so i've been talking about doing this show for a while which is um about weight management and the lessons you get from it What most people don't know I've talked about it on stream before is I grew up obese I grew up very very overweight the me you see here is 192 And the me that left college was 272. So I'm down, oh geez, 80 pounds. I wore a 44 inch waist.
I now wear a 34. The sweatshirt I have on is a large. I used to wear 2XL all the time. So the point isn't that I can lose weight, although that was good.
um the point is you can and so people thought it'd be good if i shared that um to give you hope to give other people hope that they can handle whatever their problems are in their lives whether that's weight or some other problem alcohol smoking vaping whatever or some other challenge you have in your life um so i will talk some about what i did and i will show you some of the funny pictures
And thank you, Mons, for translating it to kilos. And yeah, that's 35, 36 kilos is what you're showing there. That seems... yeah that's dead on 80 pounds oh i don't know which sounds worse 80 pounds 35 kilos it's a lot either way it's a damn heavy backpack And, you know, I can make it real in other ways, like my ring finger. uh lost four sizes so i had to have like my class ring from college adjusted because it would just fall off um
And I went through several sets of clothes because when I went from a 40 inch waist or 44 to 40 new clothes from 44 to 36 new or 40 to 36 new clothes. Not that this was bad, but. You know, it's a lot of weight. So you guys can ask questions about it. You know, if you don't know, we can pop up.
the Question widget the question extension and I'll be happy to take questions about it And you can jump in and let me know what you want to know put in questions we'll vote on it but i'll talk a little bit about how i did it so first let's talk about how i got there i grew up in a midwestern farm family
And I was the youngest kid and my parents were sick of parenting. And so what that meant was anything I asked for for dinner rather than having me eat something healthy, they let me eat whatever the hell I wanted. And they also had a candy bowl on the table and it was a magic candy bowl. It filled up with gumdrops, jelly beans, any kind of crap automatically. And I could have all I wanted.
So I would come home from school and I would sit down and eat a bunch of jelly beans and have a Pepsi. And, you know. The natural thing happened, right? I was first called fat when I was five or six by my sister. I didn't know what fat was before then. I was blissfully ignorant. Congratulations, Kill X. um uh and i lost it at 25 so we'll get to that um we'll get to that story in a minute but yeah i lost the weight around 25 so
But I started getting fat really early. And I was already gaining weight, you know, five, six, seven. And I was definitely fat in middle school and fatter in high school. And I use the word fat.
uh you know some people want me to say overweight or whatever i don't know i've always thought of it as fat so let's not have the like fat shaming debate because i'm talking about myself i was overweight um uh somebody wants to know about the painting i have in frame yeah that's my twitch souvenir uh twitch had a lot of art by this artist
And this is, I got a copy of this one because I just love, that's Alice from the Disney Alice in Wonderland considering the red or the blue pill as a metaphor for going down the rabbit hole.
from alice in wonderland so i love that painting there's a lot of others that have the same idea um so anyway by the time i was in high school my favorite meal was a Wendy's triple if you know the American burger chain Wendy's so three quarters of a pound burger um two large fries because back then they didn't have like super-sized fries so I just got two of them
And then a Coke to drink and then a Frosty for dessert, which Frosty, if you don't know, think milkshake. So it's no surprise that I was completely gigantic eating that. And it was sad. I went to college in my first year in college. I wore two XL shirts, but I actually put them over a chair in my dorm room every night, like over the arms and stuff to stretch them more.
And they wore mostly sweatpants, as you'll see in a photo here in a little bit. So, yeah. Sisini, thank you for the positive feedback. So... What I want to encourage you, though, is here I am. I get out of college. I start my first job. I'm 80 pounds above 192. By the way, I'm 6'2". So, you know, like 190 centimeters for those of you like.
and yeah it was a shit ton of food you're absolutely right um and 192 still puts me at a bmi just above 25 so if you know body mass index even now even though i look pretty thin i'm like on the high end of my weight range um and that's after losing all the weight so i'm in pretty good shape like there's other things my pulse is like 120 over or sorry my
Blood pressure is about 120 over 80. And I can legitimately say I must have a big heart because my resting pulse measures between 37 and 42, which if there's anybody medical. there they'll tell you that is very unusual um yeah i am a big american boy that's right so what did i do so i decided to lose weight and the first thing i did is
I had always read like I was 60, 80 pounds overweight. I'm like, no way. I am not that big. So I set a goal. I'm going to lose 20 pounds. And I start working out, going to the gym. my first company had a gym. They had a little gym. And so I started working out with a couple of my coworkers and I started eating a little better and I lost 20 pounds. And that's when it hit me. I looked in the mirror and I'm like, oh no.
