Yet this success did not come without struggle: a wrestling match with the shadow side of discipline—a mental push to define my worth solely through the outcome of my journey, rather than the journey itself.

Despite all my inner work, I fell back into the trap of my own ego.

After losing 140 pounds, I went off the medication Mounjaro (Zepbound). I set out to prove to myself and to the world that I could do this without medication. For nearly a year, I maintained my weight loss without the aid of medication.

At the time, I didn’t realize that my quest to prove I didn’t need Zepbound was rooted in the core lie of my life: “I had to earn my right to exist through performance”. A childhood script that tied my self-worth and acceptance to achievement and results.

The paradox is that the tools I used to achieve success over the past year—weight loss medication, major hip surgery, and a grueling endurance test—became the exact crucible where I would see this lie at play and for what it was—a story “I” told myself, a story I get to rewrite.

Each of these achievements was not a victory of willpower but rather an act of surrender to a greater truth, a truth that taught me that my worth was never in question.

Through the crucible of marathon miles, I realized that I don’t have to prove anything to anyone, even myself. My choice to use Zepbound was irrelevant to my worth—it was merely a tool enabling me to live a fully embodied life on my terms.

1. The Great Surrender: Trading Grit for the Scalpel (Hip Surgery)

In the summer of 2023, my journey transitioned from weight loss to health and fitness. The previous year, my success metric had been easy: the scale was steadily decreasing, and all I had to do was look in the mirror and watch myself slowly transform. Now that the process had concluded, I knew I needed a new metric.

Since I was a young kid, I loved to run. Growing up, I would ride my bike or run with my dad while he was training. I ran my first 10k at 10 years old, the Boulder Boulder in Boulder, Colorado. But somewhere on the journey to 314 pounds, that joy, like many other things, had been lost. After losing the first 100 pounds, I rediscovered the freedom of running. Drawing on that powerful childhood memory and cultivating the joy it brought, it was clear to me that my new success metric would be running.

In October 2023, I ran my first post-weight-loss race, the Jackson Hole Quarter Marathon, followed by the Boise Half Marathon in November 2023. My new “Mountain in the Distance” became running a Marathon—I signed up for the “Boise River Marathon” in early May 2024.

Unfortunately, as my training increased, so did the pain in my hip. I tried everything I could to manage it, including gritting my teeth and pushing through—the Shadow Side of Discipline taking over.

Ultimately, in February 2024, after visiting the orthopedic specialist, I learned I might need a hip replacement, and I may never run again.

The diagnosis was a gut punch!

I found out I had severe osteoarthritis and a labral tear in my right hip, possibly requiring a joint replacement. Running was no longer a healthy option for me for the time being. My initial reaction was a bit of denial. I desperately tried to rationalize a way to keep running—my ego shouted to the universe, “I’ll show you I can run”, rather than face the shame of being unable to perform.

After a few days and after seeing the diagnosis on paper, I finally began to work towards acceptance of this new reality. One of the steps of acceptance was sitting with and labeling my fear.

“Without running, how will I sustain my motivation to be healthy—what if I regain all the weight I lost?”

This was when I saw my attachment to running and how I was making my happiness dependent on my ability to run. One of the most important lessons of my weight loss journey was when it became clear that happiness was not an outcome to achieve; it was a continuous byproduct of the journey itself.

Finding Conscious Discipline

This realization became the cornerstone of my practice of Conscious Discipline—that my worth was not tethered to a marathon goal, but to the daily, compassionate practice of showing up for myself.” My running injury reminded me why I started running in the first place. To be the healthiest version of myself.

It also showed me something important—I had become fixated on my marathon goal and kept running through my injury despite the risk to my health.

At some level, I had tied my happiness to reaching my goal of completing a marathon.

The Good News!

In March 2024, I saw a specialist at the University of Utah Orthopedics Center. He had the best news I could ever get. He could repair my hip without a replacement, and I would likely run again!

We scheduled the surgery for late June, and he told me in the meantime to continue to run within my pain tolerance. The three months leading to the surgery were some of the best runs I have ever had. The universe had taken away something I loved and then suddenly returned it—I ran with nothing but gratitude.

In June 2024, I ran the Teton Dam 10k, two weeks before the surgery. Knowing I had no control over the outcome of the surgery, I set the intention to run this race like it was the last race I would ever run—and because it was free of the burden of performance, I ran my 10k PR: 49 minutes and 13 seconds!

When I arrived for my hip surgery, I did so at complete peace with whatever outcome may come, even one that meant I could never run again.

2. The Lie of Willpower: My Fight to Prove I Didn’t Need Zepbound

In August 2023, my savings card for Mounjaro (Zepbound) expired. My endocrinologist had recommended the medication the year prior because of the combination of obesity, prediabetes, sleep apnea, and high blood pressure. Through a combination of alternate-day fasting, exercise, and Mounjaro, I had successfully lost 140 pounds in less than a year.

While on the journey, I joined a Facebook group with others who were also on Mounjaro for weight loss. One thing I saw that really bothered me was that many people called it their “liquid gold” and it was clear they were convinced that there was no way they could maintain their weight loss without Mounjaro. I could see clearly that they were “clinging” to their ability to have the drug, and it was causing suffering; suffering that I refused to create for myself.

However, I didn’t recognize my ego at play. Seeing their dependence also triggered my own internal shame, because it reflected the root of my Shadow Side’s fear: being fundamentally dependent and flawed.

When my card expired, I decided that I would be different, that I would show the world that you can lose weight with Mounjaro, go off the drug, and keep the weight off. Subconsciously, I tied the success of my entire heroic narrative to a single performance metric: proving my discipline was so pure, it didn’t need the tool.

For nearly a year, I successfully maintained my weight loss, hired a nutrition coach, and experimented with my fasting schedules. Externally, it looked like a highly successful transition, and it was; internally, it was exhausting, a highly pressurized experiment—a year of constantly micro-managing every input, a subconscious hum of perfectionist pressure. The Shadow Side kept the pressure at a relentless pitch, driven by the little voice that screamed: ‘Don’t fuck up. Don’t let your entire story become the proof of a fraud.” It would take the clarity gained from the surgery and the marathon ahead for me to see the power this voice held over me—the voice was the hum of performance anxiety itself, which proved my worth was irrelevant to the tool I chose.

