How I Lost 80 Pounds and Transformed My Health (Full Story)

The short version of how I changed my health

Here's how I lost 80 pounds, have kept it off for a decade, and have completely transformed my health since 2014. I'm making this because I used to weigh 250 pounds. I know what it feels like to feel hopeless about my body. And I've got back down into, weighing 170 pounds, having great muscle, having a body that feels good, that I feel good about how it looks, that has tons of energy. I've totally changed my health. And I'd like for you to have all this information because I've learned a lot of this stuff the hard way, reading all kinds of books, testing all kinds of different things.

And I'm really excited to share all this with you. Now, I'm not a medical doctor. This is not medical advice. This is my experience. This is my life. And I hope you can take something useful from it or get some insights. If you have any questions, I respond to them. And I don't have anything to sell you like any products to sell you. And I personally love that, everything I'm sharing is things you can read in books and see where I've got that. And everything that I eat, you can buy it in a regular grocery store. There's nothing special there. That's what I would want to know up front.

So going forward, my goal is to tell you the whole story and to explain everything along the way. Because for me personally, I needed a lot of long form content to really go into the details. I needed mentors, examples of people who had been through what I wanted to have, had what I wanted to have and been where I'd wanted to be. I know there's more of us than ever who feel who are overweight and struggling and feel like our body's hopeless. I know what that's like. And today I feel the opposite. I love my body. I feel very comfortable and happy here. And I've healed so much to get where I'm at today.

So let's begin with how it started. We'll go through, I'll give you a little outline. We'll go through here and talk through each detail of it. So I'll begin with, simple stuff like my childhood eating habits, clearing my plate, experiencing my first body shame, having an athletic, healthy body in high school and being in great shape, like senior year of high school, first couple of years of college, being able to pass the, army PT test, run two miles in under 16 minutes, do 40 some pushups, 50, 60 sit ups. I had that peak energy and fitness. Like I started out having everything in my favor.

There was nothing holding me back, which really made it feel awful. When I started losing that, I've started putting on all this weight. I started drinking alcohol. And to me, getting sober is a big part of being able to get control of my weight too. Then all these high calorie habits I picked up and and for a decade, an entire decade of feeling like my body was just out of control. I was fighting like it was a battle. And it was a battle going on inside that made me feel so lonely. And yet I tried to hide that battle. And I didn't even know how to ask for help.

I tried all kinds of things that didn't work. Temporary weight loss, trying to eat less, working out harder, diets that failed. And then my drinking would sabotage anything that was working a little bit. I finally hit bottom run April, 2014, when I was up to 250 pounds. And I felt utterly hopeless, like my health and my whole life, my body, it was all out of control. And I, I was eating fast food. And I'll give you a clear story for like what that looked like. And I realized I was hopeless and I needed real change. And the place I got real change was going to Alcoholics Anonymous.

Because as long as I kept drinking, I couldn't do anything else to try. Everything else was a waste of time. And then I started losing weight but when sobriety got the weight loss started, I was shocked at how quickly I plateaued and realized that I had to go much further. The first thing that really worked after just dropping like 20 pounds and getting sober is I started using MyFitnessPal. And I tracked all the calories I ate for a year. This radical honesty and total accountability to myself helped me lose another 30 pounds. And I was doing personal training too, so I was exercising. And I wasn't doing like a calorie deficit or anything at any point.

Like I was eating, like aiming for like 2 800 calories a day, being very active. And I was, my intention was always to like take great care of my body. That I want to nourish and love my body and take care of it. I don't want to do anything that messes it up. I want to figure out how to actually take care of this thing properly. But even then, the weight loss wasn't enough with all that. I was lighter, but I still was struggling with my health. I started paying attention to ingredients, even though I'd lost all this weight and was sober and was so proud of myself.

I still felt like my health wasn't doing as good as it could be. And then I started asking people for advice. Again, at like two years sober, I got pretty hopeless about my health, feeling like I'd done all this work and it still wasn't giving me everything I knew was out there. My uncle, who's a doctor, recommended I read the book, How Not to Die. And from here I realized that the food I ate was affecting not just my body but it was affecting my mind and how I thought and that if I wanted to be clear headed I needed to pay attention to how I ate and that certain ways I ate would also contribute to fogging my mind up and that was a big breakthrough from there I've switched to a mostly whole plant based mostly vegan diet all of it is available easily in the grocery store and I find it's generally cheaper than how I was eating before that I went through the struggles of learning what to buy and learning what filled me up and building an entirely new way of eating from the ground up and for the first year I went a bit too hard with ultra discipline no exceptions intermittent fasting I got down to 160 pounds which was about what I weighed in middle school I have a basketball jersey I got in fifth grade David Robinson in the San Antonio Spurs I'm so proud that I can still wear that basketball jersey today and it's been a long time since fifth grade it's been like 30 years but I also dropped too much muscle I stopped working out as much and the minute intermittent fasting left me very angry and irritable and it's certainly a practice that's there when I need it and often cut off eating before bed but you know too much of fasting left me like with these huge energy spikes and I like to kind of stay more steady so then the last few years have been more about learning about balance and maintenance I went and softened up too much at certain times I got back to you know my weight drifted back up no higher than like 185 or so at various points and I've got to struggle now with how much other people's eating and the environments other people were providing were affecting me and I was struggling because some of the people around me could eat in moderation but that didn't work for me if there's potato chips in the house or cakes or cookies I need to have my house clear from that and I've also dug a lot into the emotional side of overeating eating food as a comfort loneliness and stress and feeling unsafe and you know weight as protection especially as a kid the weight I had really made sense because you know my dad used physical punishment as a child to try and control me and kids we were rough with each other playing you know full on tackle football hitting each other in school and stuff having a bit of extra weight was genuinely helpful in elementary and middle school so that I could take the blows that life dealt out to me it certainly saved me from getting injured the way I see it and yet now you know healing and losing the weight has also been like feeling safe in the world and how I live now I'll tell you like what I keep in the house I keep foods that I could eat as well as I could eat as well much as I want of in the house, foods I don't have to control myself with.

And I've got rigid discipline now, like no ultra processed foods in the house, no cakes, cookies, candy. And I buy foods at the store that I could eat as much as I wanted of. I exercise almost every day, usually vigorous exercise like tennis, a power yoga flow. And I consistently build strength through doing body weight things like, power yoga classes, Pilates, etc. And I've consistently stayed in 170s in my weight for most of the last decade. And I love that. And I'm amazed like how hopeless I used to feel compared to how I am now. In a summary of what worked is first I had to get sober, like I had to quit doing the number one thing that was sabotaging my whole life, which was hard because life sober felt really difficult.

It was hard to quit drinking because drinking did. To distract me from how I felt sober and to have fun and to get out of myself. And it was quite a process to learn how to enjoy life and have fun and to be myself again and how to enjoy and get through things in life sober without alcohol. And then from there, tracking, honestly, focusing on health, not just weight and eating foods that truly nourish me, remove triggering and foods that just are not useful for my body, staying active, watching for emotional eating and just being aware of why I'm eating, thinking about before I eat what that means for my body.

I look at food often now, like I see they'll have cake out at the AA meeting I go to sometimes. And if my mind says that like a piece of cake, I say I ask it. I'm like, so you're OK eating food that doesn't nourish your body that much. And you're OK if you put on weight because of eating this cake. And from there, my mind's like, no, never mind. And that just like being honest about what I'm doing and what it means, then it's made it sustainable. And what I'd say to someone who feels hopeless, like I know what that feels like. If you're in that hopeless place with your own body right now, you can set up a call with me and tell me your whole situation on our call so we can talk it through.

You don't have to fix everything at once

And you don't have to fix everything at once. I've noticed lots of people I've seen and in my own experience often will get to feel hopeless. And then we get on this kick that we're going to fix it all at once. I'm going to get sober and I'm going to lose weight. I'm going to get healthy and stop being sick. And I'm going to fix my mind up, too. And I'm going to start making more money and upgrade. And I'm going to start making more money and my girlfriend like easy. What I've found, what I did is I fixed the top problem like sobriety, fix that first, then dive into, how am I eating, then dive into like, what am I eating?

I've made a lot of videos about putting a whole life back together one piece at a time — you can watch them in my Life playlist.

So that's what we're going to go through here. And what I'll do now is go into more detail in each section of this, because that's the over. Reaching arc. But, going into the details will make this much more meaningful. And now that you know where we're going, we can go there.

Childhood: I always cleared my plate

So in childhood, my mother said that when I was first, breastfeeding as a baby, I was constantly hungry. I was consistently, not getting enough right from the beginning. And that continued. I often felt that, I was hungry and I could just barely get enough to eat, even though my mom was a. Officer in the military, we always had plenty of food to eat, but we had a strict meal schedule. You didn't have snacks all around the day. You had breakfast, you had lunch and you had dinner. And that was all the food you got. And it didn't matter if you liked it or not. This is what the food that was there.

And if you don't eat it, you are going to be hungry. So I consistently would clear my plate all the time because that was all the food I had access to. And no matter what was there, I would eat all of it. My dad would make Swiss steak with these boiled steak. Carrots. And I didn't like it at all, but I ate it because I didn't want to be hungry. And I would always clean my plate and take seconds if there were available. And usually my dad cooked just the right amount of food so that we all have just enough to eat. He didn't like to waste any food or have leftovers.

