I present my case:
Your boy’s learned some secrets to nutrition. The hard way. Eating healthy has become near effortless for me now, and I want to share with you some strategies to help you get there, too.
But before we go there, let’s journey into the dark side because if you are fat like I was, chances are you things happened to you that messed up your relationship with food.
I was 10 when I first cut weight
I was going to wrestle in the nationals at Tulsa, OK - which my dad sold to me as a family vacation, the only one we’d ever take. I remember sneaking a plastic-wrapped slice of Kraft cheese into the backyard and nibbling it guiltily.
I had to make weight twice in Tulsa. Second weigh-in, I was an ounce over with only 30 minutes to make it. Too tired to do anything, my dad shared a secret with me - If you stand on your head for a minute, you temporarily lose a bit of weight. It worked!
No More Family Dinners
My mom became depressed after her mom died. She stopped making dinner. My dad said mom probably wouldn’t cook again. When I told here this, she said “ok”. It’d be a decade before I’d eat something she cooked.
My dad tried to fill the role, but he hated vegetables, so we never ate them, and he was a type-A perfectionist, so we'd eat a meal over and over until he mastered it. Worst was eating chicken for 30 days straight.
As a high school freshman, I weighed 152 pounds but dropped to 135 during wrestling season. My parents divorced that year. My mom left and became an addict, and my dad became distant. I got high. I chose to live with my mom because I feared she'd die without me to watch over her. She sold meth and smoked it, so she didn't eat much. She ordered me Hardees daily, so I ate fast food. By my senior year in high school, I weighed nearly 200 pounds.
I enrolled at Iowa State University as an escape. My mom went to prison. I was alone in a new place with people I couldn't relate to, with a meal card and dorm buffet three times a day. When I dropped out of Iowa State a semester and a half later, I weighed nearly 260 pounds.
Then I became a Hare Krishna monk
People think I moved into a temple when I say monk. Nope. I rarely met other devotees, but I worshipped like temple monks.
Hare Krishnas don’t eat meat and only eat meals prepared for the deities. Scripture says you can't offer food prepared by someone whose consciousness you don't know, so I cooked everything. Every meal I prepared was an act of devotion to God. I lost 100 pounds in two years, despite eating three cups of rice every other day and barely working out.
I tried to start a music career, but it stalled. I kept searching for answers, which led me into marketing, which became a fascination in place of my spiritual practice. I stayed vegetarian, but stopped spending 2-3 hours a day cooking, and I gained 75 pounds while I became a millionaire.
Advice in a strange place
Joining Genius Network in 2014 helped my health as much as my business. Joe Polish’s group focused on building a better entrepreneur, not just a better business. First year I ignored health stuff. Then Joe mentioned he was doing yoga because of this quote:
Do yoga 3x a week and you’ll change your body. Do it every day and you’ll change your life.
Ok, I’ll try it. I started Yoga and fell in love with. In tuned me more into my body, which made me take my nutrition more serious. Within a year I dropped 40 pounds, and a year after that I was under 200 pounds for the first time since I was 17.
I weighed 205 pounds when Covid hit, and went up to 215. Two things changed me:
I started doing Ice Baths.
I watched a YouTube video by Dr. Robert Lustig called Sugar: The Bitter Truth.
Eat whole, unprocessed foods, says Dr. Lustig. In the ice bath my body tell me you don’t need processed foods anymore. And I quit without regret or craving.
I weight 181 pounds now. I know I’m healthy by what I eat though, not by what the scale says. My story frames for you the insights I’m about to share, so you can appreciate the context as well as the information. I find that makes change more likely.
Now let’s talk strategy.
Develop a food philosophy
As a monk, food was an offering to God. You honored your food, and it wasn’t primary for you. You partook in the remnants after the offering. I can find no scientific evidence to back up the claim I’m about to make. Still, I believe it nonetheless: the consciousness in which you prepare and consume food primarily affects how your body processes it.
