How To Lose 120 Pounds

My name is Craig and I lost 120 pounds. You are here because you are in pain and you need to lose weight. You may even be desperate to lose weight. You feel like you have tried everything. I want you to take a breath and just remind yourself of these two things right now:

1. If you have too much fat, your body is probably working perfectly. I will explain more below...

2. You have not tried *everything*

I am not a doctor, and this is not medical advice. This is just my perspective and experience having lost 120 pounds, and keeping it off for over 3 years with very little effort. Everyone is different, and I need you to know that if you are looking for the easy button, THERE ISN'T ONE. GET OVER IT. You will have to work hard. But you already knew that didn't you? That's ok. You have no idea how hard you can work, and much of that is about leveraging the knowledge that you already have. 

Highest impact behaviors for losing fat:

1. You need to move

2. You need to eat healthy food.

You can listen to a bunch of B.S. out there about how you need to intermittent fast, or do keto, or do paleo, or do the warrior diet, or do a cleanse, or take collagen protein, or count your macros, or do the mediterranean diet, or take apple cider vinegar, or take fish oil and on and on and on and on, but ultimately, it just boils down to simple truths that you need to execute on. Sorry. I am not here to B.S. you. I am here to help you.

All you have to do is listen to people who have actually lost a huge amount of weight. If you want to look good and feel better and feel empowered again, just look inside your brain. You are smart. You KNOW that eating bread, cookies, cake, etc. is not good for you. I am not going to insult you and try to give you some "hack" to try to lessen the blow of that truth. This is real talk. So I am assuming that you do not have a thyroid condition or some other medical condition that is preventing your body from working correctly. If that is the case, let's get started...

Ok, so your body is not broken. If you are eating food high in carbohydrates, your body responds to that by releasing insulin. Why? Because your blood sugar levels are incredibly tightly regulated and if you go outside of a ridiculously narrow band of glucose content, you die. So your body has an amazingly efficient mechanism to manage blood glucose levels. (oversimplification...) You eat carbohydrate, the glucose is extracted into your blood stream, your body detects a rise in blood glucose levels, and it produces insulin which is a hormone that is designed to shuttle glucose (fatty acids?) out of your bloodstream and mostly into your muscles because it is more efficient to put the glucose there, but also into your fat cells. Ok. So if you are fat as a direct result of eating cakes, cookies, tortillas, bread, potatoes, and other foods that are either processed or starchy, your body is WORKING PERFECTLY. Celebrate that. 

Now we just need to change the behavior of eating crap. Yeah. So simple right? Ok, so here is where psychology enters the picture. Gretchen Rubin introduced me to the concept of "abstainers" and "moderators". If you want to lose weight, you need to determine which of these categories you fall into. I am an abstainer. What does that mean? Well, it means that it is actually EASIER for me to eat zero cookies than to eat 1. If I eat 1, that will cascade into 30. Moderators on the other hand find that if they eat zero, it takes more willpower for them to get over the disappointment of not having the treat than if they just had 1. So the moderator is that person who has a chocolate bar in their desk drawer and snaps off one square a day until the bar is gone. These people are weird to me. I literally do not understand how their brains work.

The moderator takes 1 step back in order to take 2 steps forward, and this is their comfort zone. The abstainer takes zero steps back and 1 step forward. They both end up in the same place, but through different means. Are you an abstainer or a moderator? If there is a long baguette on the table and some butter, will you slice of just one piece, butter it and be good to go, or will you eat the entire loaf and then feel regret and bloat? Yeah, me too : )

So my strategy is to abstain. I do not eat processed carbs. What?! That's right. It is easy for me now, but it was 65 days of HELL to get to this point. So I decided that I was only going to eat real food...if it grows out of the ground, or it had a mother, I will eat it...so long as it has not gone through a significant refinement process. What do I mean by refinement? Flour is an example of excessive refinement. That is a nutrient deficient food like substance. It is not real food. I stopped eating all refined carbohydrate, and it required willpower for 65 days.

The unlock for me to lose massive amounts of weight came when I realized that eating carbs was a substance abuse problem. Dr. Cywes is the guy who taught me that. He calls himself The Carb Addiction doc on Youtube. Check him out. He is amazing. After reframing my abuse of processed carbs as a substance abuse problem, everything clicked. As he says, no one puts a heroin addict on a "low heroin diet" and so no one addicted to refined, processed carbohydrates should put themselves on a "low processed carb diet". If you are a moderator, you may beg to differ, and that's cool. You are weird and I don't understand you, so you do you. I, on the other hand bias toward all-or-nothing thinking and by going through 65 days of pain, I came out on the otherside with (hopefully) a lifetime habit of eating real food that is nutrient dense and healthy.

What's up with that 65 days? So I was posting on my instagram page about my journey saying "4 days without processed carbs" etc. but I would still go out to restaurants to eat, I would just not eat bread or chips or whatever hit the table. There is a restaurant my wife and I love called the Havana club and the grilled, buttered bread there is tempting beyond belief. Every time it would hit the table, I would feel this rush of desire and literally my mouth would water. Occasionally we would find ourselves there, and I would find myself shielding my eyes from it. One day (day 65) my wife and I were having a conversation at the Havana club, and 10 minutes passed before I realized that the bread had been sitting there. I had not noticed. Oh my God. I am no longer possessed by this bread. That is when I knew I had crested the hill. 

Ever since then, I have been eating real food. Not always perfect, but always real. Do I eat a baked potato from time to time? yup. Do I eat bread from time to time? NOPE. ZERO. NADA. I do not eat pasta, bread, or any of that stuff that comes from flour. Stay away from it. It is the devil.

Ok...so if you just stop there, and eat real food, get rid of the processed carbs, I have a very high degree of confidence you will lose weight, and lose it quickly. But you already knew that. It is not a knowledge problem, it is a behavior problem, and behavior problems often stem from psychological problems. I am not diagnosing you as mentally jacked up (disclaimer that I am not a mental health professional either...). I am just saying that you need to understand your natural tendencies, compulsions and attributes in order to align your environment with what works for you.

I would recommend starting with fixing the diet before you worry about working out. Yes working out is important, and is the second pillar in the two highest impact things you can do for yourself. But from a habit formation perspective, diet is WAY harder in my experience. Focus ONLY on that for like 3 months, and see where you get. Don't worry about the gym, getting your steps in, and all the other movement habits. Focus on dialing in your diet. Why? Because you at the gym for 1 hour a day, but you are tempted to eat crap for the other 15 hours or so you are awake. It's a way bigger "attack surface". If you conquer that, then 1 hour in the gym is trivial. So fight the biggest monster first. Is it overwhelming to you? Ok, cool. That's what hard feels like. GET OVER IT. You are going to have to work hard. You got yourself into a hole, now you need to get yourself out. Sorry. I am not here to tell you happy go lucky things. You have to work hard, and you have to prove to yourself that you can work hard so that you can start respecting yourself again. C'MON! You can do this. Hold yourself to a higher standard! I know it is possible, because I did it for myself. I lost 120 pounds because I was fed up and disgusted with fat ass.

I want you to experience the empowering feeling of fighting this dragon and slaying it. Let's Go!

- Craig