I eat so much crap, I can't even tell what I'm eating that's good or not. So I started asking for advice, and I ran into my uncle, who's a doctor, and he gave me a book called How Not to Die.
The book that changed everything: How Not to Die
The first book that really opened my eyes, that made all the difference in the world, was called How Not to Die, written by Dr. Michael Greger. To me it's like the Bible for healthy eating. As I understand the book, the doctor lays out, through his research, that if you eat a diet of mostly whole plant foods, it can help prevent, stop the progression of, and in some cases even reverse every single one of the top 15 causes of death. That's how the book presents it, and I followed the instructions in it.
The only reason I actually did it is because I realized that how I was eating was also impacting how I was thinking. The last meal I had before I read this book, I had five different kinds of meals, massive portion, all kinds of added salt and sugar. Now, one of those individual things wouldn't necessarily be a problem. But you pull all of them together, plus all the meat and the animal products and all this added sugar and salt, and a huge portion. I was feeling really good at the time, and I noticed my thinking dropped all the way into depression just 30 minutes after the meal was over. I realized that how I ate impacted how I thought. That's when I realized I have to read this book and follow its instructions.
My uncle's been a general practitioner doctor for 40 years, with his own practice. He says he gives the book How Not to Die to every one of his patients on their first visit, because he says this is the information you need to be healthy. He says, if you do this, you won't need to come see me. I read through that whole book and immediately started following it.
The basic thing the book says, as I took it, is that if you eat mostly whole fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and beans — of course you adjust for your specific situation, I'm not telling you to eat gluten grains if you're allergic to gluten, obviously — but if you eat mostly whole plant fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and beans, and you take a vitamin B12 supplement, then in the book's view your health will be unbeatable. Just following that book, I lost almost 30 more pounds.
Keep in mind, in theory, if I had gone straight to that book as soon as I got sober, I could have lost the entire weight just off of following it. I literally wouldn't have had to do anything else. He has follow-up books too, like How Not to Diet, which goes into further details about the research and about dieting generally.
Eating mostly whole plant foods
Since I read that book, the maximum my weight has gotten up to has been about 180. The lowest it got down to is about 160, which was lower than I weighed as a teenager — although as a teenager I had a bit more muscle. When I got up to 180, what I was doing was eating junk food at night, hanging out with my mother. I was eating popcorn at night and then having candy at night with her. I was also just eating a lot of portions of whole plant foods.
The magic with whole plant foods, in my experience, is that you can eat a lot of things like salads and hummus. I eat a lot of salads today. I eat a lot of hummus. I eat a lot of whole fruits and vegetables like celery, avocados, beans. The number one single thing most people could do to make their diet better, I believe, is to eat more beans. Beans are very nutritious, very filling, and very good for you. I eat a lot of beans. And yes, I do pass a lot of gas as well. But I eat those foods and they're very nutritious and very filling. I don't go around hungry all the time. If you're doing any kind of diet where you're hungry, that's not going to be sustainable. The key thing Dr. Greger says in his book is that your diet needs to be sustainable, so that you can keep doing it over the long term.
Loosening up so I could keep it forever
The first couple of years after reading the book, I was pretty extreme about my diet. So extreme that I refused to have a birthday cake, refused to eat any birthday cake, refused to eat absolutely anything besides whole plant foods. I would have a meal out very, very occasionally, and I was militant my first couple of years. Then I realized that if I was going to do this for the rest of my life, I needed to loosen up just slightly, so that I could enjoy meals with other people.
So I loosened up a little bit, eating more meals where I wouldn't be too picky if something had a little bit of meat in it, or animal products. Eventually I started to warm up to a little bit more, eating things like ice cream that have lots of dairy, but in moderation, in smaller amounts.
What I've learned about meat
The most recent change I made is around meat. Some people have said that when they switched to a vegan diet, it worked for a while, but at some point their body wanted meat again. What I've noticed is that I think people are exaggerating, in many cases, how much meat their body really needs. For me, I listen to my body, and my body does not want meat that often. Occasionally my body wants a very small portion of meat, and it's not something that's generally predictable. Often it'll be off of somebody else's plate. The last time I had meat, my wife ordered a sushi roll, and it had little bacon bits on top of it, and I ate one of those rolls. It was really good. It had a relatively small amount of meat on it. Having tiny, tiny amounts of meat does not make a big difference for me.
What I've found is that when you eat large portions of meat consistently, you will have a hard time. The craziest thing I've found is in the book How Not to Diet, by the same Dr. Michael Greger who wrote How Not to Die. As I understand his research, the same amount of calories from meat will leave you more hungry and put on more fat compared to the exact same amount of calories of whole plant foods. Once you see that research, it's like, wow.
Now, I definitely believe there are some limited use cases where meat is helpful for the body, especially in childhood. In childhood it doesn't seem to matter as much. If my kids eat mostly whole plant foods, they have healthy fat on them, and they are much leaner — even on the lean side, which I think is great. Childhood obesity, to me, is really sad, and something we easily can do something about. My kids occasionally eat meat, but they generally don't crave it. My daughter likes to have some steak here and there, and my son will have some chicken tenders here and there, but we don't generally make them meat, and they generally have small servings of it.
What causes the problem, in my experience, is big servings of meat and animal products all the time. So even just cutting back the meat you eat can make a big difference. But this is where you've got to really know thyself. We are not all created the exact same. I find my body does not usually need any meat, and if it does, a small portion occasionally is enough.
You can get control of your weight
I'm really grateful to have this story to share with you. I struggled and felt hopeless and powerless for so long over my weight. And I don't care what you've been through in life, or what excuses you might have. I promise you, you can do something about your weight if you'll get control of your life. If you quit the mind-altering substances, and be accountable with your diet, and eat mostly healthy foods, then in my experience you can get control of your weight. And you might be amazed how many health problems clear up along the way. I have seen all my health problems disappear since I got sober, since I changed my thinking, and since I changed my diet.
I've literally seen all of my health problems disappear. I'm in the best health I've ever been in. And I'm also in this body at the oldest I've ever been. This is my story.