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ey this is Leo for actualised org and today I want to tell you the story of how I lost 65 pounds in five months and have cut been able to keep it off for eight years so this sounds like something pretty big right and it was for me because actually where I came from where I started from was that I was a overweight kid my whole life kind of hard to see it on me now but that's because I lost 65 pounds I used to weigh 230 something pounds so I'm about 234 pounds if I recall correctly and then from there I dropped to about 175 so how did I do that it was a pretty interesting feat and I want to trace the story of that and I think there will be some interesting implications for in our game and also how to just get big accomplishments in your life the kind of stuff that you've always wanted to do but have had difficulty getting done so for me ever since about third grade I was overweight and right after third grade I was pretty heavily overweight as a kid so I went to elementary school middle school high school and the beginning a couple of years of college I was weighed throughout that whole time and it was really a challenge for me because it created a lot of limiting beliefs within myself about who I was what I was able to do and how I looked because this is not something I never had that sense that I was that skinny kid and then I just got overweight and then that I had a chance of turning things around what I always thought was that hey I grew up fat and I was fat most of my life that's how I remember myself and so I thought that that was that was natural at least for me so some of the limiting kind of beliefs that I had was that you know it's all genetic at least in my case and I don't really have any control over it because you know what I've tried I tried I tried going on diets I had some brief stints where I tried going to the gym and none of that stuff was working for me out of it sticked it would always be like okay I'm gonna get on a diet and I get on it for a week and then a week later if not even sooner it all falls apart and nothing happens no changes and fatter than ever so the real challenge there was to figure to start to understand that I could even do it and to get them the motivation in place to do it and one of the one of the big challenges for me as a result of being overweight so for so long was that it really created a lot of confidence issues for me because I I've always cared about my own looks but literally what was happening was that my mind was was almost deceiving me as to how I looked so I would like look in the mirror and I would think that I look better than I actually that I'll actually was it's like my mind was literally projecting a false appearance and reality myself it's pretty pretty crazy how that worked and I needed to do that in order to to have some sort of positive self-image but even then I was miserable the whole time because of course I knew I was fat didn't like how I looked didn't like the clothes that I wear and all that stuff you know didn't feel comfortable expressing myself around people because I didn't feel like I looked good and so that that really crippled a lot of development of my confidence really didn't feel comfortable around girls and women throughout high school or college because of that and that led to some some lasting issues so it was a real challenge for me and the way that it all started to turn around was actually very interesting this was actually really powerful a powerful experience for me so what happened was that I think it was like a sophomore sophomore chemistry class I was in in college and definitely I was overweight and I just started to chat up with with the girl that was sitting next to me and one of her friends we just kind of started talking and at that point I just really I felt like and she wasn't like a hot girl or anything but I felt like she was someone that I could that I could potentially date have a relationship with and and so from that little brief interaction there was nothing there was nothing even flirty going on there I thought that this was something that that would be cooled if I like could ask her out and we could make something happen and so from that what happened was that night I went to bed and I remember this very vividly as that I started so I started kind of imagining being with her as I was going to bed and I was still it wasn't a dream I was still very conscious about it and but but still like the emotion started bubbling up about that situation and I started kind of fantasizing about it and then I'm and then I remember telling myself well but this is just a fantasy like this is it's all great but it's in my mind like it's not very real it's not going to happen and I felt like I would never ask her out because I didn't have the confidence for it and also because I didn't feel I deserved it because of the way I looked I just didn't feel I didn't feel like it was fair to be in a relationship with someone where I was where I was overweight and they were normal weight I felt like that was that just wasn't the way that I wanted it to be so I I didn't even it wasn't even an issue of asking her out or not it was the case was that I would not ask her out unless I was I felt good about myself so what happened then is that I was fantasizing this and I'm telling myself that it's just all a fantasy and then something triggered in me something snapped and I thought this what F question and I just thought about it and I suddenly saw you know but what if what if this was not fantasy what if I actually made it happen like what if I just put all my effort forward spent six months got in shape and then I was as fit as I want it to be and I was happy with how I looked and then I asked her out wouldn't that be freaking awesome and so something brought that kind of a that kind of spark of imagination within me and and then I'm that night when I went to sleep I kind of dreamed about that whole scenario and how I would play out and what ended up happening was that accidentally