My Weight Loss Journey: From Skinny Kid to Obese and Back

I always used to be a pretty skinny kid. I was known for being skinny and was often teased for how small, skinny, and underweight I was. This makes everything that happened afterward all the more surprising. You can still see this if you go back and look at my videos from three or four years ago; I was pretty skinny, especially when compared to what happened afterward. I weighed 140 lbs or less for most of my 20s, and that was generally the case until about two or three years ago when I started gaining a lot of weight. I’ve fact-checked this with my wife, and she says I started putting on the pounds right around the pandemic, which I assume is probably similar to a lot of you.

I indeed gained a lot of weight, peaking probably around 190 lbs, maybe more. Given my height of 5’5″, that’s a BMI of almost 30, which is the technical definition of obese. So, I was literally obese.

The Reality of BMI

People often say BMI is abstract and not really representative—like Arnold Schwarzenegger had a BMI of 32—but I didn’t look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Most people with a BMI of 30 don’t look like Arnold Schwarzenegger; I looked fat, frankly. I look back at my wedding pictures, and I was just fat. There’s no sugar-coating it. My wife would rib me, saying, “Hey, you’re looking kind of chubby.” I’d get comments from relatives and people in my videos saying I looked chunky. I dismissed them because, while I was gaining all this weight, I was actually working out more than ever. I was exercising vigorously with daily CrossFit workouts and felt like I was pretty healthy. I was lifting a lot of weights; my squat peaked at 350 lbs, which is a lot of weight. I thought, “Well, actually, all this weight is just muscle. If there’s a little bit of extra fat, who cares? It’s fine. I’m very healthy anyway—fat but fit, as it were.”

But I just kept ballooning. I may have even reached 200 lbs at one point; I wasn’t really tracking my weight too closely. It happened so slowly and stealthily that I barely even noticed. I just dismissed it as, “Alright, whatever, I’m just getting stronger. Who cares if I weigh a little bit extra?”

Changing Perceptions

I had become convinced by pseudo-scientific articles that it’s actually impossible to lose weight because of the way your hormones work. So, why even bother trying? Also, I just didn’t want to lose the weight. I felt like I just wanted to be big and strong. I had this complex from when I was younger and so thin and scrawny. Again, I thought, “Hey, I’m gaining weight, getting bigger muscles, just getting physically bigger. A little extra fat? Who cares?”

That all changed a few months ago when I hung out with some professional sumo wrestlers. Most of you probably didn’t see this video; it didn’t do particularly well on my channel. But the impact on my life personally was tremendous. I really enjoyed that experience, but I found their lifestyle to be incredibly unhealthy. I looked at all the food they were eating, all the soda they were drinking, and the fact that they were smoking too. I saw their excess body weight, and it was really gross to me. It just felt unhealthy. Yes, they were constantly active and working out, but at the same time, I remember training with them. They would move for five minutes and be profusely sweating, their entire bodies dripping with sweat from just a couple of lunges. They had knee injuries, and it seemed like that excess weight was really unhealthy.

I started seeing some of that in myself. I noticed how, over the years, I had become slower, quicker to sweat, and more prone to injury. My joints would get hurt more easily. I reflected on the sumo wrestlers and looked at myself. I said, “Well, I’m not there yet, but on the path I’m going, I’m going to end up 250 lbs or 300 lbs.” Especially because, frankly, at the time, I had a somewhat problematic relationship with food. The reason I got to where I was was all diet. I was working out like crazy, but after I came home from working out, I’d be super hungry and let myself eat essentially whatever I wanted, as much as I could eat before getting full. I would just stuff it all in my mouth in 10 minutes. I was just so hungry, frankly, I couldn’t stop myself. So, I stuffed myself to the limit. If you look back at pictures of my old breakfasts, I’d be stuffing myself with multiple pieces of toast slathered in butter, plus cheese, plus kimchi, and meat or fish. It was just a lot of food that I was eating every single day. This is what I would eat in the morning, and I had absolutely no restriction on what I ate. I just let myself eat whatever I wanted and naturally ballooned outwards.

Realization and Research

I started doing some research into sumo wrestler life expectancy because I was very curious to see where it ends up with these guys. This is like a scientific experiment of the idea that “fat but fit” is okay. What I found was that it does not end well for sumo wrestlers. They die very young, like in their 60s, relative to a Japanese population overall that lives quite long, like 80-plus years. For me, it was a perfect repudiation of the idea that “fat but fit” is actually healthy. Look, I don’t want to put this as a normative judgment on you if you feel like it’s okay to be fat because I frankly don’t care. You can do what you want with your life. But for me, I felt very strongly about this, especially after having two kids. I wanted to try and live as long as possible. That became very important for me. I just felt like, long-term, the path I was going down was not very healthy. So, I decided to seriously start losing weight. This was maybe about four months ago. My weight at that time, I remember, was 187 lbs. As of this morning, I’m under 150 lbs, so I’ve lost a good 40 lbs.