20 hasn't done it. Like, yeah, I look better. I'm thinner, but 20, you know, 20 pounds didn't get it done. So I had to keep pushing. And for those of you who are hoping that I will be sharing an easy weight loss recipe, I can't. I had to change all three things.
number one i had to eat better uh meaning better quality food you know switch out the burgers for salads change what i was eating i had to change how much i was eating and then i had to change um exercise and so i had to make all three changes now um kill x here just said in chat he's right the first 20 did just fall off i lost that first 20 pounds in probably six
to eight weeks literally every time i got on the scale in the gym every couple days i was down another pound three changes uh repeating them for someone who asked in chat better food less food And exercise. So quality of food, quantity of food, and more exercise. So, and yes, somebody here in chat, Kishores says the waistline is made in the kitchen, not the gym. I agree with that. You can, if you eat too much, no amount of exercise will get you out of it.
um uh and yeah you can lose you know if you do the math a 100 calorie shift in your average daily intake translates to 10 pounds a year so if you eat 100 calories more than you burn a year later you'll be 10 pounds heavier and if you burn 100 more than you eat a year later you'll be 10 pounds lighter so cutting out soda as hefestus says here um will uh
can lead to a 15 pound change in a year all right so anyway just continuing the story oh wait i've skipped something i'm so sorry we'll come back to the story one second um what i want to do is show you me so this is my high school graduation photo it's nice soft focus there'll be a lot of fun things you can talk about in it i'll bring it up here in a second
That is beautiful me at 17 So as you can see there's a little while there's a lot more hair and it's brown and there's some nice big glasses I had LASIK. I don't wear contacts um and there's some nice big round cheeks there a little bit of a double chin even though and of course today i'm wearing the um shirt i'll move the mic So this is the gym I go to here near Seattle. I told them I'd wear their sweatshirt tonight. But that's my trademark blue shirt even back then.
And yeah, that's a class of 87 for what decade? So I want to show you something else though. This is me in college. So I managed to get even bigger. This is a YouTube made by a friend of mine. If you Google this, David Markley CMU KGB booth, we had a club and I'll play it. There won't, I think.
the sound is off but uh yeah so there's me being goofy with the hammer um different people from my college we're building um we're building a carnival booth but uh there'll be another couple pictures of me there's me you know now i've got my jacket open you can see my gut sticking out of the shirt a little bit i don't know if i'm allowed to say man boobs or not but
You can see my face has gotten even more round in that. So that's me and my Gloria 272. So I think enough of that. But the point is I got quite big. I'm 24 years old and I've been battling weight. Wow, 430 pounds down to 323. Excellent. I'm K-Bar. And I have a friend, by the way, I have a friend who is diabetic.
um he got himself up to 388 and he lost his way down to um from 388 all the way to 177 so he lost 211 pounds more than half his body weight uh took him a couple years so going back to my um story so you hear my story and i love the fact some people in chat are talking about this because look it is possible and it's possible to lose immense amounts of weight and keep it off
most people don't they yo-yo they lose weight they gain it back they lose weight they gain it back but you can do it so i lost the first 20 pounds as um killex said it just kind of fell off and in fact i said oh i've lost 20 pounds looks like i need to lose 20 more so i set out to lose that now i lost 40 pounds and i'm still overweight and i can still see it in the mirror and i'm like uh-oh maybe this whole 70 80 pounds overweight thing is true and that was depressing um
But in about four or five months, the first 50 pounds came off really quickly. But then I started to get fit and all the easy changes were used up. So it took me another year. to lose the last 20. Now, if you're keeping score, 50 plus 20 doesn't equal 80. And that's because I got down to 200 in my life and I stayed at 200. Nice round number, felt pretty good about it for many, many years before I got more serious and then lost my way down another 10.
And so now I bounce between 189 and 193 or four. And we'll talk about the bouncing here in a minute. But I just wanted to share, you know. It took me 16 months to lose most of it. So from 272 to about 200. A lot of people are putting on weight in lockdown and that's a fight.
man i wish cheese was a healthy fat if someone can convince us of that that would be awesome um we we think of healthy fats mainly as like avocado and a couple other things hi baborka uh so what else can i say um so i lost all this weight and then i had a 25 this is 25 years ago so i lost it at 25 i'm 51 so i've kept it off more or less 25 years in those 25 years i've been as low as 187 and as high as 213 so that's a 25 pound range but
So mostly I was between 200 and 205 for a long time. And now I'm between 190, 195. Here's the thing I want to talk to you all about, though. For me, at least, it's a lifelong fight. I love food. Most of you know the word gourmet. I am a gourmand. So if you look up the difference, a gourmet likes good food. Me, I'm a gourmand. I just like food. Big old cheap shit pizza, like it. Big old pile of noodles with Chef Boyardee or some other crappy sauce on it, I like it.