So as a child, my eating was very controlled and I always had enough food. And I would always try. And I remember the like addictive feelings that would come up when there was a birthday cake, like just going, nuts. And the food, it tasted so sensational. I really desperately wanted more of it. And I, I wished I could have all the access I wanted to when somebody had a birthday to just eat all the birthday cake I wanted. Like that was one of the first like addictions I remember just going nuts about having food like that and always wanting things like ice cream, candy, cookies.

But as a kid, I didn't have much control over that. And my parents controlled all that. So they made sure that I was eating all the cake I wanted. And I remember just going nuts about having food like that. And I, I wished I could have all the access I wanted to when somebody had a birthday Unreasonable amounts of sweets. And we did eat a lot of meat and a lot of animal products. We had meat for every single meal at dinner. We'd often have like meat and sandwiches for lunch. We had straight up breakfast cereal, that Lucky Charms, Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast with milk.

We often would have milk in our cereal in the morning and then a glass of milk at night. So I was very well nourished. But at the same time, I did have a little bit of extra fat and like a little spare tire as a kid. But that worked out just fine because when life was rough and kids played rough and my dad was rough, then I had, I could take it. It wasn't an issue. I don't ever remember feeling anything bad about my body as, as a kid. Yeah. I remember occasionally kids would say stuff, but I don't ever remember feeling like I was, a fat kid or anything like that.

I felt like I was just a regular kid until then.

Body shame and the athletic years

I went to like maybe ninth, grade or so starting out in junior high, high school. Then I remember kind of looking at my body and getting towards puberty and starting to notice girls more. And then I started to think, I started to get into this whole body shame with, becoming a man and all that and getting interested in girls and puberty. And with that, I started to look at and analyze my weight. And I remember my brother and I, when I was in like ninth grade and he was in seventh grade, getting on this kick that we needed to lose weight. And I don't remember, that was the first time in my life.

I was like, I'm going to lose weight. I'm going to ever remember thinking that my weight is higher than it should be and I need to lose it. My brother and I asked my dad to, let us have salads when we came home from school and started demanding to have, more, more foods that would fill us up and help us not have as many calories. The same time though, my body was very healthy. I didn't have like any issues. And I, in high school, I was athletic enough, but not enough to, I was athletic enough to have a body that could do things like go snowboarding for a week, that could play basketball or football or run around, and do pretty much anything I wanted to do.

But at the same time, I did football practice once and that was too intense. I wasn't in good enough shape for that. And I didn't want to go through the process to get there. But I had a very active childhood, always running around and playing. But in high school, I also started sitting around and playing a lot more video games. And when I was in elementary and middle school, I just ran around, was outside. My brother and I'd go outside for hours just playing basketball. So I was very active and didn't sit around that much. But starting in high school, I started to sit around more, play a lot more video games, but I still was active enough.

And I was, paying attention to my body that I was, my eating was controlled. So I kept, I was like maybe 180 pounds senior year in high school. I felt proud of how I looked. I felt good. And I was, I was proud that, girls that were attractive in high school found me attractive. I went off to college feeling pretty good about my body. Just had a little bit of body shame, but I would play racquetball with my friends, basketball. I enrolled in Army ROTC for a couple of years and girls consistently were validating me that I was attractive to them. And I played intramural sports.

So I was very active and I didn't drink most of the first year in college. I weighed, I remember being proud that I weighed like, 180, 190, that I could, do all that. And I was very active. And I didn't drink most of the first year in college. All this stuff physically. I remember feeling great in terms of, being a healthy young man. And then being in shape felt just natural. It felt natural to be able to run around and play and have all this energy. If anything, I often struggled because I had too much energy. Like I just, I'd have anxiety and get upset and frustrated because I had so much energy.

It was like, I could do a, PT test in the morning and then go play basketball with the boys, full court for a couple hours after that. And then I still have more energy. And I was like, I'm going to have more energy. And in college, I wasn't paying very good attention to my eating anymore either. I was eating very sporadically. I'd eat, too much sometimes. And other times I didn't nourish myself at all. I'd just have like a carton of goldfish and just eat that because it was cheap. And because I was trying to play as much video games as possible.

Drinking, and a decade out of control

Then I started sophomore year. I started to really get into drinking. I drank like, a handful of times freshman year, but not that much. But sophomore year, I started to drink a bit more. By the end of sophomore year, drinking was becoming a big part of my life, which led to me dropping ROTC because staying up and going to the club and getting drunk until like two in the morning really conflicts with then trying to go to Army ROTC PT at 530 in the morning. And I did it a few times, and then got laughed at when I was going so slow or, ridiculed because I was holding everybody else back.

So I, instead of, trying to take better care of myself, I just dropped Army ROTC so I could really focus on drinking. At the same time, I started drinking a lot of these smoothies that had, like a thousand calorie, this Oreo elation smoothie. It had a thousand calories in it. I remember just once I started drinking that one smoothie, I put like 10 pounds on, even though I was being so active, like just that one smoothie single handedly added so many calories and it didn't fill me up that much, but man, did it taste good. And from there, I started going on this 10 year journey of feeling like my body was out of control.

Wow. I felt really in shape and proud and active sophomore year of college. By junior year, I'd started to get more into drinking and less into physical activity. Although I still was playing racquetball with my friends, playing basketball, but with Army ROTC, cut a significant amount of exercise, cut some of the people I hung out with to, do other physically active things, cut the field training exercises and stuff we went on. And the more I drank, then I'd also make worse decisions. It was about eating. I'd get a whole pizza and eat the whole thing drunk and then be sick and lay in bed all day, which would cut my physical activity.

And it started this 10 year negative spiral of losing control, feeling like my body was just doing its own thing. And often what I would feel like I wanted it to do or it should do, I felt like I was out of control. Like I couldn't just try and make my body do the right thing or it's so frustrating, especially by senior year, I'd gotten a lot of weight loss. And I was like, I'm not going to do this. I got to the point where I was drinking alcohol every day and I was drinking a lot of soda to mix the alcohol and or beer.

So I would often have, hundreds, if not thousands of calories on average a day from alcohol alone. Then on top of that, I was eating, standard American diet, pizza, sweets, fast food. And by senior year, so I was like 190 pounds at the middle of sophomore year in college. I was up to over 200. And I hated it. I hated, how my body looked. I hated that I'd slowed down so much from carrying this extra weight that it was like no extra muscles, all extra weight. And yet at the same time, I felt helpless to actually do anything about it. And it was hard to even admit or ask for help.

And then I started to have problems with alcohol too. I went to my first AA meeting. I tried to get sober. But I just felt so anxious when I was sober. And I felt like I was missing out on having fun. I was so serious that I felt like I couldn't enjoy life. And I will give you an example of like exactly what this looked like in college. Like I would senior year, I would get up, if I had class, I'd go to class like in the afternoon. I tried not to have morning classes. I'd come home from class at like six or seven. I'd have fast food for at the dining hall for lunch and for dinner.

And then I'd start drinking after that. And sometimes I'd order more fast food or just eat anything I had in my dorm room, like goldfish. I drink, thousand plus calories of liquor and soda. And then I'd be up till like seven or eight in the morning. And then I'd go to bed and do it over again the next day. And it was a lot of time being lonely, playing video games. And I had friends that I'd drink and hang out with sometimes too. And this, social, sometimes it was anti social most of the time. After I graduated college, I put on even more weight and continued to feel more hopeless.

I tried to stop drinking, but I didn't even think about my diet that much. I just felt so powerless with alcohol. I kept going back and forth between drinking and trying to stay sober. But I also felt really scared.

How my environment ran my weight

After graduating senior year, I was full of fear. I felt really scared in the world and really vulnerable in the world. And I can see now like the emotions I was feeling. Like when I was at home with my parents, I felt much more safe and protected, but out on my own with not even planning for my future, just taking whatever job I could get. It makes sense. Like I started off after college being a correction officer and it was a dangerous facility and it made sense. Most of the people who worked there were overweight and it was a dangerous environment and weight has a protective, mindset behind it.

And I got up to 130 pounds when I was a correction officer, which actually made sense because it was a rough, dangerous environment. And I felt bad about myself. I was full of anxiety. I was often depressed and I'd eat to deal with anxiety. I'd eat to deal with the depression. I'd eat to whatever my friends were eating just so I could be social. And then I drink and my body health just continued to spiral. Then I ended up in the police academy. And I remember the police academy, I'd go get, the food was paid for already and the police department paid for the academy.

So I remember thinking, how great it was. I would get two entire plates of food at dinner, fill a huge plate up at breakfast, another huge one up at lunch and get like two plates of food at dinner and just stuff myself with as much food. And I got up over 230 some pounds. Then my girlfriend dumped me because I was into drinking and being a police officer more than ever. And I was like, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to hang out with her. And I was able to lose like 10 or 15 pounds pretty effortlessly. I lost most of my appetite because I was so upset about my relationship.

I stayed sober for a few months because I was scared of, what would happen if I drank. And it was funny how I just effortlessly lost like 15 pounds from just eating less and not drinking. But then as soon as I felt better and I found a rebound girl, then I started going back to what I was doing before. But I got to a place where I kind of stabilized around 220 pounds. And for years, my drinking and I was so active exercising as a police officer and I had a bit less time to actually eat. But I ate just constant fast food as a police officer because you just go to work, not even eat anything and then try and eat on shift.