As I sat motionless in recovery the week following the surgery, I had a powerful realization. I had built a health and fitness structure on three pillars: Mindset, Movement, and Fuel. A core pillar, movement, was completely taken away for 30 to 45 days and would not be fully restored for at least 4 months. I felt out of control; The surgery had exposed my ego's perfectionism at play. In the space of this awareness, I was presented with a choice: surrender or potentially regain the weight I had worked so hard to lose.

Later that week, I met with my endocrinologist. He strongly recommended I go back on Zepbound. Sitting with my options, the choice was clear—I would rather go back on Zepbound and continue living life on my terms than succumb to the consequences of my ego’s drive for perfection.

3. The Crucible of Consciousness: The Marathon

For the next eleven months, I slowly recovered from my hip surgery. With the aid of Zepbound and alternate-day fasting (36 hours), I lost the post-surgery weight and continued to maintain my weight loss. As my physical therapist told me, I had to “earn the right to run again” by completing the post-surgery recovery plan.

In late October 2024, I had my first, really slow 30-minute run. Over the next seven months, I built my running base.

Towards the end of May 2025, I committed to running the City of Trees Marathon in Boise, Idaho, on October 11. Typically, I would immediately sign up and pay for the race, locking myself into the goal. This time, I consciously paused that habit. I committed to the training while, simultaneously committing to not running the marathon if, deep in my heart, my body told me it was not a healthy decision. The goal was the process, not the finish line.

As my training progressed, so did the miles and time of the “long run”. During a two to three-hour run, there is plenty of time to ponder and explore the deepest recesses of my mind. At one point, I found myself asking, “Do I actually enjoy this?” I couldn’t find a word, only a feeling, that can most accurately be described as “fulfillment”. It also became clear that enjoyment is not black-and-white.

It dawned on me that in the long run, I get to intentionally step into a dark cloud—the chaos of my past and my mom’s alcoholism, the shadow of my own fear. During the run, I’m not running from the feeling. I’m not trying to escape it. I’m moving towards it. I’m running through it. I’m transcending it. Through this process of running through and transcending that dark shadow of my mom’s alcoholism (the fear I carried within myself), I am giving myself the love and clarity I craved as a kid.

As race day approached, my true task became clear: it was not to achieve a time, but to maintain presence. I shifted my marathon intention from focusing on a finish time to the meaning I placed in the entire experience itself: my personal rite of passage, an integration of seven years of personal growth work and healing.

It would be my Crucible of Consciousness.

Despite all my inner work, the ego found its way back into the driver’s seat.

Even though my body told me a four-and-a-half-hour marathon was my realistic goal, my ego wanted to listen to my training plan, which had me finishing in sub-four hours. My ego dreamed of “bragging rights” for running my first marathon under four hours. I started the race with a plan to run a 9:20 pace for 10 miles, 9:05 for 10, and then under 9 minutes for the last six miles. It was the ultimate pacing error—my shadow side’s last stand, hijacking my pace in one last attempt at a performance goal.

The Inner Duel: The Test of Presence

Past mile 13, the price of my pacing error began to play out in my body. Each mile that followed, my pace crept towards my body’s realistic marathon pace, somewhere around 10:30. Interestingly, it was at mile thirteen that I would have my first mental test—I had expected to see my dad at the halfway point, cheering me on. Passing the halfway point, he was nowhere to be seen. My heart sank.

In that sinking moment, I chose to look inward, giving my inner child the emotional affirmation I had been seeking from the external world. I didn’t need the validation; I was the sovereign source of my own comfort. A few short miles later, I passed the apartment I lived in after college. Running by, I looked at the parking lot, which was one of the last places I saw my mom alive—the spot I had to send her away, setting one last boundary with her alcoholism, my heart sinking as I watched her drive away.

At that place, I let the full emotion of the experience wash over me, bringing its dark cloud into the run. I didn’t run from it; I ran through it, transcending the trauma with each forward footstep, until I could finally see the highest version of my mom in the distance, cheering me on.

The next few miles took me through the section of the Boise Greenbelt where my grandfather did his morning walk every day up until his battle with cancer. It was here that I found myself calling upon his strength, which had been the pillar of stability growing up with my mom’s alcoholism.

As the miles got tougher and tougher and my mind wanted to take me to some other place, I repeated the mantra of my training miles, “come back to now Matt”. This was the practice of Conscious Discipline I had created for myself during the long months of training, where I proved I could survive the chaos of the long run without resorting to control or quitting.

Approaching Mile 21—now deep in the six most brutal miles of the marathon—I saw my dad waiting for me. It was the lift I needed, but unlike Mile 13, his presence was a bonus, not a requirement. I had already affirmed my worth, and now his support became the final push I needed to declare: no matter what, I am finishing this marathon.

The Final Quarter-Mile: The True Finish Line

As I approached the final quarter-mile of the race, having survived the six most brutal miles on inner grit and sheer consciousness, my mother-in-law, father-in-law, and my son were waiting to give me one last cheer and encouragement. As I passed by, my son, who absolutely hates running, decided to run me in. He ran by my side in flip flops, telling me, “You got this, Dad. I believe in you”.

At this point, I was physically and emotionally raw, and my son’s act of love broke me open.

Reflecting on my marathon, I realized I didn’t run over 500 miles to prepare for a marathon; I ran all those miles—the culmination of seven years of personal growth work—to be ready for that most important quarter-mile with my son. He unknowingly, in that moment, became my greatest teacher, showing me what an act of pure affirmation, rooted only in love and free of the need for approval, looked like.

4. The New Blueprint: Discipline as Self-Care

The true victory of my marathon was not my 4 hour and 37 minute finish time. It was the life lesson of Conscious Discipline—cultivated over four and a half months and 500 miles of training—that my worth is a given, the starting point for all things. My happiness is not the outcome of my actions, but a direct result of the moment-to-moment presence I bring to them.