I didn't have I wasn't into self development at that time I knew nothing about it I don't know anything about visualizations but what happened was that just unconsciously and kind of a just by happenstance I happened to have done a lot of visualizing what I would call now visualization now I do this type of stuff very deliberately ashlee as an exercise because it really does work but then it was it just happened spontaneously and it became especially powerful because as I slept it kind of just like soaked into my subconscious it gone through the conscious filters went to the subconscious and I woke up with an amazing sense of motivation and drive because when I woke up the next morning I was totally dead set I was a hundred and ten percent confidence I had 100% confidence that I would be fit because I saw myself as fit I totally imagined that I totally believed that I could do it and I totally bought into this idea that if I get fit that I'm gonna get be able to ask this girl out and have a good relationship with her and it's all going to work out great but I was only going to do it after I got fit so that was the beginning of my motivation it was actually very a very profound experience because I've never had one like that quite since there's never been a case where I just wasn't very motivated to do something and then all of a sudden just this surge of motivation came on so that this is this is an example that I like going back to and studying for myself because if I can dissect an understand what it is within me that made that happen and I can replicate that just the ramifications for my own personal development would be enormous the amount of success I can get because with that kind of Drive when you have a hundred 110% commitment to that thing and like you literally don't care what it takes you don't care what the pain is that it's going to take to succeed you care about nothing you just care about the result and you know that you're gonna have it if you have so much confidence that it's not that you are purchasing the result you're so confident about it it's as though you already have it you feel like you have it even though you don't it's kind of like well I could I could get hit by a bus tomorrow but I was so dead set on my course that I know without a shadow of a doubt that those six months would have passed and I would have been fit that's how I felt and so immediately when I woke up that morning I made some resolutions as to you know what kind of actions I need to start taking because it's one thing to have that drive that's the beginning of it that's the foundation but then you need to actually start putting it into action so I made a couple of resolutions first thing I did was I said that I would be go to the gym five days a week no matter what for the rest of my life and this is critical is that didn't just say that I would be doing this for six months or for a week or for any amount of period of time like that I literally said for the rest of my life I think that was very critical because all the other times that I kind of started doing diets and losing weight I found that one of my biggest challenges with that I really had this limiting belief that going to the gym was painful go to the gym was was was challenging and that ultimately was impractical for me because what I thought was that oh you know going to the gym sure I could maintain it for a week or two I could maybe maintain it for a month but eventually you know I just don't have enough time to cut out from my day and put it into gym you know I don't have an hour I don't have 20 minutes to go to the gym I have to pay money to go to the gym I have to drive to the gym so all this hassle and I just thought that that was totally impractical and therefore I never really considered it as a viable means of getting getting controlled my way so I focused a lot on diet here what I said though is that I'm so committed because I am a hundred cent I'm 110% committed I'm going to do everything and I'm gonna use all the tools in my power so I said I would tackle this problem from diet and gym and I really had this epiphany because I was so driven I had this epiphany to come to the realization that the cost of me being fit was being at the gym for the rest of my life and I didn't even it wasn't so important to me whether that was true or not whether I could cut corners I didn't want to cut corners I said that I would just make a resolution if I want to be fit the cost and the payment that I have to pay to the gods as it were is being at the gym five times a week so I made that resolution the other thing I said I would do is I would start cutting out stuff really junk food so at that point I was drinking a few sodas a day on average cokes those were my favorites so I I said that I would cut out all soda and to be smart about it I said that I wouldn't just go cold turkey from soda to water that's a little tough so I did is I went to iced tea and I transitioned to iced tea with with sugar substitutes so equal Splenda nutrasweet any of those splendid was my favorite so I said that I would be cutting out all sodas because those are a bunch of empty calories and I also said that I would be cutting back on portion size really my goal was to to stop overeating to the point where I just felt very full I had a full stomach I wanted to eat to the point where I wasn't hungry anymore but I wasn't filled either so that was another one and I really decided to cut out all sweets and desserts besides the soda you know I would eat candy by OD ice cream I would eat all sorts of little sweets and I decided to cut that out and the other thing I decided to do was really to throw out all food from my pantries all the food from my fridge so literally I had no food in the house so snacking would be impossible so those are some of the things that I did and the other thing I did is I realized that you know at that point my my understanding of fitness advice and health advice and nutrition and workout procedures was very limited I really hadn't studied it they were just you know