And then a lot of times I wouldn't even hardly eat anything at home. I managed to maintain about 220 pounds as a police officer. Again, it made sense to have a little bit extra weight as a police officer because you might have to get in a physical altercation with people, bigger often looked a bit tougher. And then I was exercising so much with that and carrying around all the extra equipment. It balanced out. But then I moved home with my parents in 2009. And I fairly effortlessly lost 20 pounds living with my parents because I was in a safe environment. I was no more work stress from being a police officer.

And I started eating meals prepared at home. So I'm telling you the detailed version of this story so you can see all these little details because for me, that's what helps me take inventory is to look at all these little details and how they impact. And I didn't see at the time how all these things made sense, but now they do. Like when I was out on my own living by myself, scared, lonely, feeling like I didn't have anybody that loved me around. It makes sense and didn't especially when I'm eating all that fast food, too. So then I move home with my parents. I'm hardly ever eating fast food because my dad cooks dinner most nights and my dad has lunch prepared.

Thus, when I lived with my parents, my routine was that I would get up about noon. I would have lunch, which was usually a sandwich and potato chips. Then I would go work out at the gym. At some point I would do or, I was applying to grad school. I'd study for the gym. I would go to the gym. Or send applications in. I would spend, try and do everything productive between lunch and dinner. I'd go to the gym and I'd lift weights and or do cardio for at least an hour. And I did intense workouts. I'd get my heart rate up to like 160, 170, 180 and go hard and exercise a lot.

Then I'd come home and I'd have dinner with my parents, whatever they, my dad prepared, which was generally enough to like fill me up and leave me satisfied. Then I would watch a movie with my mom and have a bowl of air popped or, a good, a whole thing of like air popped popcorn, but it didn't even have any oil on it or anything. I'd just put some salt and garlic powder on it and eat it straight up like that. Then I'd have a box of Altoids and then I'd stay up for seven hours, anywhere from, four to eight hours after watching a movie with my mom and play video games with my friends.

So I'm sharing all this to give the details of when I got up and had a meal first thing in the morning and then a meal after I'd been up a few hours. Then I didn't hardly eat for like four to seven hours before bed. I went to bed hungry every night and I was exercising and I was, I cut out almost all fast food from what I was eating. I lost 20 and I was in an environment where I felt safe or I didn't need to like protect myself. And I dropped 20 pounds effortlessly. I wasn't trying to diet. I literally, there's like the easiest 20 pounds I'd ever lost at that point.

I was like, I felt so good and so proud that I was back down to 100 pounds. I looked great. I was extremely confident with women and consistently dating women. And it had been, it felt so much easier to date women. And that's why I've got a lot of dating videos on this channel, but having my weight and my body under control makes it so much easier to date women. And I had the illusion that I had control back, but really I just put myself in a better environment. And as soon as I moved out of my parents' house, all the weight and more crept back on.

Within a few months, I was like, I'm going to die. I'm moving out from my parents' house and starting to go out to eat very consistently again and starting to increase my drinking again because my parents demanded that I stay sober while living in their house. So I'd take a night to the casino by myself or date a girl and go drink with her. But most of the time when I lived with my parents, I probably only got to drink maybe two nights out of the month and not nearly as much as I would on my own. But when I get back out on my own, I start eating all this fast food again.

And then I start drinking, probably five drinks a night on average, seven nights a week. But really, there'd be nights where I just have like three or four or I wouldn't drink at all. And then other nights where I'm having like 10, 15 shots plus sodas. At this point, I switched to diet sodas because I feel like that's going to save me calories. But that seemed to make my appetite go up a lot. And then I felt like I could just drink as many of them, and not consider the calories at all. So I was shocked. Within just six months of moving out from my parents' house, I'd already put 20 pounds back on that had taken me a whole year to lose.

And I started to feel right back out of control of my weight. I remember when I first moved out from my parents' house having, gastrointestinal issues and being really frustrated as my body was struggling to cope with being in this new environment. I met an amazing girl that I fell in love with and that, we were together 15 years in 2011. Starting in 2011, I moved in with her and I thought, great, everything, this is going to be like living with my parents again. But the drinking caused problems with her. And she was very slim, very lean. And I tried to, quit drinking for several different months.

But what happened was after struggling with alcohol back and forth, I from most of 2013 all the way into April 2014, I drank and I spiraled to the worst place I'd ever got before. Despite having a girl who really loved me there almost every night supporting me and loving me, it was the lowest point I'd ever hit in my life before. The last day I drank was April 22nd, 2014. And I'll talk about some of the stuff that didn't work because during this time before I get to hitting bottom of being 250 pounds and feeling utterly hopeless. So in this time I was with her, I was getting really frustrated with my weight and I try and get sober and then I try and lose weight.

Everything I tried that didn't work

And for the first time, I actually hired a health coach, a guy I met at BNI or a business networking international, a business networking group. This guy, he looked good. He looked like he was at a healthy weight. And I'd known him at BNI for a little while. He met up with me outside of a restaurant. He told me he had this amazing program for me and he showed me and talked about all these people who had success with it. The catch was that this cost several hundred dollars a month. And he said, I'm not going to be able to do it. And he was making an affiliate commission off of these foods.

The foods often didn't taste that great and they were not that filling either. It was absolutely miserable. I would eat. You'd have these assigned number of foods you eat each day. They weren't wouldn't fill you up. You'd have a smoothie and then you're supposed to have this one little salad or some small meal to go with it. Now, while I did lose a little bit of weight doing that, I then would. Get drunk one night and I'd eat a whole pizza that I ordered. And after doing that enough times, I thought, what was the point of this diet if I'm just going to get drunk and blow it all?

On top of that, my now ex wife or my wife at the time used to make fun of me for how the foods tasted and how I wasn't filled up like she thought the whole thing I was doing with this quote health coach was ridiculous, that it wasn't working. It didn't seem sustainable. And it cost too much money. So from her point of view, she was just, eating moderately and reasonably and being thin. And she was just thought, the whole thing of this health or coach was ridiculous and it wasn't going to work. And she made fun of me for it endlessly. I also tried to just eat less and do things like count my calories.

I tried working out harder a lot. In fact, I got a personal trainer and I remember one day my personal trainer told me that in her words, she said that the majority of the time I was eating less and the majority of your body and how you look because I told her she's like, why do you want to do personal training? And I tried a bunch of personal trainers, too. But I this was the cutest girl there. So you can see why I picked working with her. She told me she said, the way she sees it, the majority of how your body looks is based on what you eat.

And then your exercise is like a minority, she said, because your body will get used to whatever exercise you do, like you could crank up to burning. Several thousand calories a day of their exercise, but your body will increase your appetite to make up for that. And I felt pretty frustrated. I'm like, well, why am I paying you hundreds of dollars a month when I could just figure out how to eat right? And I tried, the personal trainer and the working out. I'd go to the gym and burn a thousand plus calories in a workout going super hard on an elliptical, pushing my heart rate into, higher zones than it said you should go just.

Really wrecking myself. Sometimes I will work out so hard that I'd make myself physically ill afterwards that, I'd go do this really hard workout and then swim in my cold pool at home. I get drunk and I try and control my calories and then I'd get a cold or a flu right after that. And I felt so hopeless, like everything I'm doing from the weight loss coach to the personal trainer to I tried to stay sober a bunch of times, a bunch of different ways. And it just felt like it all was hopeless. That no matter what happened, I would be eating more and drinking more or I'd be sober and miserable.

And when I felt bad, then I also desperately craved food and would fill myself up with food to try and distract myself. I was sitting in this fast food restaurant one day during this time. And I was looking around when I was getting close to weighing 250 pounds. And everywhere I looked around, there were people that were morbidly obese. And I remember my mind giving me this little gentle, thought saying, if you keep eating here, you're going to look like them. Because when I was analyzing them, I was being my mind was being very critical of them. And then I had the thought that, well, if you keep eating here with them, you're going to look like them.

I remember arguing with myself and with that thought. It's like, no, I'm different. I'm special. That's not going to happen to me. I can eat here all I want and I'm not going to get that big. But I also remember going to personal training. My personal trainer having me do the body weight and looking at it and it said 30 body fat and looking like that's obese, like 30 of your entire body is fat. Like that's probably double what you need to be healthy and to have a little reserve. That's a lot of extra weight to carry around. I remember being delusional thinking, yeah, it's not reading me correctly.

I've got extra muscle. I just have a big frame. I literally remember, like intentionally filtering the information that it's right there. It's on a screen and I'm like just pushing it away. Like that's not true. And I've noticed like that's a big struggle with, the biggest struggle is to get honest with yourself because as long as I was that delusional, like I couldn't make real change. As long as it's the numbers are staring me in the face and saying, you are obese. And I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm not obese. There's something wrong with that scanner. It's not relevant for my body.