The past 19 months served as a reminder that the trap of the ego is inevitable. The real shift is in how I play the game of life.

The Old Game

The old paradigm meant playing “How do I not fall into the trap of my own ego?”—a game designed for failure that only fed the exhaustive perfectionism (the hum).

The New Game

The game is not avoiding the trap, but defining the response when the trap inevitably springs: “How quickly can I become aware of my ego at play and respond to that part of me with presence and love?”

This begins with a combination of mental and physical awareness: noticing the subtle hum of pushing in my mind and the sensation of clenching tension in my body, particularly in my legs. My job is not to squash that part of me and make it go away; my job is to pause, take a deep breath, and get curious about why the buzzing and tension are there in the first place.

Because these triggers hold the gold that will lead to my next moment of growth and acceleration towards my purpose.

Closing Thoughts: A Meditation on Healing

Journal Entry: What Does It Mean To Heal? (Circa 2022)

What does it mean to heal?

I used to think healing meant that I would fix what was wrong with me. That after I healed, I would be perfect, my life would be perfect. I would be happy.

Today, I believe that we are never truly healed. To be healed would be something in the past; hence, I wouldn’t be experiencing it right now. As soon as I declare I’m healed, I’m done with it and am therefore no longer healed—I was healed.

I think we are always healing because healing isn’t a destination; it’s a lifelong journey. A journey of continuously looking at what is inside, right now, and showing a willingness to unpack what is there and experience it. There will always be triggers and internal conflicts; healing is a process of learning to accept them and learning to work with them rather than living life in spite of them.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a moment in my healing journey where there was a shift in my being. A change in perspective where my past and my wounding no longer owned me. If I were reading my story before it was written, I would have perceived this as the moment I was fixed.

“Fixed” was as far from the truth as I could ever be, as it was the moment I fully embraced the parts of me that I perceived as needing fixed, taking complete ownership of them. It was an act of surrender to what it is. If my life were a picnic and what I perceived as needing fixed was the rain, this was the moment I made the choice to have the picnic in the rain. Feeling each drop of water as it fell upon me, and choosing to savor the flavors of the picnic basket of life, rain or shine.

This was the moment I took ownership of my story, my emotions, and my life…

As powerful as this moment was, it was also rather insignificant. It was just one moment in time, preceded and followed by many others. Without the continuous moments of choosing to take ownership of my life right now, over and over, that moment would be meaningless. Like the first breath after a breath hold, if I hold on to it forever, I am not breathing, I am not living.

When I take ownership of my life, I view every day as an opportunity to take ownership of my emotions, to respond to and work with my triggers in new and more effective ways. I don’t reject the internal conflict within; I embrace it and view it as a teacher. A guide pointing me in the direction of my purpose. I view every day as an experiment that informs my next steps. I no longer seek perfection; I only seek what works.

I get to practice the art of healing, everyday.

I’ve had many people ask me, how did you do it? How are you maintaining your weight loss even without the weight loss medication [Mounjaro/Zebound]?

My answer is there isn’t a magic formula to my success—and yes, there is irony in the title of this article being a formula.

The truth is you can pick any plan, tools, and formula for health you want, as long as it is not a quick fix and it is something you can follow for the long term.

When you pick a plan, you commit to the lifestyle and habits that make up that plan.

You create a healthy lifestyle.

How have I been able to follow the healthy lifestyle I have created?

Three words come to mind — consistency, flexibility, and compassion!

Consistency has arguably been the most important attribute I’ve cultivated in the past two years.

When I talk about consistency, I’m not talking about rigidity or a self-hating form of discipline. I’ve honestly practiced a lot of flexibility within the context of the consistency of my routine.

I’ve practiced a lot of self-compassion and gratitude.

For example, at some point, I realized that having over 100 pounds to lose was something to be grateful for. That I had so much weight to lose ensured that I would learn to practice what I needed to do for the rest of my life to be healthy. I learned to be consistent.

To be successful, I had no choice but to take my health and fitness one day at a time, one night at a time. I had to practice patience and treat myself with compassion.

In the process, I’ve learned that this weight loss and fitness journey is a journey without an end — it is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life with consistency!

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Creating a healthy lifestyle

Bringing the attributes to life—create habits you can practice consistently and flexibly while offering yourself compassion for the bumps in the road.

Step one: Recognize less is more.

Go-big or go-home is a setup for failure for the typical person.

You would be much better served by picking an activity or plan you can consistently do for 365 days than trying to grind your way through 75 days of rigorous pain to force yourself to accomplish some arbitrary goal.

Starting a new habit requires you to give the time that is going to something else to your habit. Whether it is extra sleep, scrolling, or watching TV, your new habit will occupy the space currently occupied by other activities.

This is why starting small is a more practical approach than taking on go-big or go-home fitness challenges. It gives us time to adjust to the space the new habit will take up. It allows us to cultivate the habit as part of our lifestyle.

As a meditation teacher and wellness advocate, Rebecca Doring points out in her podcast Inner Critic Freedom - Episode 181:

Key takeaways: Episode #181: The key to Starting New Habits So You’ll Stay Consistent.

“Habits are something that we want to last… If you start a habit, you are saying you want to live the lifestyle of this habit…”

“We need some mental and emotional space to get used to this new lifestyle and let go of that old lifestyle…”

“…[when] we take on too much too fast, we go from not doing this habit at all to wanting to do it 110%…”

"…[then] something happens that throws off the routine, and it all goes away—the most recent thing you have not established a connection to, a routine, a habit with, goes away first…”

Rebecca Doring - Inner Critic Freedom Podcast

Taking a less is more approach; we start small so it’s easier to win, and as we get better, we add more. But, before we add more, we must build consistency by building our habits in a lasting way.

Step two: Get alignment with your values and craft your health and fitness mission statement.

Once you have committed to a less is more approach to cultivating new healthy habits the next step is to get in alignment with your values and craft your health and fitness mission statement.

According to Brad Stulburg, the author of “Master of Change” and “The Practice of Groundedness”, core values comprise your fundamental beliefs and guiding principles. The things that matter to you the most.