just basic things that I knew kind of from from popular culture from mainstream media was that I had to work out I had to exercise I had to cut my diet I had to cut out some of this junk food and that you know the difference between gaining weight losing weight was essentially calories that's how I saw it I wasn't too too technical about I just said that if I was eating less calories then then I was consuming then that would be enough to start losing weight and at that point I didn't even make any restrictions as to the kind of food I could eat I could I could eat anything as long as I wasn't just overeating and stuffing myself which was something that I tended to do a lot and I did though say that I would cut out sweets so that's kind of how I started and I also realized that because I had kind of limited diet and fitness specially fitness advice and understanding at that time what I did is I started googling and I found one specific article that I still remember this was like eight years ago found one specific article about food cravings that really helped me and kind of set the tone for how to approach weight loss and it really what was brilliant about it was the inner gain that was there it wasn't about some quick fix magic pill solution but it really set my my my my mental attitudes right it set them on track and actually what I did is I went back and I googled and I was able to find this article this is an old article from a website called intense - workout calm and I think this was a brilliant article on the inner game of tackling food cravings and I think it even applies to more things than just food cravings and so what I wanted to do here is I'm looking at this article that I have and I wanted to to read some excerpts from it it's pretty long article and I'm going to read quite a few of the excerpts from it because I think it's it's brilliant and it shows you the kind of approach you want to take towards getting success in any area of your life if you're really serious if you're not looking for a stupid little band-aid solution that's gonna work for a week and then and then fall off and not really lead to lasting results what I'm talking about here is making a change that will last for years I've been able to keep this weight off for eight years and at this point when it even though I started very disciplined about it at this point it's very easy for me to keep that weight off so there were mental shifts that happen in my brain in my mind in my belief systems in my my attitudes about weight loss about nutrition and about fitness that are the result that got me those results it wasn't just pure behavior change so I want to read some of this some of this stuff so this this article was called food cravings how to stop eating too much junk from intense workout calm and here's how it starts so it's kind of like a dialogue so like the the members of the site would ask this question and then the the author would answer it so I'm going to read you the question the question was it's so hard I'm around this type of food all the time the cravings just won't go away I have a sweet tooth I just have to give in to my cravings so this was what the guys asking and here's the response that the author gives the author is like a workout guy here's his response it was a really good one up who the hell are you to whine a meet shut up already stop boring me with your story don't give me little stories like how you're around this type of food all the time do you think you're the only one buddy everyone I know and everyone that's around me that's related to me eats junk food all day long this crappy food is everywhere I look I'm no different than you except I don't give in do I have superhuman powers no do I not give in because my muscles and arms are bigger than yours no do I not give in because I can benchpress more than you no do I not give in because my body fat is lower than yours no do I not give in because I'm physically better or physically stronger than you no I don't give in because I'm mentally stronger than you that's all it really is is it's mental and for you to give in and for me not to give in we can only assume that I am mentally stronger than you how does that make you feel I don't know damn thing about you but I know that mentally I can do something that you can't do it sure makes me feel good though in fact it motivates me even more so thanks for being so mentally weak it will make me work that much harder during my next workout so thanks a lot and he goes on next time you love food craving starts to come out think about this look at that food and think what do I want more the five seconds of pleasure enjoyment that I'm going to get from chewing this food or the enjoyment of the fact that 24 hours every day seven days a week I will have the body that I want to have that's what it really comes down to and let me tell you no food tastes as good as that feeling feels your reward for sticking with your diet are all the results that you're going to get so stop giving your cravings and your cravings will go away it's really as simple as that now I probably know what you're thinking you're thinking right now Who am I Who am I to be telling you this like I never cheat or like I never give into cravings or have little cravings no I don't not at all not a little not in moderation not anything the thought of eating some type of junk food doesn't even enter my mind I don't need those five seconds I'm stronger than that call it willpower call it mental strength my goal is my result my road to getting that result doesn't have the five seconds of chewing pleasure on it I eat for purpose not for pleasure food is not a hobby who does something you need to survive your body needs it and in this case in the case of working out and getting results food is something that your body needs to get you the results that you want it's fuel food is nothing more than that so I give my body only what it needs to make these results happen because my body need five seconds of chewing chocolate no does my my need it no my mind is way