Bread, I like it. Chocolate, I love it. Once you've developed those habits, they are very hard to break. I wish I could get rid of them. It's interesting. For some people, it's alcohol. They get their calorie problems for alcohol. I could choose to never drink again. I would miss some drinks. I have drinks here on channel sometime. I would miss some. But I would hate to give up chocolate and sweet desserts. And that's a problem, right? They're no good for you either. So that's my weakness.
And so I fight weight all the time. I haven't found a solution there yet. I've tried all kinds of things. I've talked to some people even on this channel. We have some doctors and experts on it. And I work on it all the time.
but this is what i want to say at least for me it takes an enormous amount of my mental energy to stay fit so uh i don't know if any of you put in questions yet i see you know i've answered a few in chat i don't think we have any that have been officially asked oh we have a few so if you want to vote on those i will definitely come back to them um i will definitely you know if people want uh to talk about those they're all good questions um and i will come back to them so uh let's see
an eco i'm well thank you for asking um it's funny too we have we have people here trying to bulk up also so i wish i had your problems i wish i could give you some of my problem we balance it out uh hasn't happened yet but i get that if you have a metabolism you can be underweight also and i get that's a real problem so i'm not diminishing it
so what else do i need to talk about before we answer questions here um what's some other stuff i've done okay i tracked calories manually 25 years ago in a daily binder where i i kept track of all the food i ate and basically for me anyway i have tracked caloric input and exercise every day for 25 years now
I'm not here to preach that that's a method you should use, but I use an app called MyFitnessPal. Yep, and Baborka just talked about it, MyFitnessPal. Now that there's iPhones and apps or Android phones and apps, I've used MyFitnessPal for... seven or eight years and some of my friends use it and i certainly recommend it uh but i need a way to keep a hold of how much i'm eating versus burning um
other people may do it another way i'm not here to preach that what i am going to say is find a way to keep on top of it because whenever i stop tracking my calories Funny, my weight starts to creep up because I'm sliding myself an extra cookie or extra slice of pie without thinking about the consequences. The other thing I'll say is, man. um play a sport if you can i did not grow up playing sports let me remind you why okay real quick here i will remind you why i didn't play sports because
When your physique is that, sports doesn't seem very attractive. Like Ohio is hot and I could sweat like a pig just going outside in 50 degree weather.
because this is interesting to this day i'm always cold um i'm often cold and it's because i grew up with a 70 pound blubber overcoat now if you're a regular weight person or a skinny person um i challenge you go think about go go um what's the right phrase here go put on go weigh your heaviest coat maybe a couple sweaters and a sweatshirt they'll weigh like 10 pounds i had four extra sizes my ring finger so when you take a and
Here, you can see this, right? You can actually see through between my fingers a little bit of light and wall. When I was growing up, there was no space there. It was just solid. The sausage fingers. so southern ohio near cincinnati so you go think about taking off a 70 pound coat and of course you're always going to be cold you go think about taking off four sizes you know a fat glove on your hands and my hands get cold so whatever i'm not here to whine
the point's actually to encourage you all that this is possible and some people in the channel and in our discord said hey ethan it's worth sharing your story because i've kept the weight off for 25 years and at least in my case i did it while having a career
And I did it while having a family. And I did it by finding things I enjoyed. So once you lose the weight, in particular, it's fun to play sports. It's fun to go bike riding or mountain climbing or all the crazy shit you see me post in Discord that I do. But you have to be fit enough to do it. Back then, I still like to do that stuff, but I was not in shape to do as much of it.
so i liked winter sports because it was nice and cold out and i like swimming pools because those were cool um so what else do i want to share oh so fast forward all the way to a year ago um and i know you you all have put in some questions vote on those and we'll jump on those in just a minute um yeah there are some good questions here i i look forward to getting to these if you want to vote on them But the last thing I want to talk about is a personal trainer. So 16 months ago.
my wife and i were rock climbing uh in the gym and she was starting to out climb me and i had lost weight but i had not become strong because i grew up flabby And then I lost the weight. And so I had really strong legs from doing all sorts of aerobic exercise, stair climber, et cetera, et cetera. But I had never built strength anywhere else. Very weak abs, very weak arms.