Perhaps being in a state of gratitude influences your metabolism. Or maybe it’s as mundane as taking the time to savor the food instead of inhaling it, so you get full quicker. I don’t know. But I know that when I prepared food for God, no matter how much I ate, I couldn’t get fat. Day after day, I would stuff myself until my belly was full, and I kept losing weight.
I’m still a believer in Krishna, but I’m out of practice in my devotion, yet my philosophy is to honor the food I eat and be grateful for its sustenance. Food isn’t just something that fuels me. It’s a spiritual process.
Search for the Paradigm Shift
Dopamine was my tipping point. You have a certain base level of dopamine you can use each day for pursuing your goals. Once you spend it, no amount of willpower will get you to take action. When I learned my motivation molecules were wasted on rich, heavily processed foods, they became unappealing.
Without dopamine, we wouldn’t even be motivated to eat. Scientists block it in lab rats and watch them starve to death even though the food bowl is 1 ½ rat lengths away.
Dopamine is key to our survival and procreation. That’s why the possibility of sex will double the rate of dopamine released in your system. But the prospect of chocolate will release dopamine at an even greater rate. Some activities release too much dopamine too fast - like smoking crack. Some people get hooked after one hit off the crack pipe. But what about Pringles? Once you pop, you can’t stop—truth in advertising.
Don’t think it’s a coincidence that sugar is now in about 80% of foods in our grocery store - they sneak it in everything because the more they can get you hooked on their product, the more money they can make.
I was recently visiting my dad, who offered me some butterscotch-flavored homemade Rice Krispy treats. Not worth the dopamine hit.
I don’t know if this science lesson will change your eating habits, but I do know there is always ONE key piece of information that can cause a paradigm shift in your relationship with food. Keep searching for it - feed your brain with the knowledge to feed your body in a way that feels good and is good.
Start Exercising
Working out is a terrible way to lose weight. You’ll probably gain weight at first because (a) you’ll be hungrier and likely eat MORE bad food than before, and (b) you might add muscle, which is good for your health but still net positive weight according to your scale.
Yet if you stick with it, where working out can help you with your weight is by the following:
You plan your eating better because it’s hard to work out on a full stomach. You then learn that just because you think you’re hungry doesn’t mean you’re actually hungry. You’re probably just bored.
You might start hanging around a new crowd, and you naturally become who you surround yourself with. Active people tend to eat better than non-active folk, and if you want to fit in with a new crowd, you’ll start to eat better, too. Plus, you get to see that it probably isn’t as hard as you think to eat healthy.
You become more in tune with your body which can bleed over to how you feel before, during, and after eating. You spoil the high of feeling good in your own skin from exercise if you gulp down a bowl of ice cream after.
Do Trauma Work
Being a monk stopped my panic attacks. It pushed my post-traumatic stress disorder to the background, where it no longer controlled my life. When I quit being so spiritually active, my panic attacks came back in full force.
My childhood demons always boiled down to this one thought: "what did I do that was so wrong that my parents didn't love me?" Somehow, my brain encoded my childhood trauma as something I caused because I wasn't a good enough son.
I didn't even realize I felt that way. Then one day, in my mid 30's, I got my brain scanned by Dr. Daniel Amen, and he told me I had PTSD, and my brain looked identical to a soldier he had just scanned who came back from the war in Afghanistan.
He told me to do EMDR therapy, so I did. I didn't realize how many self-worth issues I had - I guess being a multi-millionaire and having thousands of people who appreciate your contributions doesn't fix trauma.
The point is it's hard to properly nourish yourself if you fundamentally think you're worthless. It makes more sense to at least gain temporary pleasures of a deep-dish pepperoni pizza because it might be the only time you FEEL anything good. I relate. But when I began to process my trauma and love myself again, I started eating healthier because I wanted to be here longer - I felt like I could get more out of life, and now lousy food was getting in the way of that.
Sleep > Eating
If you suffer both lack of sleep and poor nutrition, prioritize sleep. You have hormones that help regulate your hunger, and sleep deprivation can make those hormones run haywire. I think you can sleep your way thin.