too strong to need it and that feels much better than any piece of chocolate would ever taste and I love knowing that so it's exactly as hard as it is for you as it is for everybody else you're not some special little flower the amount of willpower takes for you to achieve the result that you need is this exact same that it takes for anybody else what's the difference I have what it mentally takes and you don't so that's the that's those are some long excerpts from from the intense workout calm article and what I really loved about that is that it set my inner game it set the kind of attitude that I need to have that kind of hardcore attitude and something about the way that article was written the way the challenging way and it was written where it was it coddling you and it wasn't it wasn't sympathizing with you but it was really provoking you and telling you that you're a mental weakling basically when you don't have the willpower to do what you want to do that somehow sparked something in me combined with that kind of confidence that I was that I had coming out of those visualizations in that dream that really that really sent a very strong foundation for how I wanted to approach it in fact what happened was that those first few days I remember very vividly there was a there was a time late at night usually I have developed a habit of snacking on stuff like ice cream or chips or candy bars or whatever chocolate and that was something that I had to cut out so now after I was on my diet and after I was go into the gym one of the I remember very vividly it was late at night and there was a Klondike bar I remember there was a pack of Klondike parks in the in the freezer and I really I was watching TV and then I got really this this craving for for that Klondike bar because I was kind of hooked on them at the time and remember just instinctively almost walking over there to try to grab it and then what happened was that I remembered what this article was talking about and I used this technique specifically the one where he really talks about you know this little mental game that you play it on yourself you ask this result this question you know what do I want more do I want the five seconds of enjoyment that I'm going to get from from chewing on that Klondike bar or do I want that higher level of enjoyment that you get that pride that you get from from really using your willpower to create the kind of life that you want and then the kind of body that you want now at that point I didn't have any kind of body I was just getting started so all I could really rely on was the fact that I was going to be proud that I was that I was falling through and I was using my willpower and so at that point there was something very very decisive that I was that I very astutely if I may say realized about myself in that moment which was that that was the defining moment for me I just saw it that if in this moment I can't resist that Klondike bar then everything that I've been talking about that I've been dreaming about all of that is and all of it is useless if I could not resist one Klondike bar in that moment that's it everything else was just empty air that's where it really came down that's where the rubber met the road and so I really really struggled with it to the point where it was almost like like battling an addiction I've never really taken drugs or anything but it almost felt like I was that heroin addict that just needed a hit that's really what it felt like because I felt like I was very addicted to sweets and I literally had to resist resist myself and just just tell myself that this is the defining moment and what end up happening was that I kind of went back and forth back and forth and finally I resisted it and so from that point on everything got much much easier because that was the moment that defining moment that showed whether I was really committed or whether I was deceiving myself and so from that point on my journey continued I started going to the gym I hit the gym really hard my schedule for the gym was that I was going five times a week Mondays Wednesdays Fridays I would do I would do weightlifting and and then all five days Monday through Friday I would do 20 minutes of treadmill so some jogging and then I would do 30 minutes of weightlifting on those days that I did weightlifting and then I would do 15 minutes on the on the on the bicycle in the gym and so it was about an hour and fifteen minutes of total workout time on Monday Tuesday Friday and then no I mean I'm one day Wednesday Friday and then Tuesday and Thursday those were like 30 minute workouts so I stuck with that I was going to the gym at first it was very difficult because my body was totally unused to it what I did smartly is that I started off very very low so I started off very slow on the on the jogging very slow on the treadmill very slow on the kind of weights that I was lifting so I put the lowest weights possible started very slow on myself gave myself the opportunity to do that really told myself that I didn't matter what I looked like at the gym at that point I wasn't even going to a full Fletch Jim it was just a gym in my apartment but even there when I saw people you know one of the challenges I think when you first start working out is that you are you are insecure about how you look when you work out and the fact that you're not happy with how you look in you're there and you're sweating and you're not able to run on the treadmill you're like running out of pace of three on the treadmill and you're breaking a sweat and you're you're lifting like 20 pounds on the bench press or something but you know what I said that it doesn't matter because the results will prove themselves in six months the other smart thing that I did was that I made this a long-term commitment and I said that this was not going to be a week thing it's not going to be a month a month thing literally I literally said that this would take six to twelve months and then after that constant maintenance by going to the gym and eating healthy so for me this