And so I couldn't keep up with her rock climbing. I didn't want to hold her back because she enjoys it. I do too, but I was holding her back. So she had been going to a personal trainer and I said, well, all right, I hate gyms. I don't like doing things inside in the gym. But I will try it. And let me tell you, the personal trainer, the first time I went there, damn near killed me. I went for only an hour.
i tried to do everything they asked me to i came home i'm drenched in sweat i wanted to shower and my arms were so weak from all the stuff they'd had me do that and look i don't have a lot of hair that to shampoo my hair i'd like put the shampoo in and give it about two rubs and i had to put my arms down to rest and then i like get them back up and do that a little bit i was whipped
um sad story right so there is a point here you can be on your weight but not in shape the next thing that happened was i got um so sore i was taking advil or whatever to try and dull the pain but that first week i was in misery because you know muscles i'd never used right um it's just terrible so i wanted to quit so bad and i will say i went to this personal trainer once a week for six months and it sucked i got my butt kicked and all i learned in it
was wow there's another muscle i've never used i can't do this exercise uh you know i couldn't do a pull-up i couldn't do a sit-up so even though i was in shape weight wise um I was really not in good shape from a strength viewpoint. Well, here's the punchline from this. I stuck with it. And now a year later, I actually look forward to going to the gym. We had to cancel. We were going to go to our trainer tomorrow. And for different reasons, stuff came up. I can't go and I'm bummed.
um total change but why i started getting good at stuff and a slot more fun when you can actually do the exercises and now it's very very hard to make me sore because i paid the price for a year so what do i actually want to tell the channel though look personal trainers are expensive um
You don't need one. There's plenty of videos online and there's plenty of gyms that are either attached to your office when offices reopen, which will be soon, attached to your school if you're still in college, or that don't cost that much, 24-hour fitness, etc.
um but you do have to then motivate yourself to go so hey sandstrom um so bottom line here's point i recommend mixing in weight training which i never did because what i learned 25 years after losing the weight is i could be thin or fit and still not be strong and being both is more fun And so now anybody who knows rock climbing, we're now starting to climb 510, which is pretty good for old lay people.
uh you know it's way below professional standard but i don't aspire to that and it's a lot better than we ever did so i posted some pictures in our discord of us climbing outside we're going to go on a climbing trip here in a couple months and it'll be fun would you say that your quality of life has improved after the transformation completely because i discovered look some of you know the charity for our channel
is washington trails association i'm on the board and it's a hiker group and um i could have never hiked and backpacked in the mountains out here carrying around 70 pounds um i mean look i'm sweating to the oldies has a meaning and and i have seen some really big people on the trails and they're just dying and it can't be any fun they're just mosquito targets and if you're big and you're going to use that as a way to get
smaller great and if you're big and you can tough it out and enjoy the outdoors great but yeah my quality of life is way better there's a cost though i love desserts And I used to, you know, when I was eating the Wendy's triple and whatever, I just ate whatever the hell I wanted. Half a birthday cake? Sure. Half a carton of ice cream? We used to buy, when I was in college, we used to go to the ice cream shop and buy a pint and just eat it.
now a pint of ice cream i would break into like four servings and still feel bad about all of them um you know because they're junk calories but i love them so uh going to the gym gives you superpowers it's not just the physical changes the mental stuff i agree uh yeah ben and jerry's love it costco's pizza um
So, all right, you all have asked some good questions. Before we jump into those, they're next. Real quick, our mentorship contest is still going on. If you have questions about that, you can also put it into our Q&A. Tool. We have two days left. We've gotten some good entries. There's some more coming in. I will do the award show next week where I'll announce the winners.
show their work, describe what I like and don't like. And we'll talk about the next phase of the mentorship network. But there's still plenty of room in the competition. We have three big prizes. 500 for the first place, 300 for second place, 200 for third place. We only have four real entries. So if you want to put your entry in, it is not hard shot.
to get in the money and i would be happy to give it to you because i'm getting what i wanted and what i think all of us want which is good design input all right with that let me switch over to questions um So mods you can go ahead and pin the first question there and I will tackle it And then if you want to enter your inner questions or vote on them, this is your chance
ha ha kashores i like what you said after getting in shape you don't see a snickers bar anymore you just see 30 minutes on the treadmill yeah um i totally i get it um i have to think that way and um i don't like it it's mentally draining and so this question this first question which is going to get pinned here in a second is um was it more physically or mentally challenging to lose the weight mentally by far pushing away from the dinner table
making wise choices on the food, cutting down on the portions, sticking to it, and then doing that for 25 years. um that's mentally draining uh the physical not as hard um because two of the three changes you need to make right i said early in the show not all of you were here To lose weight, I had to do three things. One, exercise. That's physical. Two, eat better food. So trade in the chips and burgers and pizza for salads. That's mental.
and three eat less food and that's also mental um and so two of the three changes are mental and it's also to some degree mental to go do the physical workout so for me way more mentally challenging and i would say uh the ongoing mental burden even today is my worst problem with it is i put a certain amount of effort mental effort every day into what am i going to eat that's healthy and how much exercise can i get
And that's draining. It's thought cycles I'd rather be putting into this channel or the design contest or a book or helping people mentoring.