I crave junk food only when my sleep schedule gets out of whack. Studies show sleep deprivation makes you more likely to seek out calorically-dense foods.
It’s hard to fix diet and sleep simultaneously, so pick sleep first, and don’t be surprised if dieting becomes much easier. Here are some quick tips for better sleep:
Get sunlight as soon as you wake up. It helps set your circadian rhythm for the day, making it easier for you to fall asleep at night.
Quality before quantity. Focus less on the number of hours and more on how you feel upon waking. You might be in a pattern where your alarm clock goes off while you’re in a deep sleep cycle. If this happens, you’ll feel sluggish no matter what. Try waking up a half hour earlier - and don’t be shocked if this makes you feel more refreshed.
Filter out blue lights in the evening. I wear blue blocker glasses after 5 pm and do my best to avoid screens. I put electrical tape over any light in my bedroom with blue light - smoke detector, power chord, Roku player.
Cold at night, warm in the morning. Your body associates the temperature dropping with bedtime, so I make it a bit cooler than I find comfortable and nestle under the covers. I set the thermostat to increase in temperature in the morning to coincide with when I know is the best time for me to wake up, which makes it easier for me to get out of bed and get immediately outside.
Yoga Nidra. I listen to this 20-minute meditation that helps my brain unwind. It’s my go-to if I wake up at night and can’t fall back asleep, and also, I listen to it during the day if I need a quick nap. Even if I don’t technically fall asleep, it calms me enough to make my Oura ring think I’m sleeping.
Consider Fasting
I cheat at it. By drinking coffee with butter, collagen peptides, and MCT oil, I sate my hunger while keeping my body in a biologically fasted state. I usually don’t eat before 11 am, and I stop eating at night before 7 pm, meaning I”m fasting 14-16 hours most days.
Fasting works well because (a) it gives your body and especially your liver a break to clean up, and (b) it’s a bind. The cognition that goes into being deliberate about what you do and do not eat can be more exhausting than just deciding not to eat at all. Yes, you get less energy from food, but you might end up net-positive energy-wise because you’re no longer thinking about it.
I don’t know where the science sits with this, but my theory is your body, over time, learns: dude ain’t feeding me, whether I complain or not. So I’ll just quit nagging him with hunger pains.
High Satiation + Impossible to Overeat
Not all calories are created equal. I can eat two eggs (140 calories) or two slices of bread (140 calories). The former will leave me feeling full for hours, while the latter often won't even dent my hunger. A square of 100% pure chocolate is also 70 calories and can sate me for a long time. Butter sates me, especially slathered on steak.
Find the foods that fill you up and keep you feeling full, and you'll curb overeating as long as you're not just eating out of boredom. If you still tend to eat out of boredom, that's where "impossible to overeat" foods come into play.
Spoiler: it's vegetables. It may be hard at first to eat only vegetables as a snack, but that's because you haven't repalatized yet. Once you start eating more whole foods and less processed foods, you'll find processed foods almost make you sick because they are way too sweet. My palette now can barely stand the sweetness of a bell pepper, whereas when I was overweight, that same bell paper tasted bitter.
For me, the game changer was baking. I'd take a huge pan and cram it full of broccoli, stick it in the oven at 425F and let it cook for 15 minutes. That's a snack I can eat all day, and even if I ate 4 pounds of it, I'll be fine.
Change your time horizon
If you had to follow a diet where you couldn’t lose an ounce for one whole year but then were guaranteed to morph into your ideal body weight, would you do it? I wish it worked like that because it forces you to focus more on what’s going on in your body than a stupid number on the scale.
If you knew you couldn’t see any external benefit for an entire year, you’d learn to appreciate the food you were eating more. You’d notice more how different foods affect you beyond the momentary taste and texture. You’d eat to feel good inside instead of looking good outside. And guess what? That’s the secret.
Eat for the short-term… but make the short-term feeling better after the meal than before it. Make the short-term clarity of thought; the boost of energy; not only the emotional comfort of the food. Let the brain in your gut do its job - you give it the right ingredients, and it will make you feel better, and when you feel better, you automatically look better.