was a total shift in how I live my life this was not a little diet that I was that was undertaking even though my diet changed quite a bit so those were the details of how I started go to the gym about what I started doing with with my eating habits I really started to I decided for myself that calorie counting was not going to work part of the thing I think that's really stupid about calorie counting and you know maybe it works for you but I think it's it's ultimately practical is that there's too much work in in in counting all the little calories that's not something that I saw in myself that I would be able to maintain consistently and what I was concerned about there is that I wasn't gonna do anything that wasn't consistent I wanted to maintain a consistent schedule - Jim wanted to maintain a consistent eating something that I could eat consistently so nothing nothing that would only work for a week or two so what I did was I decided that I'm not going to be counting calories what's going to be important is that I just want to use my own feelings of hunger and fullness in my body and use that as a gauge to lose weight instead of pulling out calculators and all the other stuff part of the reason is that I didn't really even know at that point I was eating out a lot I wouldn't cook at home I would go out eat and I didn't know how many calories were in what were in all the stuff that was being served to me and finding all that out and counting it up felt like a real chore so what I thought would work well better for me is just using that feeling of hunger and and so that's exactly what I did is I started to to really look at fullness and hunger and within myself and when I was eating I always I always first thing I did was I said that the first thing I'm going to do is start leaving a little bit of food on the plate each time and so if I was eating a burger I could eat the whole burger and then I would eat most the fries but I would leave like one fry just one fry and I started very slow because I knew I wanted to ramp up into it and you'd be surprised how hard it is just to leave one fry on the plate because on the one hand it seems like well one fry that's nothing I mean you can eat the whole burger and a and a whole handful of fries and then to leave one it's it's like insignificant calorie wise and you know what what's the point and so but you what you'd be surprised when you start to do that especially if you don't have a habit of that and you have a habit of overeating or just eating everything on the plate is that it starts to to to actually become hard and your your mind starts playing tricks on you like one of the tricks your mind plays is this this idea of wasting food like I shouldn't lead and leave any food on the plate that's gonna that's gonna be wasted like what why waste a fry why don't I just eat it you know it's not very significant just there's like five calories maybe ten calories in that fry why don't I just eat it just to finish it up for sake of completeness right and I would always finish my plate that was just a habit that I have and so here I started to break that habit that was part of the the challenge of it part of the importance of doing that and then also what I did was I started ramping it up so at first it was one fry then it was two fries then it was half the prize and and then it was not even that half the fries but it was also like a quarter of the burger was left uneaten and this was challenging for me because I really had this limiting belief around wasting food I thought that leaving food on the plate was bad it was wasteful that was like money and resources that were not being consumed and that I would the other oh the other the other belief that I had is that oh if I don't finish this then I'm gonna get hungry I'm gonna get hungry really soon and I'm not gonna be able to focus on my schoolwork I'm not going to be able to to do this and that because I'm just going to be hungry and so that's another way that your mind is playing tricks on you when you're trying to do that so you know I went I worked through that and I really resisted and I kept leaving a little bit more a little bit more on the plate eventually what started happening was that usually the portions that you get served we go out to restaurants or fast food or anything they're usually way too big they're more than you need so part of the challenge was that when I was eating the whole plate I was overeating and then I was stuffing myself hole I was feeding feeling bad about it and just getting a massive excess of calories and so when I started leaving stuff on the plate I started to feel a little less full every time I left the dinner table and it was good because I what I really wanted was I wanted to reach this point where I would eat to become moderately full but not stuffed and just enough to the point where my hunger was I was still a little bit hungry at the end of the meal but I knew that when I if I if I left the meal and I walked out and waited 10 15 minutes all that food would get to my stomach and finally I would feel just kind of that perfect level of the point where I just satisfied my hunger but I didn't over over stuff myself and so I really worked towards that kind of just working with the feelings of my body and doing some of these behavior changes like leaving food on the plate and eventually I got to the point where where I was doing that and I also got more comfortable with hunger the feeling of hunger because before before I started this whole diet and fitness thing what happened was that I was very hunger was like a was like a very big no-no like in my mind I would build it up as something like that's a horrible thing to have a horrible feeling to have you can't have hunger you can't you can't cope with hunger you're not supposed to be hungry that kind of stuff and all that nonsense was really preventing me is those limiting me because it meant that I was over over stuffing myself all the time so what I started doing was I started to purposefully keep myself hungry and it was true that