did you have to cut all carbs no fighting pickles i still eat carbs i i have not so i will say i have not signed on to any particular fad diet so i am not keto wasn't invented and paleo wasn't invented and um the basic advice when i started losing weight 25 years ago was well low fat low carb wasn't a thing yet so atkins diet wasn't invented or or wasn't popular yet so the big push was simply low fat the idea being um
if you're fat you already have enough fat so don't eat more fat now that theory has been somewhat debunked but that was the main diet theory um so i just switched though to more whole foods and less processed food and for me to be really honest i simply ate less calories so a lot of people say counting calories is not enough it's the type of calories that might make the difference etc um I had to just, for me, if I had fewer calories than I burned, that worked.
confuse them i agree with you by the way uh that sleeping well is definitely the biggest part of mental health when it comes to living healthier I recommend this article all the time. You can Google for it that says manage your energy, not your time. And it talks about the value of sleep. And Maximus, thank you for the sub and the ongoing support.
i have a question sandstrom i am heavily obese but slowly starting to lose weight this year by changing my food take also daily walking one thing i'm afraid of is loose skin which is kind of stupid uh any suggestions to deal with it both mentally and maybe prevent some of it okay so i'm not going to play show and tell here on screen but i definitely have loose skin i was heavy enough that I had stretch marks like would normally be found on a person, a pregnant woman.
where my skin has scars, where it started to pull apart because I was jamming so much me into it that the stretching started to basically rip and I have little scars. And now, even though I'm pretty fit, I have what appears like an empty fat pouch where I used to have a gut. There may be some minor things you can do with laser treatments and creams. But if you're really, you say you're heavily obese, you're going to have empty skin. It is way better to have that than it is to have the weight.
I mentioned earlier, I had a friend who was diabetic. He got up to 388 pounds. He's about 5'9", 5'10". Not hugely tall, but not short. He was 388. He lost weight down to 177. He had so much empty skin. He had to tuck it in. It's called an apron where it folds over like your belly just flops over emptiness. He had to tuck it into his pants like a shirt. Now that's gross. but still better to be down 200 pounds. What he had to do though, you can get it cut off.
So you can have essentially a tummy tuck where they will cut off the skin and good news, they'll ask you to donate it for burn victims. So your former gut. or wherever your skin is, can help someone who's been severely burned. But it is a pretty invasive surgery. And since my problem is not as severe as some, i have elected it's a pretty invasive surgery it takes you out you can't really exercise for some number of weeks it's painful um and so you know i've i've elected to live with mine
And I don't, man, if there were a better way, a magical way to get rid of it, I would be all in. And some people make that choice. I will never have a six pack. I will always have a six pack under, even if I develop. a so-called six-pack where the muscles you have to imagine it's like a six-pack under a heap of laundry it's in there somewhere and you can kind of feel it maybe but you'll never see it so
400 pounds at 6'3". Yeah, it's big. I mean, you're my height and twice my weight. And so, yeah, man, anything you can do to get that down and then... You know, cross the bridge when you need to on the surgery. So. Yeah, so Kishore has the point here. I've never met anyone with loose skin who wishes they were heavier. And I generally agree with that. All right, let's go to the next question.
If you wanted to design an app that was 10 times better than MFP, which is MyFitnessPal or other manual nutrition trackers, what features would it have? oh well it'd be tied you know somebody said apple watch it would be tied to all the monitoring tools um the other thing is i think it would be more holistic i mean i don't know
I don't try to use my fitness pal has some nutrition stuff in it. Um, and it does occasionally give you suggestions like if you put in a food that's really bad for you full of sodium or fat or whatever it'll be like hey maybe you shouldn't eat in that um
I kind of wish it would tell me like, hey, if you went for a 30 minute run, you could have a Snickers bar. I kind of wish it was encouraging in the other way. It doesn't do anything much proactive to encourage you. Like it doesn't say doesn't have prompts in it.
Like, hey, do you have a plan to exercise today? Or I noticed you used to go running, but you haven't in a while. Or... did you know if you substituted this brand of yogurt for that brand of yogurt you'd save a little on calories or it it's not proactive enough it also doesn't gamify anything um i mean it so I basically, if I had an app that was 10 times better than MyFitnessPal, I would say somehow it would be encouraging and it would be proactive in terms of suggestions. It would suggest...
you like these types of foods, substitute this. Or have you ever considered eating this rather than that? And it doesn't give me anything there. Yeah, I agree. It's tedious. uh i do it because i've learned it works for me um but yeah okay um and i don't know what would make it 10 times better i guess it would lose weight for me what else do i struggle with oh man i wish there was better science on foods that make you feel full
that like if it could tell me like look your nutrition is off and if you eat more of this or more of that you're going to feel more full or it's been this many hours since you ate eat this or do that and it'll stave off hunger those would be the things would be dynamite to me because like everybody I get busy or whatever, and then I'm starving, and then I eat poorly, and then I feel guilty. That's a shitty cycle. I'd rather not do any of those things, right? So, all right, fiber, yep.