The first step in clarifying your core values is to craft a list of the attributes that resonate with and light you up.

For example, the list of attributes that form my core values are:

• Vibrancy

• Presence

• Joy

• Excitement

• Love

Once you have the list of attributes, take some time to form a mission statement to guide you. This is your why.

Here is my health fitness mission statement:

To live the most extended, vibrant life possible. To show up for myself, my wife, and my kids with joy and excitement. For my kids to not experience the pain I went through of losing a parent at 25 years old.

This is my why. It gets me up in the morning to work out and keeps me on track, even when I don’t want to.

No matter what happens, I can always come back to this.

Step three: Set goals in alignment with your why.

Now that you're clear on your values and why, it's time to set your goals. These goals will orient you toward a vision of realizing your mission statement.

Using the mission statement from step two as a guide, set some meaningful, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART) goals.

Keep steps one and two in mind here:

Remember, LESS IS MORE, and being meaningful equals aligning with your values!

Instead of “I want to weigh 150 pounds,” Try something like “I want to hike the continental divide with my family by the 4th of July.”

The key here is to remember that your goals are only your compass, something to orient on.

In the past, my goals were a destination I was fixating on in the distant future, my salvation, and the eventual source of my happiness. My goals were my perceived escape from my suffering and a distraction from the current moment. A reminder that I need to be anywhere but right here, right now.

Today, my goals are my compass. They are the mountains in the distance, reminding me I’m going the right way.

My focus is on the current moment—the actions I’m taking today.

Step four: Pick a plan you can follow.

After establishing your less is more meaningful SMART goals, the next step is establishing your plan.

At this point, we are talking about the commitment to the actions and habits you will practice to reach your goals. These habits and actions will bring your health and fitness statement to life daily.

Here are some key points to remember when designing your plan and picking your daily habits and actions:

1. In alignment with your current reality—less is more.

2. Rituals over routines.

3. Tools over fixes—no magic bullets.

4. Consistency, Consistency, Consistency.

Pick Your Plan: 1 - Be alignment with your current reality.

First, you must remember to be in alignment with your current reality.

For example, if you weigh 300 pounds and haven’t run in 10 years, picking a marathon training plan for your daily actions would not be in alignment with your current reality. It would not be something you could do with consistency—picking a daily thirty-minute walk would be an example of choosing something in alignment with your current reality.

This is where less is more comes into play because your actions will be sustainable and easier to practice with consistency.

Second, you must accept yourself where you are right now. When you do this, you allow yourself to experience happiness right now!

You are not waiting for some goal to be happy.

You are not resisting the truth about what is — i.e., your current situation—as an obstacle to happiness.

You realize that right now, there is nothing to fix.

Though this may seem paradoxical — to change, you must accept the way it is.

This is because when you let go of the tension of wanting to be somewhere else, you can relax into the serenity of taking action aligned with who you are in the current moment.

When you cling to a goal and resist the truth, you create internal tension, and over time, be it tomorrow or six months, this tension will become more than your mind can handle.

And this is why we quit.

Because willpower alone is not enough.

Action becomes sustainable when it is not fighting the internal tension of clinging and resisting.

How to accept yourself where you are at.

How do you accept yourself where you are at?

This can be a frustrating concept to practice in the beginning because, after all, what you want is the feeling on the other side of your goal, and maybe, in reality, your health depends on meeting your goal—hence, it's easy to attach to the result of achieving your goal as the source of the feeling you desire and the fix for what is wrong right now.

For example, before I made the shift to accepting where I was at, I was rejecting the fact that I weighed 316 pounds. In other words, in my mind, I was saying there is something wrong with me because I weigh this much; I must fix this.

This created suffering and resistance within me. It shifted the intention of my actions away from my values and why to fixing what I viewed as wrong with me. The result was cultivating negative feelings and an attachment to the outcome.

When we are attached to an outcome, for example, losing weight, we have outsourced our happiness to that result. We are left feeling anxious in the current moment. We suffer.

The first step to acceptance is viewing what is true in the current moment as just what is and not adding meaning to it.

To do this, we must drop our story and focus only on the facts. This requires objectively looking at the story you are telling yourself about where you are at and seeing it for what it is - a story.

The second step to acceptance is to focus on creating the feeling you desire upon accomplishing your goal through the effort of your actions today.

What about your goal lights you?

It could be the feeling of aliveness after a long run or the pride of being fit.

When you are practicing your habit, for example, going for a walk, rather than focusing on accomplishing your goal, shift your focus to creating the feeling you desire—for instance, aliveness and pride from accomplishing the effort of completing your habit.

The third step to self-acceptance is to practice gratitude for the lesson of the moment. When you look for gratitude in the lesson of the moment, you shift your mindset from something is wrong here to being open to what is possible.

In the past, the reason I did not have consistency with my health was that I had a goal-oriented, outcome-based approach. In my mind, I needed to work hard to achieve some goal, and then I would be magically healthy for the rest of my life. 

This led to me always looking for the “golden ticket” or “magic fix” that would solve my problems, which in turn led to me taking unsustainable approaches to weight loss. 

This pattern of inconsistency repeated itself over and over until I was willing to let go of my story about my health and fitness.

I had to accept the truth about where I was. I had to let go of thinking that being skinny was the key to my happiness. I had to be willing to let go of my fantasies about finding a magic bullet.

Letting go of tying my happiness to my weight loss allowed me to choose to be happy even when I still weighed over 300 pounds. Letting go of tying my happiness to losing weight allowed me to shift my thinking.

I went from thinking there is something wrong here, ie. I weigh 316 pounds, to finding gratitude for where I was and seeing the more significant lesson of the moment.

In my case, the lesson was to learn consistency. I needed to practice being healthy for an extended time. I had so much weight to lose it would take a long time to get to a “healthy” weight.

This was a gift because it forced me to slow down and make sustainable weight-loss choices. It allowed me to view my health choices as the actions I will be taking for the rest of my life. It caused me to realize that my health and fitness are a journey without an ending.

*Note: if your inner critic is running wild, you may have some inner work to do before you can practice true acceptance of where you are now. See my article on “Accepting Yourself—With Boundaries” for more on this.