after you know after you leave a meal and you're not overly stuffed then you'll get hungry faster and what I just learned to do was I learned to we just accept that hunger that I would have it so literally I started to kind of to kind of start myself and that was the second side of my approach the first approach side of the approach was to to do a lot of fitness fitness work so working at the gym and the second part of the approach was to really get a calorie deficit to shed the pounds and I started there were some times where I was really like I was skipping meals I or I was substituting meals for something very lightweight like a yogurt or like a chocolate pudding type of thing so that I got a bigger calorie deficit and I was weighing myself every day so I could see the results I said that the first two weeks I wouldn't really be judging myself by any results and and so I didn't because I knew that it takes some time to start to trigger the weight loss but then after those two weeks I started to see very consistent very consistent drop in weight on the scale sometimes a pound every couple of days ultimately I lost 65 pounds in five months so if you do the math on that then that comes out to about two pounds a week two maybe three pounds a week I was losing so that was done through a combination of five days a day to gym and and that kind of a under eating and feeling a little bit hungry all the time and just learning to cope with it and to deal with it and at that point I was so committed that it's very surprising how fast those five months flew by and the way just just dropped off to the point where is really crazy people were we're telling me like how how big of a change I was able to make because people around me saw it friends saw people at college saw it my parents my parents and my family saw it and it was a really really big drastic change in fact one interesting point that totally threw me off guard that I wasn't expecting at all was how people around me would react to the weight to the weight loss biggest challenge was that at that point I was living away from my parents my parents were living in another state I was in California they were in Texas and so they didn't really see me for a long time and then what happened was that the I lost all this weight and they knew me their whole life as this overweight as as a silver weight kid and overweight adult in college and then what happened was when they saw me when I was thin they were they were literally shocked like so shocked that they couldn't believe it in fact they they really I thought that they would congratulate me for the achievements that I made in fact it was the opposite like they started telling me that I need to put the weight back on that I was too thin and I was too skinny when in fact I was at that point I was still not at my ideal body weight right now I'm about 175 and so in there I was going to be like 180 or something like that so it was perfectly healthy weight but they really started fearing that I was anorexic or that I was I was dropping the way too fast or really that I'm just too skinny like they would tell me all you're all skin and bones are all skin and bones you need to put some fat on the body well one thing that I really realized was that a big factor that contributed to my overall weight gain was the environment that I was in fact is that I grew up in in household where food was always was always was always eaten in massive quantities and there was no there's no sense of holding yourself back there was no real value placed on Fitness there was no value placed on eating healthy foods there's no value placed on moderation of food so we would always have huge portions always seconds always desserts always this always that and and always this attitude that that was totally normal totally fine so part of the challenge when you're making big changes in your life and this relates to to weight loss or really any other aspect maybe if you're starting a business or if you're you know you're planning to change your relationship up or any any kind of improvement that you're making in yourself is that if it's dry if it's drastic enough improvement very counter-intuitively and almost almost scary that the friends and people that you hang out with your family a lot of times will start to hold you back from making those changes and there are various theories on this one of the theories that has been said a lot is that literally they do it because they lose the ability to manipulate and control you and that's kind of that's kind of a you know kind of dark and Machiavellian to say that the people are out there controlling you but people the fact is that people do fall into a into habits they have certain habits of how they see you they put a certain projection of an image on you there's certain ways that you act around your friends different than how you react around your family different than how you act around your coal your co-workers or your boss and so all these people have certain expectations of you that you've set up and when you try to set yourself on a different path you start challenging a lot of those expectations and all the sudden several things happen one is that you might make those those other people in your life insecure about what they're doing so if you lost a lot of weight and you have friends that are fat overweight or fat then what's going to happen is that they're going to start to be either jealous of you or resentful of you because you've been able to make that change and they haven't and it reflects very poorly on them that they haven't been able to make that change because when you're in that kind of state and you see someone that has become thin then it's kind of like oh I should be stepping up why am I not doing that but the fact is that for those people because they're not motivated intrinsically to do it it really rubs their ego the wrong way so their ego gets in the way their ego says to them that this guy is the enemy that this change is too weird we don't like this new change we don't like this new