Hitting bottom: April 22, 2014

When I hit bottom was April 22nd, 2014. I was laying in bed. I'd thrown up blood that morning. And so I got scared. The blood was mostly because of how much I drank the night before. I'd probably had 12 to 16 diet sodas and two shots for each one of those diet sodas. So I'd had a lot to drink the night before and I gambled online and I realized I was talking to myself. I was totally out of control. Like that, my money, my relationships, my health, everything was failing and I felt powerless. Like I can't stop this. And I realized my life was hopeless.

Like I, I'm heading towards the end here and I can't stop it. I can't, I can't get off this path. I know I've tried losing weight, tried getting sober. I've tried having a better business. I've tried being a better husband and nothing works at the, end of the day, I end up drinking, being mean to my wife, filling my body with food that makes it overweight and blowing all the money I make in my business and not serving my clients, like utterly hopeless. So I prayed to God desperately that I didn't even believe in. I said, please, I'll do anything to get sober because I realized I had enough honesty to see that if I got sober, there would be hope.

But if I didn't get sober, there was absolutely no hope. If as long as I kept drinking, it didn't matter if I wanted to be a better husband, better in my business or lose weight, the drinking was going to guarantee that everything else was sabotaged, which was frustrating because drinking was the way I coped with reality. Drinking was my reward for getting through a painful, awful reality that was real life. To me, I had the main pleasures I had in life were, the relationship with my wife, which was strained. The time to play video games with my friends and my friends, stopped wanting to play video games because I was getting so toxic.

And then alcohol. And now it's like I got to give up alcohol. How am I going to continue to live? But thankfully, after I prayed, I had the thought that, well, why don't you go to Alcoholics Anonymous? That'll be a part of the anything you're willing to do to get sober. So I went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Now, keep in mind, I'm not paying any attention to my weight at this point, even though I weighed myself and I saw 250 pounds. Absolutely horrified. My friends had this guy that he is six foot two and he used to weigh 240 pounds. So I'm five foot eleven.

So this guy's three inches taller than me. He weighed 240 pounds at one point, and then he lost the weight back down to like 180. This guy's in fantastic shape. And his nickname was 240. And they used to make fun of how big he was at 240. And I remember sitting at the table with them when I weighed 240 and I'm three inches shorter than this guy. And I remember somehow it it. It wasn't connecting with me most of the time. There was occasionally I thought, if they're making fun of him for how he used to be, what are they saying behind my back about my big self right now?

When I went to Alcoholics Anonymous, I was surprised at how happy people were when I got to AA.

Getting sober in Alcoholics Anonymous

I didn't feel very happy about being sober. I felt like I'd failed. I felt like I'd, ruined the privilege I had of drinking, that I was afraid I wasn't going to have fun anymore, be able to deal with life. I felt really defeated and afraid when I came to AA. And I was shocked to find people there who were really loving, supportive. Like it felt like I was at some family barbecue, which didn't make sense because I wasn't happy to be there. But I didn't have any other ideas for how I wasn't going to drink that day. I went to the AA meeting instead of drinking.

And I left that AA meeting and I sat in the parking lot and I cried. And my dad had just died a few months before. And I felt like I could feel my dad's presence. I could feel love. And it felt so good. And that made me want to come back to AA. And it made me want to be accountable and be real. Because I saw people in rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous being real and sharing parts of their life that I would have a hard time admitting to myself, let alone sharing in a room full of people. Going to Alcoholics Anonymous was tough for a few months.

And I just white knuckled it and hung on for dear life. I didn't take the program too seriously until after about 90 days, I really wanted to drink. And I could consciously see how insane I was, that my mind is thinking about drinking, and I'm praying to stay sober. I told everybody I'm staying sober. I'm going to Alcoholics Anonymous. And then my mind's obsessed with drinking. It felt like I was suffocating. I had so much anxiety. I was desperate for some relief. And that's when I finally started getting rigorously honest with people in AA. I went in and started sharing that I was really struggling to stay sober, that it was hard, that I didn't know what to do.

And from there, I bought the book and started reading it. From there, I started taking suggestions like I got a massage. And a massage really helped me to be more present and mindful in my body, which to me is essential for mindful eating. Because if I'm not really present in my body, it's kind of hard to tell when I should stop eating, or what foods are having an impact on my body, or whether my body likes the food or not when I'm eating it. And massage helped me get connected to my body again, and helped me release some of the trauma in my body, and helped me be present and relax.

And after I got the massage, I realized that, which was the suggestion of a woman in AA that had been sober like a decade or two, she said that when she had trouble relaxing, she'd get a massage. And I had trouble relaxing, especially in early sobriety. So I tried getting a massage. It worked really well. I tried reading the book, and I started to understand alcoholism better. I tried sharing in meetings, honestly. I tried getting a sponsor and doing the steps, and it all worked fantastically. And after like six months or so of being sober, I'd lost like 20 pounds just from not drinking. And if anything, I was eating more sweets.

I tell that part of the story in full in Long-Term Emotional Sobriety in Action. The honesty and accountability I found in those rooms is the same thing I try to offer you when you schedule a private one-on-one call with me.

I was juicing. So drinking these huge, probably 700 calories a day, I was like, I'm going to die. Juice drinks that took an hour to prepare and clean the juicer. I bought some hundred and some dollar juicer, and the juice was so good. And then I'd eat all this candy with it, plus eat all the meat and animal products I usually ate. And I was frustrated that after getting sober, in my mind, I thought all I have to do is get sober, and I'm going to go back down to 200 pounds when I lived with my parents. But I sat at 220 pounds for several months.

Meanwhile, I often would get sick or get the flu. I'd be going to the doctor to get antibiotics. And I was frustrated, feeling like even though I've made some really strong progress, my health is still out of control. It's less out of control than it used to be. It's less unmanageable than it used to be, but it's still not where I want it to be. I was mad this variety wasn't enough because I thought, well, if I just quit drinking, it's all just going to come back. So I tried different, different approaches to my diet and tried reading these books and figuring out what other people were doing to lose weight and get better bodies.

And somehow I started this strategy where I thought about Alcoholics Anonymous, and step four is where we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. And that's where the real work in AA begins. Really, you're just before that realizing I need help. I see people who could help me, and I'm making a decision to, accept the help. But step four is where it's like, okay, now let's really look and see what's going on here. That's where the real work begins. And I just intuitively applied this to my weight. I thought after I was frustrated with my weight that I wasn't losing, I realized I don't even know what I'm eating or how many calories I'm eating.

I don't even know where to start with trying to losing weight. The first step based on AA would be to take inventory of what I'm eating.

Tracking every calorie with MyFitnessPal

And that led me to get my fitness pal. I think I'd read it in somebody's book about tracking the food and the calories you ate. So I downloaded my fitness pal, and I committed that every single day I will put every single calorie I eat, within, if it's less than 10 calories or something. But if I eat any substantial amount of calories, like over 10, 20 calories, I'll put all the calories I eat all day, every day into my fitness pal. And the only requirement is to be rigorously honest. If you have five, sweet stripes, you put those 20 calories, but usually it was more like 50.

Then you put those several hundred calories of Bob's sweet stripes you just ate. And I'd measure and very carefully as I could as accurately as I could without being too perfectionistic. I said about to just practice radical honesty. Like you don't have to do any kind of diet or restrict calories at all. I just, I committed to, I set my calorie goal at the high 2000s. Like maybe I'd move it here, and then I'd move it down. And then there are a hundred or 200 calories, but generally on average, it was around like 2 800 calories a day because I was exercising at the gym consistently.

And from what I saw, what I looked up, I, I figured I should be eating about 2 800 calories a day for how big I am for how much I exercise. 2 800 galleries was my, my target. Some days I'd go under it. Most days I'd go a little over it. I set my target for 2 800, but I didn't constrain my eating strictly based on that. I just would track everything I ate. And some days like Thanksgiving day, 2015, I had like 3 900 calories. And the cool thing that happened was when I saw that I'd eaten 3 900 calories and I tried to measure it as carefully as possible.

I'd, use cups and tablespoons and stuff to try and measure how much butter I was eating. And when I saw it at 3 900 calories and I was about to eat more, it motivated me to stop. I'm like, okay, I've had enough calories. I'm like, I've had enough calories today. Like I'm 1 100 calories over. I'm going to stop. Whereas the year before I'd continued to eat at that point. And the radical honesty left me surprised sometimes because I go back and like, man, I had ice cream twice today. Or, I just like, look how much, cake, like I, my daughter, when she was born, I'd make a birthday cake for her, like three months old or something.

Then I'd have, 800 calories of birthday cake. It left me really just looking at what I was doing. And that led over a year. I did that every single day without missing a day, no matter what was happening. Every single day for a year, I put all the calories I ate into MyFitnessPal. And that led to losing another 30 pounds. And it was amazing just the taking inventory. So many days I ate less just because I saw, oh, I've already had 3 000 calories today. I don't need any more. Some days I'd see there was like 2 500, 2 600, and I wasn't that hungry.

And I literally would just not eat anything else because I didn't want to put it in for the calories. Out of sheer laziness, I'd be like, whatever, I'm just, I'm done today. I lost 30 more pounds. I felt really good about my weight when I was 190 pounds. I looked better than I ever had before. Great muscling from going to the gym and doing personal training. And the lowest weight I'd been since sophomore year of college. So this was 2016, 12 years. It felt really good 12 years later to be back down and to feel like I was in similar shape and similar energy level that I was sophomore year of college.