Pick Your Plan: 2 - Cultivate Rituals, not Routines.

The difference between rituals and routines comes down to intention.

Routines are something you do to accomplish an agenda, like making your bed every day so that your room is clean. Routines are a means to an end; the only meaning behind them is the agenda itself.

Rituals are similar to routines, with a big exception. They are something you do to cultivate a feeling. Rituals are less about the outcome and more about the meaning you put into them.

As you design your plan and create your daily habits its important to cultivate rituals rather than just creating a bunch of goal oriented routines.

When you cultivate meaningful rituals, you are much more likely to sustain doing them in the long term.

Pick Your Plan: 3 - Tools over fixes—no magic bullets.

A trap that I have fallen into many times in my life is looking for the “golden ticket” that is going to save me from all my problems.

Up until my Moment of Surrender on July 31, 2022 every diet I had ever done was an attempt to fix myself. Each and every time I had gone into it thinking this is the “magic fix”. I became attached to the diet and its intended outcome as what was going to fix me and make me happy.

The truth is Mindset alone is not going to accomplish your health and fitness goals. You will have to take actions that will get you to where you want to go.

The key is how you view those actions.

Are they a fix or are they just the tool you are using?

When I showed up at the endocrinologist's office in September of 2022 I had already shifted my mindset and intention. I wasn’t looking for a fix. In fact, I went in into his office in acceptance of the possibility that he may not be able to offer me anything that would help. I was completely open-minded to any possibility.

Pick Your Plan: 4 - Consistency, Consistency, Consistency.

Creating a healthy lifestyle is not about quick fixes.

When creating your health and fitness plan, it's imperative to think about sustainability over the long term. Think 365, not 30, 75, or even 90.

Consistently repeating a small habit for 365 days will have infinitely more long-term impact than repeating a big action for 30 days and then going back to an unhealthy lifestyle.

The longer you practice a habit, the more ingrained it becomes, and the more likely the plan you pick will lead to creating the healthy lifestyle you desire.

Step five: Focus on the step (and feeling) in front of you.

The final step to creating a healthy lifestyle is to focus on the action in front of you.

This is the workout today. The food you are eating today. The things you are doing today.

OR

The act of setting your intention for things you will do tomorrow—for example, setting your gym clothes out before you go to bed so that you are ready to go in the morning.

The critical thing to do here is to keep your current actions aligned with your vision and connect with how they make you feel in the present moment…

And know that your ego WILL try to pull you off track.

My ego has a remarkable doing this.

It has a way of hijacking my efforts to be healthy and taking them too far.

It can be subtle but starts with a feeling of shame that I quickly skip, followed by thoughts of fixing...

For example, if I eat poorly the following day, when I wake up, there will be a moment of shame followed by a stream of thoughts of wanting to go on a long fast or be super strict with my diet to fix...

Or I might think of a vacation we plan to take this summer, and pretty soon, I’m thinking about how I will look in July.

I've learned to become aware of this tendency very fast.

When I become aware that I’m doing this, my next step is to look up and determine if my thinking and actions are taking me in the right direction. Are they cultivating the desired feeling or creating tension and suffering?

Am I facing west towards the mountain I want to climb in July? Am I taking the actions that will get me there and filling my bucket right now? — Or Am I facing south toward the beach, imagining having a body that will get me validation? Are my actions leaving me feeling empty?

One key way to practice flexibility and to keep your daily actions focused on the feelings you desire is to shift from making decisions to making choices.

Shift from Making Decisions to Choices:

Is there a difference between a decision and a choice? After all, either way, you make a selection from a subset of options and then move forward.

I’ve come to realize on my healing journey that the difference between making a decision and a choice comes down to how I’m left feeling afterward. It’s all about intention.

Here is the definition I use:

DECISION: A selection made after making various logical considerations.

CHOICE: A selection made after making various logical considerations, exploring them, setting them aside, and then connecting to what feels right.

In other words, a decision comes after using your mind to logically analyze something and pick what you think will work best to attain an outcome or result.

A choice involves looking at all the options, examining and exploring them, then setting them aside and doing what feels in alignment with your truth…

A decision involves eliminating and narrowing options and picking what best serves the desired outcome; It involves an agenda.

A choice is all about what feels right and comes from a place of creation and possibility; It results in freedom.

When you make decisions you experience the “Have-To’s”.

Ie: I have to go to the gym today.

When you make choices you experience the “Get-To’s”.

Ie: I get to go to the gym today.

My experience has shown me that the get-to’s take me a lot further than the have-to’s.

When I shifted to making health and fitness choices instead of decisions the internal resistance to my actions dropped. I actually started to enjoy the process.

I experienced a sense of internal freedom.

Continuously Celebrate Success

The best way to keep the action you are about to take aligned with your vision is to celebrate the step you just took!

Success IS a constant feedback loop of wins and challenges that reenergizes and informs your mindset along the way.

Celebrating my success and challenges has been critical to sustaining my momentum throughout my weight loss journey.

Each time I celebrated a small win, I connected to the feelings I wanted to cultivate in the current moment.

When discussing celebrating success, it’s easy to focus on the wins. In my view, it’s just as important to talk about our failures and challenges because that is where growth happens.

When we have an opened-minded Mindset, our failures and challenges are no longer presented as obstacles to accomplishing our dreams. They become the Sensei of life, teaching us the lesson we need to learn to grow.

Our failures and challenges point us to the Emotional Work we must do as we become more integrated human beings.

As I reflect on my weight loss journey, I can see that the most meaningful times were found in failure and challenge — The moment I accepted that failure or challenge and surrendered to the lesson it was trying to teach me.

Every time I accepted my failure and challenge and surrendered to life’s lesson, I was unburdened by the weight of a wound from the past.

Closing Thoughts

I’ll close today with something I wrote back in March of 2022; It was one of the moments when I first accepted the truth of my health situation. The moment I realized I had let go of what was not working in my health and fitness. 

What do I have to let go of to be healthy?

March 13, 2022

This morning I woke up after the fourth or fifth day of completely letting go of eating healthy. I’m not even going to sugarcoat it, I drove the train off the tracks and over the cliff.