The Role of Diet

For many people, the first thing that comes to mind when they think about losing weight is exercise. But I had already learned that exercise was not a stepping stone to losing weight. In fact, for me, it was the opposite. The more I exercised, the more weight I gained because the hungrier I got and the more I allowed myself to eat. My big realization was that it was 100% diet. The stuff I was eating before was, you know, I already talked about the breakfast I was eating, full of multiple pieces of toast or bagels, lots of butter and cheese, and multiple eggs fried in butter. That would be my breakfast. Then for dinner, I would let myself eat whatever I wanted, usually big bowls of cheesy pasta or the most delicious pizza I could get my hands on—really rich, fatty foods, which I somehow convinced myself were okay because saturated fat is all keto and good for you these days.

The first thing I did was have a call with my nutritionist aunt. She was basically like, “Dude, the first thing you’ve got to do is eat more vegetables.” It didn’t really make sense to me at first because I was like, “What do vegetables have to do with losing weight?” I didn’t really get it, but I was like, “Okay, I’ll humor you. I’ll eat some more vegetables.” So, I started with every meal; half of the meal was vegetables to begin with, and that would be the first thing I ate. I started kind of pounding vegetables, basically. What I realized pretty quickly was that it’s actually a great way to lose weight because you’re filling your body with nutritious fiber and crowding out room for all the other rich, fatty foods. You’re filling yourself up in advance. I realized the root of my problem was that I would let myself eat as much rich and fatty food as possible and be absolutely stuffed with every meal. My goal became to be more comfortable with hunger. The vegetables turned into a critical part of that because I’d start my meal with a plate full of vegetables or spinach and peppers. It wouldn’t exactly fill me up, but it would at least take the edge off my crazy hunger.

Adopting a New Diet

For the rest of the meal, I experimented with a lot of stuff. What I ultimately ended up with was kind of an extreme diet, but it worked for me. Most of my carbs, rather than coming from grains, came from whole, recognizable beans or legumes. I eliminated all processed carbs from my diet—no more bread, no more cookies, no cakes, nothing like that, no soda, obviously, no candy, no processed foods of any kind. That wasn’t a huge problem for me before, but bread was a big problem. So, I replaced it with slow carbs like chickpeas. I had a lot of chickpeas and lentils. A typical meal for me would look like a bowl of spinach and lentils, which also have protein, by the way. For plant-source fat, I liked olive oil, so I ate a lot of olive oil, sometimes peanut butter. I tried to have less animal protein, but I did eat lean protein, usually either fish or chicken. No sauces of any kind, apart from the olive oil—no hot sauce, no other oil, no vinegar, nothing. Just plain boiled spinach and chickpeas, and sometimes potatoes. This started to become my diet day in and day out.

This also totally exploded the myth for me that healthy food is more expensive and/or takes longer to prepare because all of these meals took under five minutes to make with stuff that comes straight out of a can. Over time, I did start to become more experimental with what I ate, so I wasn’t just eating chickpeas and lentils every single day. I’d throw in some corn or peas, but the core principle for what I was to eat became whole foods, as minimally processed as possible. I tried to eliminate calorically dense foods to the maximum extent possible—less fatty meat, more whole grain carbs like oatmeal. When you think about processed foods, you often think about things like soda or packaged snacks and cookies. But the reality is processed foods include a wide variety of things like bread. If you go into a supermarket and look at bread on the shelf, all these supermarket breads will have ingredients like xanthan gum and all kinds of emulsifiers and fillers, which I subsequently learned actually promote overconsumption of the food. That was a huge problem for me—overconsumption.

Embracing Simple Food

Some of these meals, if you look at them, seem frankly a little bit unappetizing. But that was actually the point. I wanted to eat food that was as kind of unappetizing but nevertheless still healthy as possible. Jack LaLanne, the famous bodybuilder from decades ago, had this great phrase: “If it tastes good, spit it out.” That sort of became a motto. I felt like it was a pretty easy way to lose weight if the food became much less appetizing. I always really enjoyed eating, and it was a problem for me because I enjoyed eating so much that I would stuff myself with every meal. So, I tried to make the food deliberately less appetizing—not gross, just basic healthy food.

I feel like one problem with our modern society is how good our food has become. The range and quality of things you can eat have expanded so much. But if you look at hunter-gatherer societies even today, what do the Hadza eat? They eat tubers and occasionally poorly cooked animal meat. Their diet is not very appetizing. You don’t want the food to be too good because if it’s too good, you overeat. That became a core part of my ethos. I started weighing myself every single day. I started losing weight immediately; the first week, I lost several pounds. Here I am, having lost 40 lbs four months later, and it honestly feels really good. I do miss being able to stuff myself with incredibly delicious food on a regular basis, but I also recognize that’s an unhealthy way to live. I feel way better not weighing as much. I can move easier, sweat less, sleep better, and hopefully, I’ll live longer as well. Occasionally, here and there, I will eat the delicious foods that I like. I will eat a slice of pizza, but it’s much more rare that I do these things. When I do, I now know when to stop. If I’m eating something incredibly delicious, I know to stop before it becomes too much. If I’ve eaten a little bit and still feel an immense urge to keep eating, I will force myself to stop. Surprisingly, 20 minutes later, I’m feeling full. I’ve gotten more comfortable with being hungry or, to put it another way, being not completely stuffed all the time. Oh, and no alcohol, candy, snacks, or any ultra-processed foods ever. I think that should go without saying if you’re really serious about losing weight.

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