I dig into how that calorie-tracking phase compares with the plant-based change that came next in Calorie Tracking vs Plant-Based Eating.

But this time now I'm 32 instead of 20. But I again plateaued, but not just around weight loss. I felt like I could drop a little bit more fat, but I was frustrated. How often I was getting sick. And I started, having various symptoms that seemed to respond to what I was eating. And I started to get frustrated because I didn't know what to do. And I'd ask people for advice and nobody else knew what to do. I'd look things up online. Like I noticed certain things I'd eat with certain symptoms, like a rash would seem to flare up in proximity of what I ate.

So then I'd go into the ingredients and I'd look, I started looking at the actual ingredients in the food I was eating, all the different things I was eating. And I noticed, and I started reading these books about, ingredients and food. And I realized I eat so many ingredients that if I was allergic to one thing, or if, one thing was triggering another, I wouldn't even know where to start. Like literally there's just hundreds and hundreds of things I eat every day because I ate lots of processed foods, lots of ultra processed foods. Like, ice cream, candy, cookies. And then I had all kinds of meat and animal products.

And I had all kinds of just stuff to go along with that. Like just a hamburger, throw some cheese on it and a bun and some, sauces and stuff. And there's a whole laundry list of ingredients when you put all those together. And that's just one part of one meal. Throw in, potato chips, dessert, and you got a whole bunch more ingredients. I started to feel hopeless again at about two years sober. I'm like, I feel out of control still, even though my body looks great now. I don't feel as good as I should. Something's not working right. And I don't even know where to start.

And people are talking about the ingredients. So I started to try these elimination diets. And some of those were not a good idea. I tried some, crazy diets, just having like three ingredients. I wasn't at all getting proper nutrition. And after one of those diets in particular, I did it for three days. I felt sorry for myself. And again, my wife was like, good Lord, when is he going to be done with this? And then I got, I had a cold or a flu for several days, at which point I quit doing that elimination diet. I then saw that like my health needs to be the bigger goal, not just trying to weigh less, but I really want my body to be healthy.

I want my body to be strong and I want my body to be nourished. And this led to me asking for advice. I just, I got so desperate. I just started asking everybody to help me. And I just started asking everybody for advice, any books, any doctors you should go to. I just started asking everybody, what do you think, what's going on? And it was amazing how like a little rash and like little other symptoms, like got me so frustrated and feeling out of control that I opened up and asked for advice, just like I'd done in Alcoholics Anonymous a couple years before.

How Not to Die, and going plant-based

Right then, I happened to be at a family barbecue in the middle of all this in Michigan. I remember being there with my wife and I had some family members there who were vegetarians and vegans. I remember actively making fun of them and telling my wife I was glad she didn't eat that way because I wouldn't want to deal with it. How ironic. Then my uncle's a doctor. He's been a doctor since the 1980s. He's a general practitioner, seen, tens of thousands of patients. And he recommended I read the book, How Not to Die. Just after I told him everything, that was all he said.

Just, he said, he said he gives that to his, his patients. He recommends that to all of his patients on their first visit to read the book, How Not to Die by Dr. Michael Greger. And I, I'm big into reading books. So reading a book sounded like no big deal. And I read the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous and the AA literature, and I saw how much reading a book could help me, with problems like drinking. So I thought, okay, I'll read that. Before I started reading it, I went to the airport with my wife and my two year old daughter. We're at the Detroit Metro Airport, and I hadn't eaten.

I hadn't eaten anything that morning. I was in a great mood, had a really nice trip with a family, and I was feeling excited to go back to my life in Sarasota. We stopped at a fast food restaurant chain, and I ate what was a fairly normal breakfast. It had like five different kinds of meat, all kinds of like animal products, added oils, salts, sugars, processed foods in it. Again, not something unusual that I ate at the time. And what I noticed within 30 minutes of finishing that meal, my mood, which had been way up and feeling great, I noticed my mood had went about as far down as it could go.

I noticed I was feeling depressed, and I was feeling hopeless, and my thoughts had even started to spiral to, maybe I should get a drink at the airport bar, at which point I got seriously alarmed and felt hopeless. And then I had a major realization. I realized that the food I ate and the thoughts I were having, they were connected. I wouldn't go so far as to say like the food caused the thoughts specifically, but what I ate and the thoughts I were thinking, there was some kind of relationship between the two of those. That if I eat different food, or if I don't eat at all, I'm probably not in this depressed state.

And that really shocked me that I had figured that what I ate had nothing to do with what I thought. And it seems pretty common sense that there'd be some connection, especially as people go into like gut bacteria and gut health and how important that is. It seems obvious now, but at the time, it was a shocking realization to think that what I ate affected how I thought. And from there, I dove into the book, How Not to Die, with a very open mind, very eager to take this information in that my uncle suggested that this doctor had dedicated his life to presenting this medical research.

And if I would make one suggestion here, I would make the suggestion to read the book, How Not to Die also. That was the biggest book I've read in terms of like, health. Weight loss, all that stuff. Absolutely incredible. And as soon as I read that book, and I was having the realization, I remember being on the plane, just having the like intuition that the feeling, the thought that what this book, the information in it is valid, and it will work for you. I don't know about everybody else and everybody else's body types and all the details, but I had the feeling this will work for me.

If you do what this book says, you will get the results. You're looking for. And the summary of the book is that it suggested, based on a lot of medical research that is quoted in the book, that a whole plant based diet was the way to go. That it would help, according to the book, it talks about how the whole plant based diet can have a positive impact across a wide variety of health outcomes, including all the top 15 causes of death. And after reading that, I just had this like, knowing or this commitment where I'm like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to really commit to this.

Now, by whole plant foods, the author specifies fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and beans, minimally or not at all processed, raw or cooked in a way that maintains the nutrition, like kale, raw kale or kale chips, cooked in the oven. As soon as I read that, I committed to it immediately. So I had just, a few, a week before I'd been saying that no way would I want to eat like that. And I'm glad my wife didn't. All of a sudden, the snap of fingers, I'm like, I'm doing this. I'm doing this and there's no going back.

The hard first week and a new way to eat

I got home and I immediately started to set my life up to eat a whole plant based diet. And then I read other books too over time, like the, there's a book called Whole from the China Study, which has very similar information in it from another, either doctor or medical doctor or PhD that did a lot of research on this. And I read a book called Whole from the China Study, and when I got home, I faced the first week of switching my diet and it was challenging. I didn't know what to buy. I remember standing in the grocery store, just looking around the fruit and vegetable section.

I'm like, I don't know what to do. I know how to go the meat aisle. I know how to make, make meat and animal based food. I know how to plan my whole diet around that. Hamburgers, hot dogs, deli meat, roasted chickens, like healed meat. And usually what I was ready to make, and even I know how to plan my whole diet around meat and animal products. I did not know what to do if you exclude those. I remember going to the 49ers and going, I'm going to go to the 49ers and going, Googling like crazy and watching YouTube videos and reading the book and trying to figure out how am I going to eat like this?

And I, at the same time, I, I got, I went way too hard at it. I went into like ultra discipline, no exceptions. I also cutting out processed foods like cake and candy and cookies all at the same time. I went, I went hard at this. And the first week I, I had some unfortunate gastrointestinal consequences. I would get, since I didn't know what to do, I would get like frozen fruits and vegetables, like frozen bag of broccoli and blueberries, just blend random stuff up and drink it as a smoothie. And I got seriously bloated and uncomfortable doing that several times because when my digestive system was used to digesting a lot of ultra processed foods and meat and animal products, I start throwing huge amounts of whole grains of meat and animal products.

And I started throwing huge amounts of whole grains whole plant foods at it. It was a ton of fiber. It was a shock to my system. And I settled on making this fruit and vegetable smoothie. My thinking was that if I had the smoothie with all my fruits and vegetables in it, I could easily get the beans, nuts, and whole grains on their own. So every day for like a year, I made this massive smoothie. I would put, three to five kinds of fruits in it, like pineapples, strawberries, bananas, blueberries, raspberries. And I would blend them all together. And I would put, that up with a bunch of vegetables, broccoli, carrots, celery, cucumbers.

I know it doesn't sound very good, does it? Sometimes even things like radishes. And I just, a kale, just blend all this together. And I drink it. And I throw spices in there. I did silly things like I'd blend oranges with the peels on until I realized that was not a good idea. Blend lemons with the peels on. And I, then I'd take the peels off. I had that smoothie most days for a year. And it filled me up. And then I would have like roasted pecans, roasted walnuts. I would have Larabars. And I would have hummus. I found hummus was the best way for me to eat beans.

But I tried, just cooking beans, boiling them. And I'd have like pasta for spaghetti. Or I'd have like triscuits and hummus for the whole grains and beans. And then have some nuts or a Larabar. And for at least a year, I was hardcore about my diet. No birthday cake for me, no Christmas cookies or candy, none of that stuff. And I also tried intermittent fasting too. And I stopped doing personal training because I had, a few personal trainers I worked with in Sarasota. And then we moved up to St. Pete. I just didn't get attached to a gym right away.