I can look back and see where the dominoes began to fall; I let the stress of work and a busy week throw me out of my workday routine…

On the other side of the stress and the unhealthy binge, I am pulled to overcorrect the wheel in the other direction. The pushing thoughts are here. ”I’ll start a super strict routine”, “I’ll fast for a week”, “I’m going strictly low carb”...

I have a really hard time staying in a sustainable, steady state. I yo-you from one extreme to the other. Extremes are what I know; I have a really hard time with - consistency. (I struggled to even think of the word to put there)

This makes sense. Growing up with an alcoholic parent was extreme. There was no consistency. When my mom was drinking it was chaos; When she was sober she pushed hard to be perfect, for us to be perfect.

Normal was a perfect house or a disaster zone. Normal was never consistent.

So what do I have to let go of to be healthy? I need to let go of my fantasies.

First I need to let go of the fantasy that I’m going to find the magic solution where I push myself really hard and “then I will be healthy”. 

I also need to let go of the fantasy that I won’t be pulled into chaos, and that I will heal myself in a way where I won’t be triggered to completely go off the rails.

Finally, I need to let go of the idea that being healthy is something I will get to “someday”. Being healthy is something I have to do right now, every day, over and over.

The lesson of this moment is that I’m not going to heal my way to health… 

There is no magic fix waiting for me around the corner. I am being called to surrender to the truth… 

The truth is that I have no idea how to be consistent with my health; I daydream about being skinny while plotting the perfect plan to get there. That when I’m “on fire” and working my ass off all I can think about is the next pizza.

The opportunity is to learn to work with the parts of me that want to pull me to extremes. To build a consistent, sustainable structure I can lean on. So I can provide those parts of me what they need to feel safe, soothed, seen, supported & challenged.

When I look at my health in this way, I see I already have everything I need; I’m doing this in other areas of my life. My challenge is to integrate my health routine into my daily rituals in a consistent and sustainable way. And to create space for and be with the parts of me that struggle with it.

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In the case of my health, the problem was that I weighed over 300 pounds.

I would ruminate on how to solve the problem. It consumed me.

Losing 140 pounds taught me something important:

I do not have all the answers, nor do I have to figure them out…

I become lost in my thoughts when trying to find all the answers—I am not present. I bypass my feelings and what is going on around me. I reject the current moment through avoidance. 

My ego thinks it has all the answers. It believes it can “fix” me.

My ego is not open to feedback, only confirmation of its narrow view of the world and me. My ego looks for happiness tomorrow, next week, month, and year. The answer to my happiness is somewhere in the future, somewhere else.

My ego stands by to hijack me at a moment's notice. It will latch on to anything, even my perception of my awareness.

Getting off the hamster wheel.

How have I learned to manage my tendency to overthink, keep my ego in check, and get out of the cycle of overthinking? 

First, I’ve learned to bring awareness to this tendency—to become good at noticing that my mind feels like a hamster on the wheel.

Second, I’ve learned to remember that “I am not a problem to solve.”

Finally, I find stillness in meditation and breathwork.

Example mediation for creating calmness and presence:

I close my eyes, breathe, and feel what's happening inside. I pick a feeling in my body and bring my complete attention to it. With my deep attention on the feeling, I open my eyes and fix my gaze on an object. Finally, focusing on the feeling and my gaze on the object, I listen to the sounds around me and pick a sound to focus on. If thoughts creep into my mind, I refocus my attention on the feeling, the object, and the sound.

Learning to find stillness and bring awareness to my overthinking has allowed me to create the internal space to heal the parts of myself I learned to view as something I needed to fix, including my health and fitness.

It has also enabled me to see the trap of the overthinking, overdoing cycle.

The overthinking, overdoing trap.

When we overthink our health and fitness, we treat ourselves as a problem to solve. We are trying to fix what we perceive as wrong.

When we overthink our health and fitness, we tend to take a go-big or go-home approach to fitness—we end up on the hamster wheel.

I did this for years.

The go-big or go-home approach to fitness is a setup for failure for the typical person.

You would be much better served by picking an activity or plan you can consistently do for 365 days than trying to grind your way through 75 days of rigorous pain to force yourself to accomplish some arbitrary goal.

This is not to say you shouldn’t do the 75-day hard if that’s where your edge is; if your intention is right, go for it!

However, in the past, my intention was superficial every time I attempted to take on a challenge like that. It was the magic bullet that would fix what was wrong with me—I was overthinking my weight loss and treating myself as a problem to solve.

I took on countless diets and fitness challenges, looking for the golden ticket to health.

What has changed in the past two years of my weight loss and fitness journey is that I am no longer looking to fix what I perceive as wrong—I’m bringing awareness to my habit of overthinking my fitness.

Questions I ask myself often to bring awareness to my overthinking:

Question 1: What am I trying to fix? What is driving me to numb out or push myself to extremes?

Question 2: What do I need to let go of to accept these parts of myself that drive me to numb out or push myself to extremes?

Question 3: What are these parts of me trying to communicate? What is the unmet need?

These questions always lead me to this realization and question:

If I accept that my triggers with food and my instinct to respond to shame with controlling behaviors will always be present for me—what do I need to do differently so that I can respond rather than react to those triggers?

Changing the game.

I realized something huge at some point during my journey.

I was playing the wrong game my whole life.

Before this journey, my game was: “How do I never become triggered to numb out with food again and control myself to be healthy at all times?”

The game I am playing now is:

How fast can I become aware that I am triggered in a way that wants me to numb out with food or feeling shame that is evoking my controlling behaviors—When I realize that I am triggered to numb out or feeling the internal pressure to push myself I can respond in that space I’ve created with love and compassion.

Often, the most loving action I can take is not taking the next bite of food or trying to push myself harder but taking the next slow, deliberate breath.

Closing thoughts

I will close today with a note I shared with my brothers in the Man Talks Alliance in February 2022. It was a moment of reflection following my morning meditation, and I realized that my tendency to overthink wasn’t fixing anything; instead, it was leaving me dysregulated.