you we don't like that you're thin anymore we don't like that you're smarter now we don't like that you're in this new relationship we don't like that you started a business for XYZ reasons and a lot of that is because those people are are used to a certain expectation from you and maybe you start acting differently in front of them maybe now you're not as keen on going out and drinking with them you're not as keen on going out and splitting a dessert or getting fast food and obviously that starts to change the dynamics of the relationship and that's not something that they might be very comfortable with not to mention that you're really telling they're you're telling their ego to step up and a lot of times your ego wants to protect itself and do do nothing basically is to stay in that steady state and it's hard to deceive yourself when you're trying to do that it's literally like an ostrich sticking its head in the ground so a lot of times P around you will would be ostriches with their head in the sand and when they see you making changes that that's like taking their head out of the sand and making them look around and seeing what's really out there and what's really possible for themselves and if they're so caught up in their own then they're gonna want to put their head back in the sand and they'll resent you for pulling their head out so it's a very interesting phenomenon that's a lot of times why sometimes really to make the biggest changes that you make the best way to do it is to do something very drastic like actually start changing your friends start changing the relationship in the dynamics you have with your family because a lot of times that can really hold you back from making progress figuring out new ways to interact with friends and family sometimes your friends you literally need to outgrow your friends and get totally new friends or your friends just keep dragging you back in it's that analogy of those crabs where you stick a bunch of crabs in a bucket and if the crabs worked together or if one of the crabs tries to crawl out he can actually do it he can actually scurry up the side and crawl out but what happens is just as he's trying to do that one of the other crabs in the bucket grabs him by the by the leg and pulls him back down just because instinctively that's what they're doing and so that crabs in the bucket analogy is it's crazy how and kind of freaky that that actually would happen with humans and with your friends and the people that you think care for you the most but when you start making these big changes you find that that's very very true it's a very it's a very real phenomenon so that is my story of how I lost 65 pounds in five months and have been able to keep it off for eight years I think there's a lot more that I could say about this they'll probably do another video blogs one thing I want to conclude with is that when I started really it was very very much about willpower and what I really learned from this whole experience was that first of all you need to connect with your motivation if you're not connected with your motivation nothing else would happen but even then the importance of willpower and to be able to power through challenges and to be very persistent very disciplined is so important to being able to make big changes but the other thing that I learned is that like at this point the kind of willpower I have to exert to lose that weight is not the kind of willpower no I now need to maintain it so at this point so many of my beliefs and mindsets have permanently shifted that now if I see for example stop going to the gym I'm not perfect about going to the gym I still go about five times a week on average lately I've been skipping a few days here and there and that's something I want to I want to correct again in myself but what I really what I'm really doing now is that if for example I don't I don't go to the gym for a whole week if I even miss um two weeks of gym my body starts to naturally feel this urge to go and exercise which is not to say that I can't totally fall out of the habit I have to be vigilant all the time I'm still staying true to that promise to myself that I would be going to the gym for the rest of my life that's exactly how I see it so there's no there's no there's no one thing that I just do here and then I have it for the rest of my life it's not like I've gone to the gym for a few years and then that's good now I'm going to the gym forever and same thing with diet my diet my tastes for for what I put in my body have drastically evolved since then I've done paleo really cut out a lot of carbs cut out a lot of sugars there's still more work that I'm trying to do on that front but it certainly improved a lot I've really cut out cut out even sugar substitutes I used to rely a lot on Splenda and iced tea at this point I do mostly drink water sometimes fruit juice no soft drinks um desserts I try to really stay away from any sort of desserts I try to stay away from any sort of breads I haven't eaten bread in in months so I've done months where I haven't eaten any bread any grains and that has been really good for my energy just besides looking good there's also energy and also my long-term health so what has happened is that once I started looking good that was my prime motivation I just got got thin and fit once I got that then I started to to get into building muscle I got I did a lot of study on how to do proper weight lifting techniques that kind of stuff like squats and deadlifts really got into that for a while um also got involved with you so started looking at paleo started looking at healthy ways to eat and I really started to to think about not just getting fit for looks but getting fit for energy and getting fit for for performance so that I'm able to perform better at work I'm able to perform better in bed all this kind of stuff so I'm able to live longer I'm less likely to develop cancer and diabetes and all these other nasty diseases that that will potentially develop if you don't if you don't really take care of your body you