Going too far, then finding balance

And then I ended up going down to 160 at my lowest. And a significant part of that, I dropped muscle. I did drop some more fat, but I also dropped some muscle because I stopped lifting weights. And I just got into this routine of walking my dogs for my only exercise. Now, I'd take 30 minute to an hour plus long walks with the dogs. So these were good length walks. But I dropped a significant amount of muscle, especially all over and in my arms, in my abs and in my legs. I dropped a bunch of muscle everywhere. And I had a while where I wasn't doing like any vigorous physical exercise for a couple of years.

And I was intermittent fasting. Now, intermittent fasting worked great in some ways. I would go until I'd wake up at like eight or seven or eight and then go till noon without eating. And then I do all my eating anywhere from like noon to three or five in the afternoon. The problem with that was it was often annoying for everybody else around me. And I'd often get super anxious and irritable. And I'd get really, irritable before I ate because my body's really hungry. And it's like gearing up to like try and hunt something or, it's trying to gear up to give me all this energy to get food.

And eventually I kind of, compromised to be more in sync with everybody else in my life. I started softening up a bit, started having the birthday cake again. I cut the intermittent fasting because it was annoying, like to try to go out to breakfast. My wife, I'd break the intermittent fast one day. And then we'd do something with our family the next day. And then the third day, I'd think, well, I even bother with it today. And then my wife really enjoyed having things like candy and cookies and cake and ice cream around, although she would eat them with moderation. And she wasn't as thin.

She had been like underweight when I met her, but she had got to a place where, she she's great. Like she had a nice, nice amount of weight on, not overweight, not too thin or anything. And she could eat. She could do just fine. She wouldn't sit there and eat a whole bag of potato chips like I would or eat the rest of the pint of ice cream. She would have a little bit of it and move on. Over the next several years. I would consistently, go back and forth on trying to tighten up my discipline, cut back on the ultra processed foods, especially. And then I'd slide back into it because, well, my wife got annoyed with me not wanting to eat those things.

And I got annoyed with her. I got annoyed with her wanting to have them in a house because they felt like a temptation to me being in the house. And if I had foods like that in my house, I had a harder time saying no to them when I was out in public. Over time, the worst I got was around in 2022. I ended up when my mom moved next door, I started consistently having popcorn, a bag of popcorn and some, ice cream or some kind of sweets. My mom's big into sweets. And I got my weight back. I got my weight up about the highest I got was like 185, 188.

And I'm grateful because even with eating the extra calories at night, eating the whole plant foods, they're so filling. They have so much bulk. It takes so much work to digest. I found even with being pretty sloppy with my eating, even with eating, extra added oils and salts and even some candy and ultra processed foods. It was difficult for me to even put on much weight because just so much what I ate didn't have that many calories, but it did fill me up. And once I realized and I weighed myself and I saw what was happening with my mom, I stopped eating at night over there and then eventually stopped going over there overnight also.

And I found that for me personally, moderation doesn't seem to work very well when it comes to food, especially anything that's like kind of addictive or really tasty or sensational. Like about the most I have generally, is honey. And this is where I started to get into seeing even eating whole plant based, even eating with so many of these foods that fill me up, I can still comfort eat. And the thing is eating a whole plant based though, you can easily eat so much food that you are so stuffed that like you're tired and lethargic. I've noticed that usually when I get tired and lethargic, assuming there's nothing I really don't want to do and that's kind of annoying me, which generally there's not.

A lot of times I get most tired and lethargic is when I've eaten too much. And then the food leaves me feeling slowed down. I had various periods where I would have almond butter, honey, and chocolate chips. And that was like my vice. And sometimes I'd have eight or nine scoops of honey, almond butter, and chocolate chips. But even then I wasn't putting on weight because almond butter is very filling. And then I was also eating, kale chips, hummus, carrots, things like carrots. You, I don't think as a human, you can even get the nutrition you need just by eating carrots because it takes so much work and are so filling to digest that you just can't get enough calories even eating carrots.

But I love having a carrot. I try and have a carrot most days because it has such fantastic vitamins like vitamin A. It has great nutrition in it, but that's the beauty of plant foods.

The emotional side of overeating

And I started especially the last few years. I read books like Intuitive Eating, Mind Over Medicine, and noticing the mind body connection when it comes to food and overeating. I noticed that I often, when I would get a bit anxious or down, I would turn to food as comfort, especially the honey and almond butter and chocolate chips ended up being comfort food. I also noticed that if I tried to cut some other things, like if I was a little addicted to video games and I cut that out, then I'd go into comfort eating more. And the emotional side of overeating comes from the fact that I don't want to eat too much food.

To me, it's one of those sneaky things that the whole plant setup, for me, makes it so that my comfort eating doesn't matter as much because you're comfort eating carrots and hummus. You're only going to have so much carrots and hummus before your body physically stops you from doing that. It's different when I used to comfort eat and I would have two cheeseburgers and a couple of hot dogs. The amount of calories from that versus having some hummus and carrots, it's thousands of calories difference. And I read even more incredible information in the book, How Not to Diet, which absolutely blew my mind. Some of the studies they did in there, where they would do a study showing how eating one type of food versus a whole plant food.

They did some studies, I remember they cited, and you can check the references on yourself. I remember they did this one study where they said they had people eat a fixed amount of calories of chicken and then they had another control group eat a fixed number of calories of beans. And the people who ate the same number of calories of the meat actually put on weight and the people eating the beans didn't. I'm like, that's nuts. We think in terms of calories, we don't think in terms of the food itself controlling how that affects your weight gain. So I'm grateful that with eating a whole plant, it was actually easier to face the emotional side of my overweight.

Because as long as I was emotionally eating and gaining weight, then the weight gain became my focus. But with the comfort eating without gaining weight, then it just got me to look at like, hey, what am I doing? Like, why am I eating so much food that I'm filling myself up and feeling bloated and feeling bad? Like the comfort eating was more direct and in my face, because it'd leave my body physically feeling bad. But I still felt good enough in terms of my weight that, it was very obvious. Instead of getting distracted by the weight, I was like, why am I eating right now?

I'm not hungry. I just ate this huge salad two years ago. I'm not hungry. And here I am eating again. And it showed like the weight as protection and the weight as distraction and the eating as as, something to do. I remember when I was a correction officer, there was a lot of comfort eating I observed there. If people just bored or anxious, or, often, I've noticed getting my sleep helps me to if I don't sleep right, I often will eat more to where I'm at now. I'll talk.

How I live now

You know how I live now. I'm careful about what I keep in my house, like the main place for self discipline is what I keep in my house. Like there's no ice cream in this house. There's no cookies. There's no candy. There's no there's I guess the about the only thing I wouldn't want to eat all of it is honey. Like there are a couple of jars of honey. But honey, it comes from bees, it feels very good, like healthy for my body. And I did some little muscle tests. And it seems to my body seems to like honey. But at the same time, honey is not something I'm generally going to overeat a whole bunch of it.

Like I don't have any raw sugar in the house or because sometimes I used to do I'd eat like 10 straight spoons of straight up, brown sugar. I don't have anything like that in my house. I don't bake. And I bought I have a pizza veggie pizza. I do have two kids, a 10 year old daughter and a seven year old son. I try and accommodate them personally, I generally don't even drink juice anymore. Because my thought is I'd rather eat the whole plant food than the juiced food. So I have a bag of oranges, but my son, my kids are both, healthy, they're both lean.

And therefore, I actually will allow them a little more leeway than I generally do with myself. Like my daughter wants a cheese pizza. Like fine, here's a cheese pizza. I explained there why she might like a better option. She's like, I don't care. I want the cheese pizza. Like, okay, get you a cheese pizza. So I allow my kids slight more leeway, but I really enjoy being rigorously disciplined with my kids. Now, if it's me and my house, I'm not buying you any ultra processed foods. The pizza is about as far as I can go. So I'm not buying you any I'll go. But they believe cheese is healthy.

And it does have some sauce on there. The pizza is about as far as I go. And I really like now that I'm divorced, I have my own house. And it's my rules. It was a constant frustration with my ex that was she wanted what I wanted on health. Her philosophy and mine were different. She was annoyed that I one day I threw out some of her food, things like candy and cookies, and she went off on me about that. She's like, that was my food. And I'm like, this is my house. I don't want these foods that are tempting that I have to control myself with.

I don't want these ultra processed foods in my house. So you can see how that entire day went. And I'm glad now like I've got a house. I see the main place I need to be disciplined and to resist temptation is when I go to the grocery store. Because that determines what's in my house. I've really let it out the last couple of times. I went to the grocery store and I bought a bag or two of potato chips and shared with the kids. But even the potato chips, I get the avocado oil ones. And the potato chips are at least a plant food, but they have a lot of added oil.

I try and minimize adding oil unless it's in the environment of eating a whole plant food. When the potato chips are cooked, some of the nutrition leaks out when they're cooked. So I try and minimize adding oil unless it's in the environment of eating a whole plant food. They're fried. Thus, I try and eat always the maximum nutrition version of any food. Like I'd rather have boiled potatoes for nutrition than potato chips. And what's been amazing is I talked to so many people and they say, well, I could never do without steak. What I've noticed is my taste buds only take like 10 or so days.

And this is what I've seen in research. But for me personally, it only takes a couple of weeks for my taste buds to change. I used to love cheese. I loved cheese. And today I generally can't stand cheese. Like a piece of pizza with cheese on it just makes me want to hurl. I used to love that. But my taste buds are physically, they're not the same taste buds as before. My taste buds are different than the ones I had before. And I have loosened up too. I've, if I feel I've learned to be a little more intuitive and a little, little less mental rigidity.

