I got some other questions for you to follow that up.

Sure.

I was...

I was put on my first diet when I was five, and I didn't understand.

I wish at five I could have understood, like, listen, the way you're eating is going to lead to X, Y, and Z, and we just want to curb that a little bit and get that under control.

I don't think I was in any position to understand any of that, and so...

It just seemed to be something being done to me that I didn't enjoy.

you didn't feel fixed yet?

If we go back to many other iterations of portraying that timeline, they're not gonna, the writers are kind of l- lazy.

It's like they had a horse and carriage.

That's what you get.

Mm-hmm.

You get a horse and carriage.

And here's Tesla, like, creating eavesdropping devices to record.

Like, it's all theoretically possible.

Everything he's doing is withou- within the realm of possibility.

That was,

that's not happening at 500 pounds.

And you know, and then, Just personally, the first time I did a pull-up, I almost cried.

I couldn't believe I did a pull-up.

I had done a number of them with bands, with a trainer at one point.

And even those seemed so far away from being a reality.

And then one day...

How are you able to rein it in and be as diligent with your rest and recovery as you are with your exercise itself?

Uh, the weight loss alone is an extraordinary achievement, but talk about how that's coupled with dealing with addiction and, and what, what that challenge is like.

Yeah, the two things ran really similar and parallel for me, and it, it took me a long time to figure that out.

You know, I, uh, my, my instinct at first with addiction was if I can stay sober for 30 days, I will remain sober, and that just wasn't the case.

It was, it was something that I had to confront would be a, a lifelong management.

Um, there was no real, uh, curing of that for me.

So it's something I still have to deal with day to day.

Although it gets less, it's, it's less hard to deal with.

Mm-hmm.

You can feel that authentic rage.

Watching that, it made me wonder about whether you know because there's there's aspects where like i don't know if that actually was his battle cry i don't know right historically if that's taking liberties or not but i do know that not far from where this took place there you know very close to where this took place there were certainly instances in history where they did take no prisoners you know what i mean where they you know the sacking of baghdad by the mongols like they killed everyone left came back and and found the survivors and killed them like there that was something that and then you think about just like was it was it just the madness of the desert and the fact of like resource scarcity where you're like if we're gonna take this we have to wipe everyone out.

We cannot leave a single person.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was a heavy scene.

Right.

So what's the one thing you love the most, big or small, and the one thing you hate the most, big or small? Which is tough for this one, but

You and I have had conversations.

And all of that.

You know, I, um, I was put on my first diet at five.

Throughout my childhood I was then moved from every, onto every fad diet that hit Los Angeles, whether it be like nightshades are bad, or there's things in lectins that will kill you, or just eat meat, or...

For me, I thought, I believed for a long time that carbohydrates were the sole thing that was making me fat.

And it turns out after many years of trial and error, losing weight and gaining it back, that I eat carbohydrates every day and I'm perfectly fine eating carbohydrates.

I thought of my obesity and my weight as the problem, and that point of view eventually changed to seeing that obesity was a symptom of a problem, and largely the problem was in my behavior, in my proclivities, in my compulsions.

S- can you give any advice for anyone who's stuck, and they feel like they can't take that step to losing weight and, and feeling better and such?

How insecure were you about your weight when you got older and started recognizing it or seeing maybe someone make fun of you or realizing like, "Oh, I can't go on a hike with my, my girlfriend or my friends and do these certain activities"? Did you feel insecure about it ever? Or was it more of just this is who you are?

I definitely felt insecure about it.

I also got into a lot of fights as a kid and, and was like, you know ...

There were a few times in elementary school where, like, some preschooler would say like, "Wow, look how fat he is." And that, I'm obviously wasn't gonna fight a little preschooler.

And, and you come to learn like, well, avoid little kids at all costs because they just say ...

They see something and they just talk about it, and I d- I, that w- made me terribly uncomfortable.

But if like another 10-year-old said something like that to me, we would just have a fight-

Mm

That's nationaldebtrelief.com.

nationaldebtrelief.com.[upbeat music] Welcome to Life Long, where practical health meets real life, and we navigate this wild ride together.

I'm Ethan Suplee, and wherever you're watching, whether on Zoom, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or whatever app we're live streaming on, I'm glad you're here.

As we're coming out of winter, at least fingers crossed for the people of New York City, there's that early spring feeling where we've been c- cocooned for a few months.

Maybe a little more sedentary than we'd planned, maybe a little more in our heads than we'd like, and with that comes the pressure, the okay, it's time voice.

Time to move, time to eat better, time to focus.

For some people, that means tightening things up.

Yeah.

So what was the steps then to start exercising, eating clean? Like, how hard was it for you?

I called my girlfriend at the time from Romania, and I'm sobbing, and I'm like, uh...

And I, I told her this, and it was as though I was telling her a secret, right? I was so...

It felt like I was telling her something she didn't know because it, it, none of it really made sense to me how she could know about the state of my body and still care for me.

That didn't make fucking sense, so she must not...

It, but none of it was rational.

But, you know, sometimes we feel irrationally about things.

So what happened then? Because you're looking great now.

Like what has been like your secret sauce to maintaining all this for so long?

finding people to be accountable to, finding people to talk to.

And that has proven invaluable in sobriety.

And that has proven invaluable in weight loss.

When I When I ran from conversations about when the idea of talking about my weight was like touching a hot stove and burning, like mentally, I was revolted from the idea of discussing my weight.

And I just had to get over that.

I just had to, you know, start talking about it and start accepting aspects of myself that were real.

And do you think that people often get into weight loss transformations for the wrong reasons and that they think that losing the weight is going to create this immense level of happiness forever and they want the accolades and that's why they end up failing because they don't have this deep internal yearning or validation for themselves?

Like, "I'm not gonna forgive you until this or that." We're very conditional about these things.

Yeah.

And I think being around people with yoyu and realizing I grew up in a place with no yoyu, where everyone was economically kind of pushed against the wall, and in terms of what are our opportunities, well, there aren't any.

And so, like, when you're in a situation like that where you can fall, when you see how far you can fall, I think this is like another thing about, uh, the Amer- um, the American condition that's a little bit scary, is when you see how far you can fall, and you can fall to hell, beyond hell in America.

There just aren't those safety nets to catch you.

Um, when you see how far you can fall, it's really hard to feel a sense of abundance that you can give to other people.

And so in Japan, because of like all these structures and these social structures and like you can only fall, oh, I can see how far I can fall.

So if you had to write a book and it had like, you know, 10 chapters, like, you know, each one being one of these principles, like what rises to the top in your mind as the most important factors for somebody who is contemplating making a change?

So what was the animated energy at that point? I mean, you were, were you just rebellious, or what were you rebelling against? Or was it chaos in the home, or, y- you know, what was happening?

The chaos, I think...

Look, I don't know.

It's, this is like a chicken and the egg kind of a question for me, and I've tried to do some real soul-searching.

I was put on my first diet at five years old, and when I look at pictures of me at five, I do not see a kid that needs to be put on a diet.

There's plenty of kids today that I look at and, and I go, in the most non-judgmental way possible, like, "That kid's f- eating is out of control." That was not, like, when I look.

But for whatever reason, my parents saw something, um, in me and thought, like, "We gotta nip this in the bud before it gets out of control." And that, so I don't know if I was experiencing this t- turmoil prior to that or that was the catalyst, but f- kind of from that moment on, I learned to do the things that I wanted to do in secret.

So was there, like a single bottom or a series of bottoms? Like it, you know, it took you a bunch of tries and a bunch of stabs before this thing stuck.