Blood glucose monitoring fiber is good. You know, I'm not a nutrition expert. One of the things I need to do is spend more time on nutrition. So reading about nutrition. All right. I think it's interesting to talk about optimizing the fitness apps, but for me, Streamline is as simple as possible. Yeah. I have not checked out Andrew Huberman chat. Premium mode sends a firing worthy email to my boss if I don't hit my goals. Yikes. Eat more veggies. Low calorie, high volume. I try to.
you know i grew up eating jelly beans and so carrots and shit don't taste that good but i try to i eat a lot of salads not with a lot of dressing um and you know but i've learned yeah i have to keep veggies handy low calorie high density foods are good charts out there that's what i'm working on that's my next change is to incorporate more vegetables because i've just kind of starved myself with the bad stuff and i haven't replaced it with enough good stuff
and oh by the way warning i'm going to be one of the oldest people if not the oldest person i'm probably not the oldest but one of the oldest people here in chat um your metabolism you all know this but it slows down every year so the fight gets harder every year which means you have to get smarter because you know i i can't run and climb and do things even though i'm very fit comparatively i can't
play hockey at the level i could 10 years ago i can't climb mountains the way i did 15 years ago and so each year i have to get a little bit smarter on diet and quantity because oh i'll just burn it off um my sister took an approach she's older than i am so she's 60 now she took an approach to lose weight of i'll just burn it off
And so she ran an hour every day and bicycled and swam. So like two hours of hard exercise. And from she lost weight younger than I was. She lost it when she was about 16. and from 16 to 40 she kept it off and then uh menopause hit somewhere in her 40s and it's all back after being gone 25 years and it's the change in metabolism and she was reliant almost i would say you know mostly from my observation i haven't talked to her about it too much
She was reliant mostly on exercise as a tool. And she got to where she couldn't exercise enough to solve it. So I would just say. Don't rely only on exercise. You're going to have to get smart about nutrition. All right. Next question. How did you find the time? What was it like maintaining a high-level corporate position while also being able to take care of your health?
Oh, good question. So I had to prioritize it for sure. I walked to work when I could. I often lived walking distance. But if I did nothing else. i basically walked every day so all these high intensity exercises are good but simple walking will burn a lot of calories if you just get mobile um And then I played some hockey, which was like the high intensity aerobic stuff. But answering this, I would think while I walked. So you can.
The great thing about exercise is if it's something like walking or stair climber or riding a stationary bike or treadmill, you can listen to a podcast or music, but you can also do work. um you can balance it in and think but yeah a lot of high-level corporate folks start gaining weight and they have to be really disciplined about it um i
Look, if any of you, and I know some of you out there are overweight, you're struggling with weight, you're obese. Basically, I grew up with people calling me fat and mocking me for it. And once I lost the weight, it felt so good not to have that, that I basically swore I would do anything to avoid going back. And so I just made it a non-negotiable.
I was able to fit a corporate job around that. It wasn't always easy, and I did creep up and wait sometimes, but I just... it just wasn't negotiable for me and i know that sounds easy i'm just telling you the truth about what i did is i wasn't willing to give it up um so all right um We have a few other questions. Reminder, I hope some of you are going to submit. We have a couple more. I know we have a couple more proposals coming in for the Mentorship Network design contest.
was the number one foolproof method for losing weight and keeping it off. Change your lifestyle. Whatever lifestyle made you heavy will keep you heavy. You have to look at what you can change about how you live, okay? I can't say that I never went on a diet. but what i learned is if you go on a diet and you lose weight you have to stay on the diet forever and so the diet has to become a lifestyle so the number one foolproof method for losing weight
is change your lifestyle to a new lifestyle that you can live in for the rest of your life that produces less weight. That's... The only thing that works. And you can say to me, Atkins, paleo, intermittent fasting, blah, blah, blah. You know, a lot of you come from Devin's community. Intermittent fasting.
probably works i'm not going to weigh in on one way or the other but it's a lifestyle it's not like you intermittent fast for a while and then you can go back to your old ways and you'll stay healthier if intermittent fasting works or paleo or keto or gluten-free or atkins or fill in the blank weight watchers um you're gonna have to do them kind of forever
And so make changes you can just incorporate into your new life. And that is the number one foolproof method for losing weight and keeping it up. Yeah. None of us says make it part of your identity. What do I recommend? Find vegetables you can tolerate.