I've found that my body does seem to want a small quantity of meat. Because what I've noticed a lot of people went on whole plant have said for one reason or another, they stopped doing it. And for me, this has worked so well. I want to keep doing it indefinitely. Like my blood pressure used to be 120 over 80 when I started this. And it was even higher back when I drank. And my blood pressure last I checked 100 over 60. The last time I went to the doctor, which was several years ago, they said I was in the top. 10 of the health out of all the patients they saw.

And that was just three years or five years into getting sober three years into changing my diet. But from all the indicators I can see, I'm fantastically healthy. My body works very well. It has energy all the time. It functions predictably. And I rarely have anything that slows me down. And I also have added practices in like yoga. I realized after a few years of just walking around, I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm not lifting weights that I was, I was getting weak. And I was getting rigid. So I started doing yoga to loosen up and then doing power yoga flows to get some more strength.

I'm really happy. I actually have the highest leg strength I've ever had before. I can max out the leg machines that you do that like you sit with your leg spread and you, pull the machine to pull the legs together. I can actually max those out for the first time in my life. I can do, 180 100 of the time. I can do, 190 pounds on the leg. I wish I could remember it. But the ones where you spread your legs in and out, I can max those out. And that's because of doing power yoga flows and balancing poses. Now my arms, I've had more strength in my arms at various points.

My bench press is lower than it was at some of the peak. I used to be able to do like 180 or so with like a free weight bench press. And it's significantly lower now. But I also am really fast. Because I don't have extra upper body muscle that I have to carry around my speed, my leg strength. I don't know if I've ever been able to run this fast. I feel I love it. I exercise almost every day now. And I've tried different ways of eating. And what I've found is to just my body seems to work well with more of a snacking approach.

I've read some of these books to talk about why you shouldn't snack and all this stuff. But to me, the bottom line is what feels good for my body. Usually doing stuff that feels bad for my body is not the right approach. What feels good for my body is to not, if I want to have energy all day, I need to eat. And if I eat too much at once, it'll slow me down for a while. Now I still sometimes I'll have, a big plate of like bean nachos and feel a little slow afterwards and sit down and rest and do my work. There's nothing wrong with resting and digesting.

But I have learned if I want to film a video, don't because your body's going to need some energy to digest that. And that leaves me feeling, so fantastic. I'm amazed now that I ever felt hopeless about my body. Like it seems crazy that 12 years ago, I felt hopeless and defeated. Wondering if I ever will be able to get back down to a weight I was happy with. Today, I love, I go to the yoga studio and there's a mirror and I'll like, I'll look at myself in a mirror and smile. I'm like, I love you. I love how you look. I love how your body moves.

Loving my body, and eating without guilt

But to me, I had to start loving my body before it looked how I thought it should look. I talked to a girl recently who, was in the same struggle I was. And she was talking about, loving her body. And for me, loving my body does not mean I just eat whatever I want whenever I feel like it. And I don't know. I don't drink whatever I want whenever I feel like it. Loving my body for me means I say no to things that don't have an effect on my body that I want. Like, for example, I go to AA meetings and sometimes I'll have cake or cookies there.

And people like, are you going to have a piece of cake? I'm like, no. First off, when I don't have any of the foods in my house that I don't see as fundamentally nourishing. And ultra processed foods, I don't see that those generally nourish my body. So there's no point in me eating those. In fact, that to me is like putting fuel in my body that, like putting water in my gas tank in my car. It's just, if you want to fuel the car, it's better not to put that in there. And when I see a piece of cake now, I see an ultra processed, I see something more like a piece of paper, something that is not natural, that my body certainly, I'm not going to eat paper and definitely don't do that.

But, I don't see that as fundamentally nourishing my body. It's something that does not, I don't think that belongs in my body. And loving my body is saying no to putting things in my body that don't fuel it, that don't leave it feeling good, that don't help it look good. And I've had some people criticize and say, well, you just need to have fun. You just need to loosen up. Like I can have fun and loosen up and joke about the stuff I say. I can have fun getting out on a tennis court and running around. I can have fun doing the yoga flow the opposite way the instructor says.

I can have fun getting out and doing my YouTube videos and playing video games. I can have fun having a conversation, going out with a new girl. But it's not fun for me to put things in my body that leave my body feeling bloated, that contribute to weight gain, that can mess up some of the systems in my body. That's not fun. Now, it used to be fun. I remember when I was in my 20s and I thought messing my body up with alcohol and stuff was fun. That's not fun today. I don't want to feel bad. And even if it's a little bad, I don't want to feel a little bad.

And I don't want to feel any guilt. I remember being at this conference a few years ago and there were three of us that were whole plant vegans all at the same table. And they all brought out a dish of ice cream. Me and the guy decided we would both eat it and that we would both not feel guilty about it. That if I'm going to eat something, then I'm not going to feel guilty. And if I feel guilty, then next time I just shouldn't eat it. So, me and him both had this scoop of ice cream, one scoop in a nice glass dish. And then his partner, she had a scoop of ice cream and she felt bad about it.

She felt guilty. She talked about it the rest of the night. She referred to it days later that she'd violated her diet. And for me, what I found is if I'm going to eat, I want to eat in a way that doesn't produce guilt, that is based on nourishing yes, I do want to eat for pleasure and join intuition as well. I'm not absolutely opposed in every single environment to occasionally eating a little bit just for pleasure. I went out on a first date with a girl a couple of months ago and she wanted to go get ice cream. And what's nice is with this mindset, if I do eat for pleasure, I eat less.

I went to ice cream and instead of getting in the past what would have been a double or triple scoop, I got a single scoop in a cup. So I didn't have the cone. So I had the pleasure of the ice cream, but I also minimized it.

Listening to my body

I noticed occasionally, and this is something more recent in the last few years, that occasionally my body will desire a little bit of meat. And it generally only wants a little bit and it generally is satisfied quickly. And I remember thinking before, absolutely not. That's, with drinking, I have absolutely hard. I never take a sip. I never drink alcohol. Under any circumstances, in any form, no non alcoholic beers, no kombucha, no alcohol at all in any form, no food cooked in alcohol, nothing. So I have a very strict zero tolerance with alcohol policy. But when it comes to meat and animal products, I found occasionally my body seems to genuinely have a desire for a little bit.

And I figure that's my body intuitively. If there's some system in my body that could benefit from a little bit of meat to fix something or to keep itself running, running in optimal condition. One of the first times I experienced this was several years ago. I was out on a date with my wife and we sat down at a breakfast place downtown and I was looking at the salmon benedict on the menu and it was strange because most of the time when I go out to eat, I automatically filter anything with meat in it. I saw the salmon benedict and I thought, I would love that right now.

And then the thought like, no, I don't eat meat. I'm not going to have that. And it's like, I don't want to eat this every morning. I just would love to have this right now. And I ordered it and I ate all of it and it was delicious and there was no guilt or regret or remorse out of it. And there I usually will have weeks where I don't have any meat at all. But if my kids want to go to a sushi restaurant and the most delicious sushi is a meat one, I'll often have that now. So I generally, I can not have meat for weeks and then I might have a little bit of meat.

Occasionally here and there. But what's nice is I live more intuitively now and generally and habitually. Habitually, I eat whole plant foods. Occasionally, I'll eat something else. But I also keep myself out of situations generally where people are eating things that I wouldn't want to eat habitually. I generally avoid going to birthday parties. I generally avoid going places where there's fast food. Like I don't go out to eat much. When I want to go out on a date with a girl, I generally will ask her to do something like go on a walk to the park. The beach, just come to my house or go do a yoga class, go play tennis.

I generally will avoid going places to eat because then I lose a lot of control over what's in my food. And with that, I feel very good about my eating. I feel great about my body. And I just hope that you can get that feeling yourself where you can trust your intuition, where you can have a body you feel great, where you can feel confident, where you love your body, where you're happy with how it looks, and then where you have that message to share with others as well. If you want help mapping out what that could look like for your own body, you can book a one-on-one call with me and we'll walk through where you're at together.

What worked for me

So to go over what worked for me and to wrap this up, for me, I was hopeless until I fixed my biggest problem first, which was alcohol. And for many people, I see substance issues often block any other progress. And then next, really looking honestly at how am I eating and what impact does it have? And now focusing on health, not just weight, I focus on maximizing the foods I eat that truly nourish me. Like that's, I remember when I was trying to lose weight before, it was so much about losing weight and calories and all that stuff. And today it's like, I need to fill my body with foods that nourish me, that give my body water and that give my body nutrients and give my body calories in a form that's very healthy and helpful for it to process.

And as an example of that too, I've focused more on muscle recently because for so many years I focused on weight, but, and especially fat and trying to minimize fat. But what I've seen more recently is I heard something somewhere and you can look this up rather, there's truth to it, that, the amount of muscle you have is often a better indicator of health than fat. So that if I, I have to choose between one of the two. I'd rather make sure I maintain muscle. At the same time, so many people have suggested, like one of my friends suggested for dating, I should, go to the gym, work out and drink these protein drinks, which they have vegan protein drinks with plant protein.