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Figuring it out leaves me dysregulated.

February 23, 2022

This morning, my thinker was busy. I had an unsettling dream last night, and my thinker went to work trying to figure it out. My morning was filled with thoughts of potential meaning.

During my breathwork, I created some space between myself and these thoughts.

I witnessed the little boy [in me] trying to figure it out.

After my breathwork, I sat in stillness, feeling in, but then I got caught again in the loop of trying to figure out the meaning of my dream. As I became aware of my thoughts, I heard all the voices in my head at once… It was chaos, and then suddenly clarity…

“The act of figuring it out creates dysregulation in me…”  

My dreams and thoughts just are, and I can just let them be. When I let myself get pulled in to figure them out, I am jumping in the river and being carried away. I am no longer in the present moment and no longer grounded on the shore. My thinking triggers a cascade of emotions, and in response, all my protectors show up to save me [from my self-created problem]…

It makes sense that a part of me would want to figure it all out. I can see that little boy, alone and scared, trying to figure out what to do [about his mom’s alcoholism]…

My job is to calm and comfort that part of me and let him know it's safe now. We don’t have to have all the answers.

A note on parts work from Psychology Today:

KEY POINTS

• Parts Work is a therapeutic lens that assumes that each of us has many different parts to our minds and psyches.

• Parts Work helps us generate new, creative solutions to internal problems we’re facing.

• Parts Work can help us understand the unique topography of our internal psychological landscape.

  —Psychology Today

In the past, I had taken on every diet and fitness challenge under the sun: calorie counting, low carb, low fat, keto, paleo, 75 Day Hard, Whole 30, fasting, a juice diet, and even a potato diet!

And every one of these efforts failed.

What was the reason for these failures?

My success and happiness were tied to my expectations of the outcome of these efforts!

What changed?

I began to take a mindful approach to my health and fitness, shifting my intention from achieving outcomes to creating fulfilling emotions.

When the intention behind our actions is focused on achieving an agenda, it is not sustainable and depletes our energy. This is because we seek a feeling that we hope to get at some point in the future “someday.” As a result, we are left feeling empty in the current moment.

When the intention behind our actions provides meaning and is connected to our values and purpose, it becomes sustainable because it creates a feedback loop that reenergizes us. We continuously cultivate feelings that align with our why in the current moment, and as a result, we are left feeling fulfilled.

Five steps for a mindful approach to health & fitness.

Here are my five steps for a mindful and fulfilling approach to health and fitness.

1: Let go of expectations.

When we put expectations on ourselves, we attach our happiness and success to achieving that specific outcome.

When we are attached to an outcome, such as losing weight, we have outsourced our happiness to that result. We are left feeling anxious in the current moment, and we suffer.

The key to acceptance is viewing what is true in the current moment as just what is and not adding meaning to it.

We must drop our story and focus only on the facts to do this. This requires objectively looking at the story you are telling yourself about where you are at and seeing it for what it is - a story.

After losing 140 pounds and coming off the weight loss medication Mounjaro (Zebound), I was honestly really nervous about keeping the weight off.

Over the summer of 2023, I cultivated a renewed love for running — After coming off Mounjaro, I put all my energy into running and eventually committed to running a marathon.

Running a marathon had become my new metric of success. It kept me showing up for myself every day. However, shortly after running a half marathon in November 2023, I started to get severe pain in my hip. When my marathon training went into full swing, the pain became unbearable.

As my training progressed, I tried to work around my hip pain. I went to physical therapy, took a few weeks off, changed my strike pattern, focused on my cadence, and even started the walk-run method.

Nothing worked! Every time I ran, I felt pain deep in my hip. In my gut, I knew there was no way I was going to be able to run a marathon, but I wasn’t willing to accept this. I ran through the pain.

Finally, in mid-February, I saw an orthopedic and got an MRI. The diagnosis was a gut punch!

I found out I have severe osteoarthritis in my right hip and multiple labral tears.

Running is no longer an option for the time being.

This was the wake-up call I needed. I had shifted from running for my health to running despite my health.

My expectations of completing a marathon drove me—my ego was at the wheel.

I had been ignoring what was true in the moment, my hip injury. I believed the story I was telling myself about what it would mean about me if I couldn’t run.

After I did some inner work and reflection, I understood my story and fear.

“Without running, how will I sustain my motivation to be healthy — what if I regain all the weight I lost?”

Acknowledging this story allowed me to look at the facts objectively.

I called the doctor to ask straightforward questions about what would happen if I kept running. The answer was that I would destroy any hope of a less invasive hip scope and guarantee that I would be getting a hip replacement.

Without my story distorting my reality, I could sit with the impact of this information.

After creating space by clarifying my story and examining the facts, I was able to let go of my expectations of running a marathon. This allowed me to work through the adversity of this injury with much less suffering.

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2: Get clear on your core values and your why.

Once you have let go of your expectations, the next mindful step is to clarify your core values and your why.

According to author Brad Stulburg, core values comprise your fundamental beliefs and guiding principles. The things that matter to you the most.

The first step in clarifying your core values is to craft a list of the attributes that resonate with and light you up.

For example, the list of attributes that form my core values are:

• Vibrancy

• Presence

• Joy

• Excitement

• Love

Once you have the list of attributes, take some time to form a mission statement to guide you. This is your why.

Here is my health fitness mission statement:

To live the most extended, vibrant life possible. To show up for myself, my wife, and my kids with joy and excitement. For my kids to not experience the pain I went through of losing a parent at 25 years old.

This is my why. It gets me up in the morning to work out and keeps me on track, even when I don’t want to.

No matter what happens, I can always come back to this.

3: Orient on your vision.

Now that you're clear on your values and why, it's time to set your goals. These goals will be your orientation in moving toward a vision of realizing your mission statement.

Using the mission statement from step two as a guide, set some meaningful, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART) goals.

Instead of “I want to weigh 150 pounds,” Try something like “I want to hike the continental divide with my family by the 4th of July.” Remember that being meaningful equals aligning with your values.