and make them into meals for me that was salads i i've eaten so many entree salads southwest salads grilled chicken salads like salad is a meal for me second find an exercise you like so what do i recommend find a food you like and find an exercise you like now over time i found lots but the first one i found was a stair climber
so the first thing i got into was a stair climber and ultimately i bought one for my house and i lost most of the weight by being on a stair climber 30 minutes a day which burns like five or six hundred calories at my size and that was enough to do it So Monte Carlo, what is a gherkin? What's another name for a gherkin? The only vegetable you get are gherkins.
I know the word gherkin, but I can't picture what one even is. Pickle. Oh, pickles. All right. That's kind of like saying that the only vegetable you'll eat. Pickles have a lot of... cucumbers do not have a lot of calories pickling them adds a bunch um but uh yeah gladly on you know it doesn't matter what you do but find an exercise So those are my actual suggestions. We have two more questions How did you manage to successfully stay accountable to your goal?
Well, as I said, my goal started at lose 20 pounds and then it became lose 20 more. Then it became, oh my God, these numbers are right. I need to lose another 30 or 40. How did I stay accountable? Well, I was starting to date. So part of my accountability was wanting to look better. And yes, that's vanity. I admit it. But that was that was definitely part of it. And part of it was, though.
it became easier there's a positive feedback loop that when you start to see the numbers on the scale go down it's exciting to see them go down more it's just like now when i go to the gym and I can lift more or I can do more sit-ups or pull-ups, it's exciting to see those numbers go up. And so it works both ways. But I stayed accountable to the goal because I started to see progress and it was fun to drive the numbers.
So for data minded people tracking the numbers or having a graph or watching, you know, making it a score. Look, you're all gamers. Make it a game.
right you understand high scores really well or in this case the low score is the high score make calories and your weight a game and the idea is to get the lowest score and you're good gamers uh so do that i i essentially gamified it uh okay last question here is um did you enjoy cardio or weightlifting more for sure cardio cardio can be boring in a gym but i took it outside so i got i get most of my cardio
walking, skiing, climbing, hiking, biking, rollerblading, playing hockey. The cardio I enjoy most is either in the great outdoors. like uh my wife and i went cross-country skiing today a brutal ass-kicking workout we went 16 kilometers so about 10 miles up through the mountains So up about 1500 feet. So 400 meters of gain, something like that. You know, but it was fun. It was beautiful. It was outdoors. And then I play hockey. It's a game. So sports.
Uh, and I had, I was never good at this stuff as a kid, but when you get smaller, you can do it. Um, so that's what I did. I, uh, weightlifting for me as is it's interesting now. Just because I never realized how weak I was. And like curing some of that, like seeing the change, again, it's seeing that feedback loop. yeah so saltine crackers says my dad raves about cross-country skiing it is a brutal uh you know it's a brutal workout um i love hiking but i got no friends to hike with well
Go out as much as you can. Monte Carlo, if you're really winning the game eating only pickles, God bless you. Fighting pickles is probably worried and scared. yeah all right so those are your questions i this doesn't need to be a long show i will say no show is complete without one more revisit of my motivation here's my motivation right here don't be that even better oh that's the channel where to go i killed it
All right. Don't be that. Don't don't be. That's my motivation. Don't go back. Never go back. I don't have a bad body image very much. But I like to have the brown hair back. Anyway, good enough. Any other questions, let me know. Anything else you want to talk about. Otherwise, band together, win yourself some money, help us build a mentor network. And next week.
probably on Thursday. I haven't picked a time yet. We will do the Mentor Awards show. So we will, I will bring on, I'll announce the runners up. We'll show any of their work we want to.
uh then we'll do third place second place first place um so we will uh go through the design get more feedback online cooking stream oh boy that means i have to move the camera i can't cook up here but i can do that someday healthy cooking recipe recommendation salad i know that okay salad with chicken on it salad with salmon on it salad with ahi tuna on it i know okay uh what else egg whites we make a lot of egg white scrambles so egg whites have lots of protein no real cholesterol
They come in a bottle, I mean, in a carton, so you can just pour them out and stir veggies into them. We eat egg white scrambles probably two or three mornings a week. Recently, even more than that. How can you participate in the contest? It is on. Anybody can participate. The rules are posted in our announcement channel. And there's a discussion channel in our Discord.