You can drink and get huge if you want to. Like a lot of people ask me, well, where do you get your protein? Like, first off, like everything I eat has protein in it. The beans have a lot of protein. The almond butter has a lot of protein. Even some of the fruits and vegetables have a little bit of protein in them. But the beans, the whole grains, and the nuts have lots of protein in them. But if you just want a bunch of protein, there are vegan protein drinks too. But I personally, I don't take any supplements, do any kind of drinks like that or any of that ultra processed nutrition.

I tested different supplements. I tested this one supplement, which had a, some program I could supposedly make money selling it. But I got, my gastrointestinal system was messed up for a week after having just a couple of days of that supplement, which to me, the people doing the supplement told me, well, you got to get used to it. And I don't think anything that's good for me should require getting used to. Like it shouldn't make me feel bad. So I don't take any supplements. I do have B12 in the nutritional yeast I eat. And I don't take any supplements. And I put it on foods for kind of a cheesy flavor.

And that has B vitamins in it. So that's a source for B vitamins. I also eat seaweed snacks every day too, which some people say that B12, it has B12 in it, but some people debate whether you can absorb it or not. My body seems to enjoy seaweed every day. So does my son. So I'll eat it. And I look at, I need to maintain muscle. And some people suggest that I should bulk up and get these huge shoulders because that, that's what turns girls on. It's like, I don't want to put extra muscle on. I want lean, I want a lean body that I can run fast, that I can last the test of time with on this planet.

I don't want to have to carry around unnecessary weight that's just for looks. I want muscles that can hold me up, that I can balance. I can balance really well. And the more I've done yoga and gotten better balance and done body weight exercises, the less I have falls and injuries, which is awesome. And the more I lifted weights and kind of got myself out of balance before, the more I often would injure myself too because some muscles were too strong and other muscles were too weak. And that's where I'd injure myself. So when the strong muscles yank the weak muscles and then something would go wrong.

And several times when I've got into lifting weights, especially on my own without a trainer, then I'd have a little minor injury. So I'm focused today, not just on health or not just on weight, but overall health. And just minimizing or doing away completely with foods that are not primarily for health. And I'm amazed how much.. See, when I cut out the sensational foods, like the ultra processed cake, cookies, crackers, my body actually enjoys the regular foods I eat more. Just a bowl of popcorn with olive oil and salt and some nutritional yeast is delicious. And now I think I'm going to have some right after this because that sounds so good.

I can eat just ordinary, ordinary meals today and they taste great because I'm not used to having anything more sensational. When I eat meat, it feels very sensational. I have a bite or two of meat. Like especially I have a bite or two of steak. That's enough. Like it's so much taste. It's so intense. It's like, that's too much. Like I don't need to have that much taste and that much sensation. Like that's enough. I'll have a little taste of it. It's like, wow. But I'm good. And what's important to me today is too that it's sustainable. My biggest challenge still is emotional eating where I'll eat because I'm bored.

I'll eat because I'm happy. I'll eat because I'm sad. I'll eat to try and avoid emotions. I'll eat because I'm lonely. But thankfully the way I eat now, it doesn't have that. Besides getting too full and a little lethargic, there's not much in the way of consequences. But to me, the most important thing is that what I'm doing needs to be sustainable. Like my sobriety needs to be sustainable that I enjoy being sober. So I keep doing it. And a part of making what I'm doing, doing sustainable is teaching others and helping others. When I see someone that looks like they could use my help, I want to share all the information I have because it's people sharing that kind of stuff with me that helped me go from hopeless to hopeful to now, I've got the results I'm really happy with.

That's a big part of why I keep showing up here, and you can schedule a private call with me to talk all of this through with me.

So if you're feeling hopeless, I know what it feels like. And you don't have to fix it all at once. Real change is possible. And to me, the goal is a life that works. Now I'll acknowledge, it can be very difficult if you're with someone else. Like I have a friend, he's in a relationship, and him and his wife are both struggling with their weight. And that can be very hard, especially if he tries to make changes, but then she doesn't like him. And then, then it becomes an argument. And the way he's eating doesn't work for what she wants to do.

Health, dating, and who I let into my circle

And then that's why, one thing I'm very strict with on my dating is I only want to date someone else who's very healthy. Like I'll tolerate a lot of other stuff. You want kids, you don't want kids, however your politics are, older, younger, whatever. Like the main thing I care about dating is, are you healthy? Because, I can change my politics and it's not going to be a big deal. Or, age gap one way or another is not a big deal. But if I date someone like who drinks and is feeling out of control with their body like I used to be, that's the easiest way for me to lose what I've got.

Getting my body under control is also what made dating workable again — something I cover across my Life playlist and in posts like Dating Apps Are a Bad Deal for High-Value Men.

So my main discipline is very much controlling who's a part of my inner circle too. And the main thing I ask to be a part of my inner circle, especially someone that I'm going to date and live with and have that kind of intimacy with is like that you're healthy. And the beautiful thing is like the more healthy you get, the more healthy of a person you can often attract into your life. But the challenge, I acknowledge it can be very challenging if you're with someone who's, who's struggling with their health. I've, I've seen people where, they're both struggling with their health and they both make beautiful changes together.

And that can be awesome. But if you're with someone else, it's hard to do it alone. And my, my wife was a great example. Like I got, I, her, her lifestyle rubbed off on me a lot. And I'd say being with her is, if anything, she was a little underweight when we started dating. And she, she put on a healthy amount of weight and I lost a huge amount of weight. And being with her was a key part of that. Just watching how she lived and how she didn't eat a whole bag of potato chips. And even though I couldn't do it, I realized, I could not eat a whole bag of potato chips one day and then the next day and the next day.

But at some point I'm going to buy a bag and I'm going to eat all of them. So just watching her made me see like, okay, what she does doesn't work for me specifically, but I want to be more like her. So I need to build systems that work for me to get the results that she has. If that makes sense. The goal is a life that works. And I acknowledge it can be difficult if you live with family members, kids. It can be difficult, especially with the people around you. But the good news is real change is possible.

If you feel hopeless, start here

And the real change starts with me. And it starts with imagining what it'd be like. Like at some point, I imagined what it'd be like to be sober, even though I had a hangover. I imagined and was willing to do whatever it took to change my life. Like that's the key step, that decision that I'll do anything, as long as it's loving, doesn't hurt anybody else. I'll do anything it takes to be at the weight I want to be at, to look how I want to look, to feel good in my body, to nourish my body. And if that means I say no to the cake at the AA meeting, if that means when I go to the grocery store, I'm putting my blinders on and there's just a lot of stuff I'm not even considering buying.

I got into the vegan, dairy free ice cream for a while. And it's like this, this is not much better, if at all better than the ice cream. Like, either just don't eat it or just eat the ice cream. Like the dairy free is not really an improvement, at least for me. So if you want help, I found it's really helped me to talk with people who they have what I want, that I can be accountable to, that I can talk about applying this in real life. And I'm available. And you can just talk with me and ask me all the questions you've got. Tell me your unique situation.

I don't give advice. I lead by example. And I listen. Most of the calls I'll listen for 50 minutes. Because it's like, it's like when I give something to chat GPT. I dump a whole bunch of information at it and then I have it process it and crank out the, the goal or crank out what I wanted to know. That's how I look at my calls. You, you give me the information, you share a unique situation and then I'll process it and share what it looks like to me. Because lots of times I've noticed I can't see my blind spots. I can't see what I'm missing.

I can't figure out what I don't know that I don't know. But as soon as I know that I don't know, then there's hope. Like when I realized I don't know how to stay sober and like it. When I realized I don't know how to intuitively eat. When I realized, I don't know how to truly nourish my body. I don't know how to eat food in a way that doesn't make me sick or put on weight. I don't know how to say no to a steak or, I don't know how to make changes. I don't know how to buy a bag of potato chips without eating it.

Still don't know that one. So the solution is just don't buy them. All right. Because a lot of eating is also opportunity cost. It's not as much like with potato chips and the way I live. It's not much like, so what I had a bag of potato chips. The calories aren't an issue because the way I eat and live. But it's that you could have, I could have had, instead of having this whole bag of potato chips, I could have boiled some potatoes and eaten those and put some olive oil and salt on them instead. And I would have had less oil, less salt and more nutrition.

Like to me, that's what it's about. It's not about trying to maintain the, to figure and impress everybody else. It's like, can I put the right fuel in my body to help it feel good? And is the food I'm eating pleasurable to eat and giving my body the right fuel? That's what it comes down to. I hope this made a difference in your life. Like I've got videos. I've been really, I've been dating lately. So after being with my ex for 15 years, so I've been really into doing dating videos lately. But, weight loss and health, maintaining a healthy body are huge for dating. Like it was so much harder to date when my body was, when I felt horrible about my body and didn't feel attractive because of it.

And it's so much easier to date now when I put on a, college shirt and a pair of slacks. I feel good about how muscular and lean my body is, how my face looks. And it feels so good to walk up and see a woman that sees me and is immediately attracted to my physical body. And then I open my mouth and sometimes things go downhill from there. But I feel so good that I have a physical body that attracts a significant amount of women. And the women that I find attractive, I love that. And at one point that looked hopeless. And I'm so grateful to have that to share.