Three Lessons From Losing 120lbs

Hello my friends, 

If you read my first newsletter, firstly, thank you. I very much appreciate you taking the time out of your day to read my attempt to decipher my thoughts into a coherent message to hopefully be helpful to someone reading. If you didn't, you can find all of our past newsletters here. Including Mike’s introductory post which I highly recommend (he’s funnier than I am). 

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I wanted to use this newsletter to expand a bit more on my background. But more importantly, the main lessons I took away from losing 120 pounds, keeping it off, and changing my life for the better. These lessons probably took me longer to learn than they should have, but hey, late is better than never right? I hope these offer a bit of help for anyone else trying to figure out how to feel alive and not just live. 

Lesson 1: 

It's going to take longer than you expect, much longer, but that's the point. 

I have been weightlifting for almost a decade now, it's the most consistent I've been at anything in my entire life, just ask any of my sports coaches growing up. When I first started weightlifting it was to lose weight and look better - purely external factors. 

Now I am not saying that's a bad thing, at the time, I thought it would give me more confidence to talk to girls (what else matters for a 20 year old guy in college?) The problem I soon ran into, and is the case with most extrinsic motivators, my results were not coming fast enough for my liking. 

When we tie our motivations to something external, “if I look a certain way, see a certain amount on the scale, have X amount in my bank account, then I win and I will be happy.” We make a contract with ourselves that we will just accept to be miserable until we hit the arbitrary expectation that we set in our heads, and I was, for years. 

Here’s the tough truth, anything in this life that is WORTH having is going to require a ton of time and work. So unless we just want to accept being unhappy for the vast majority of our lives, we need to adjust our expectations and motivations and our definition of “winning”. Alex Hormozi described it beautifully - life can’t be won, only played. 

You can’t win at getting healthy, the point is to stay healthy. Just like you don’t win marriage, the point is stay married. Do the things and build the habits everyday that keep you in the game in all aspects of your life. When I changed my mindset to playing the game of losing weight and being healthier instead of trying to win, the weight kept coming off and I found my happiness while I was doing it.

Lesson 2:

Going from Mindless to Mindful Eating. 

This one is much more simple, but VASTLY more important than I gave it credit. The first law of thermodynamics states that ALL energy taken into the body is accounted for. All calories count, and must either be stored or utilized within the body. 

So having an understanding of what food and calories you are ingesting is critical because, no surprise, you must be in a calorie deficit to lose weight. In my experience, the best way to be more mindful of what you are eating is tracking your macros for at least a month.

This will give you time to understand how much protein you are eating vs should be eating (.8 - 1 gram per pound of body weight), what an ACTUAL serving size looks like, and how many calories you eat on a typical day. 

After some time counting your macros, you will start to be mindful of your portion sizes, amount of protein, and how much food you should be eating in a day because you have seen it by the numbers.

The goal is not to track your macros for the rest of your life, but to build a baseline of knowledge on what your body needs on a daily basis. After some time you will be able to adjust your nutrition (without even counting) based on specific goals you have, lose weight, build muscle, or increase endurance because you know what your baseline is. 

Once you become mindful of the food being put in your body, nutrition is no longer something that is intimidating or a burden, but a tool you can use to accomplish the goal you have in front of you. 

Lesson 3: 

Daily Movement Matters

“Oh god, another person telling me to get my 10,000 steps a day.” Yes. Yes I am. Physically moving your body everyday will increase the calories you burn and make it easier to be in a deficit, but that is only a portion of the positive effects from consistent and daily movement.

I learned this lesson after about two years in the gym. I had gained some muscle and strength, but I had dropped almost no body fat. It didn't make sense to me, I was doing the work but not seeing the result I expected. 

What didn't help was other than 2 hours at the gym I maybe got another 2000 steps in all day. I would retreat into my bedroom and sloth around to play video games.  

A body in motion stays in motion. I am an avid believer that everyone should weightlift, but that isn't an excuse to curl up on the couch or the bed for the rest of the day. Getting outside and going on a daily walk has so many more benefits than burning calories. 

Getting some sunlight, having a moment to yourself, or a quiet unplugged walk with your partner will do just as much good for your mental health as physical. Our lives can be so noisy all the time, taking some time to just be with yourself is so impactful. So yes, you should go on a daily walk a couple times a day, but don't just do it for your body, do it for your mind. 

I hope these were helpful. I hope you were able to take something from this to apply in your own life. No one has all of the answers, and no one is perfect. But you don't need to be, you just need to continue showing up day after day. 

Go crush this week!

Sean

BTY Performance

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