So it is really easy to participate. And if you have any trouble, join our discord and we'll show you. You can make treats with egg whites too. Yeah, you can make egg white cookies. That's true. some people call them meringue cookies uh they're very good uh what else picked up fly fishing it turns out standing in freezing cold water is very draining i believe that where do i submit the proposal
You can either DM me in Discord with it attached or you can send it to me on LinkedIn, same way. And I've gotten some through both channels. So submit away either DM in Discord or message on LinkedIn. either one whatever you like uh you seem to have a very positive body image when many people who have loose skin seem to struggle what's your perspective hmm um i guess i don't worry too much about things i can't change weight i could change the skin i can't change and i don't like it
But I think of it as I'm so much better off and I could change this. I could opt for the surgery and I just don't want to. And so I kind of feel like I've chosen loose skin over surgery. And once I choose something, it is what it is. The other thing is I mostly wear shirts. Like, so I have loose skin, you know.
most people don't most people don't uh no so i don't know so i'm maybe not the best person to give advice on that but i would just say um the loose skin is fixable if it's important to you so don't let that hold you back uh you know there are here are cosmetic surgeons who would love to help you and they are very competent and will do a good job and like i said if you go down that road your skin will go to burn victims if you donate it and that can be very helpful to them too um so
Let's see. Eliza has found the mentorship PDF. That's great. Please feel free. You have until Friday, 5 p.m. Pacific time to submit something to me on one of the channels. I don't know. I could wear sweatshirts. I could wear, what is the top half? I'm blanking on it now. Quarta, right? Which really means shirt, but I could wear the Indian sort of longer shirt.
but i don't know i could wear a dress i could wear a sorry a muumuu or something just wear a kilt go no shirt at all wear a vest anyway um any other all right kurti kurt kurt uh i believe we must have someone here from india who can explain what a what uh the correct name of the
traditional indian top dress is kurta there we go thank you human uh interesting to hear you talk about a non-negotiable decision yeah i was reading lonely danbo interesting here you talk about a non-negotiable decision um yeah you have to make choices look i I wish there were magic solutions to this. I did this show to encourage people that even though this is hard and sucks.
you can get out of it like you can lose weight it takes time you can keep it off it takes effort you can change your lifestyle none of these are easy but they are very very worth it so um yeah i did mention it spock the puss i was 25 and then i've kept it off for 25 years um all right uh okay uh would you mind quickly going over the design contest for first time of learning of it sure it's almost like you're a plant in the audience but you're not all right
very quickly you can read about it in the contest rules but everyone should hear this i went out and surveyed this community plus my linkedin community and said look i normally teach career mentorship what is it you all need? And I had ideas in my head, but your answers surprised me. The number one answer collectively you gave as a community on the survey was you needed mentorship.
And the number two answer you gave collectively on the survey was you needed peer support. So I said, okay, we should design a network with all the people we have here to provide mentorship and mutual support. And I thought, wow, it works so well to ask everyone how to do that. I will sponsor a design contest to have the community design their own community. And then I will try to help bring it about.
And so I wrote up the rules, which are in our Discord, in the announcements channel. There's a PDF of them. And I said, look, I will give out prizes. And your prize can either be money or, well, it will be both, or it can be feedback. If you're into doing it for the art of learning how to pitch things and write a good proposal, I will do a show. where I pick the winners and I go over what I like and dislike and think is well done and poorly done in each proposal.
and uh those of you who just watch can learn from the proposals those of you who propose can get feedback and then we will design the community based on the best features of each proposal so i don't expect probably to pick a single proposal and say we're doing just exactly this i expect to pick a winning proposal
But then to say, well, of this winning proposals or the best proposals, here's what we're going to cherry pick out of each of them to form the overall community. There also will likely be late this month after we do this award show. a second contest to design mentorship training because i've realized i probably need to help mentors become better at mentorship
And I probably need to put together a little bit of a training course for mentors. And so I need to go do that. That may be a second contest later. But for right now, this contest has been running a week.
It has two days left. However, that is plenty of time. I would say the average contest Andrea I've received so far is about two pages of written text. Some of them are slides. They come in different formats. But... i would say there are about two pages of text so if you've ever written a two-page document for a class or work uh you can do this now some people have done more beautiful graphics some people have gone very flat text
And I'll give feedback on both of those on the show next week. But that's the contest. And I would love the main medium. I assume will be Discord. But you can propose that. It's in the rules. Help me design something for this community. So. All right. So that's the contest. Thank you for asking. We will be back in roughly a week to announce winners. Other than that, it's been good talking to you all. I hope.
at least one of you has more success with your weight um whether losing it or maintaining it or not gaining it in the first place um you can by the way apply Many of the things we've been talking about to other struggles in your life. To make a lifelong change, you have to incorporate a new lifestyle. So if you're trying to kick something else, you have to change your lifestyle. And with that, I'm...