When I took time to pause and reflect on my running injury, I quickly determined that I had some inner work to do and that I needed new goals and actions that were consistent with my new reality. Goals and actions that pointed me toward my values.

Given that I am likely facing hip surgery, my new goal is to be in the best shape I can be before my surgery by keeping up my VO2 max and improving my core, hip, and leg strength. To lose an additional five to ten pounds, which will aid in reducing joint impact and improve my post-surgery recovery.

The key here is to remember that your goals are only your compass, something to orient on.

In the past, my goals were a destination I was fixating on in the distant future, my salvation, and the eventual source of my happiness. My goals were my perceived escape from my suffering and a distraction from the current moment. A reminder that I need to be anywhere but right here, right now.

Today, my goals are my compass. They are the mountains in the distance, reminding me I’m going the right way.

My focus is on the current moment—the actions I’m taking today.

4: Focus on the step in front of you.

Now that you have oriented your vision with meaningful goals, the next step is to focus on the action in front of you.

This is the workout today. The food you are eating today. The things you are doing today.

OR

The act of setting your intention for things you will do tomorrow—for example, setting your gym clothes out before you go to bed so that you are ready to go in the morning.

The critical thing to do here is to keep your current actions aligned with your vision and connect with how they make you feel in the present moment…

And know that your ego WILL try to pull you off track.

My ego has a remarkable doing this.

It did it just this week—I caught myself wanting to do more than where I was at, to lose weight like I did at the beginning of my journey, even though I know that's not realistic right now.

My job is to recognize that my ego is at play and that it has hijacked my efforts to be healthy and taken them too far.

I know to look for subtle clues. This usually shows up for me as a feeling of shame that I quickly skip, followed by thoughts of fixing it.

For example, if I eat poorly the following day when I wake up, I will feel shame, followed by a stream of thoughts about going on a long fast, being super strict with my diet, or working out harder than I need to.

All these thoughts have something in common. They are trying to fix something I perceive as wrong!

They are not about feeling good today—they are trying to escape what I did yesterday so I can feel good tomorrow.

Another place my ego hijacks my fitness efforts is by taking me way out into the future. I might think of a vacation we plan to take this summer, and pretty soon, I’m thinking about how I will look in July.

I've learned to become aware of this tendency very fast.

When I become aware that I’m doing this, my next step is to look up and determine if my thinking and actions are taking me in the right direction. Are they cultivating the desired feeling or creating tension and suffering?

Am I facing west toward the mountain I want to climb in July? Am I taking the actions that will get me there and filling my bucket right now? Or Am I facing south toward the beach, imagining having a body that will validate me? Are my actions leaving me feeling empty?

5: Celebrate Success Daily!

The best way to keep the action you are about to take aligned with your vision is to celebrate the step you just took!

I make it a daily habit to celebrate the small wins.

• Each workout.

• Catching myself moving toward or even in an old, unhealthy pattern and stopping it.

• Sticking with my rituals.

• Remembering to give myself grace when I slip.

• Sticking with my nutrition and fasting plans.

• Handling the daily challenges that arise.

• Letting myself relax and enjoy life.

• Being consistent.

Success IS a constant feedback loop of wins and challenges that reenergizes and informs your mindset along the way.

Celebrating my success and challenges has been critical to sustaining my momentum throughout my weight loss and fitness journey.

Each time I celebrated a small win, I connected to the feelings I wanted to cultivate in the current moment.

When celebrating success, it’s easy to focus on the wins. However, talking about our failures and challenges is just as important because that is where growth happens.

With an open-minded Mindset, our failures and challenges are no longer presented as obstacles to accomplishing our dreams. They become the Sensei of life, teaching us the lessons we need to learn to grow.

Our failures and challenges point us to the Emotional Work we must do as we become more integrated.

For example, when I sat with the lesson of my running injury and let go of running a marathon, I was given a gold mine of insight.

I saw I had let training for a marathon and accomplishing that goal become more important than my why—being the healthiest version of myself. At some point, I shifted to pursuing a goal despite my health instead of my health.

I also noticed that I was letting the amount of training I was doing become a distraction from other important, internally challenging things, like writing this fitness publication and sharing my journey on social media.

Reflecting on my weight loss and fitness journey, I can see that the most meaningful times were found in failure and challenge—the moment I accepted that failure or challenge and surrendered to the lesson it was trying to teach me.

Every time I accepted my failure and challenge and surrendered to life’s lesson, I was unburdened by the weight of a wound from the past.

I was able to let go of the expectations that were the enemy of my success, and I found joy.

My weight loss journey started long before I lost the first pound. It began when I started the hard work to bring awareness to my inner critic, unhealthy behaviors, and the emotions behind them. I spent nearly two years setting boundaries with my inner critic and unhealthy behaviors so that I could have the space to process the feelings that were driving them.

This hard work was crucial to my weight loss and even more significant for my success afterward.

Sustainable Weight Loss Strategy

Step 1: Set boundaries with your inner critic.

The inner critic is that little voice in your head telling you some form of “you are not good enough” and “if you only did more of something [i.e., fitness],” you will fix what’s wrong and get the love and acceptance that your inner critic so desperately craves.

The inner critic is formed as a child in response to traumatic events.

For me, this voice in my head would see my image in the mirror and say, “You are disgusting,” and “If you just lost fifty pounds, you would look so much better.”

Where did this voice come from?

Growing up, my mom told me, with the best intentions, things like, “If you just lost 15 pounds, you would be such a good-looking boy.”

At the beginning of my journey, I had to bring awareness to this voice and tell myself some version of “No, you will not talk to me that way” and then pivot to practicing saying something kind to myself in its place.

Step 2: Set boundaries with your unhealthy behaviors.

Like my inner critic, I had numerous unhealthy behaviors that were driving my obesity. These coping mechanisms were keeping me stuck, and I had to learn to say no and then replace that behavior with something healthy.

One of those coping mechanisms was waking up in the middle of the night and midnight snacking to numb out from the chronic hip pain I was feeling.

I committed to myself that I would not do this ever again. Recognizing that was easier said than done, I also made a nightly ritual.

Every night, I wrote myself a love note and placed it on the fridge to read it in moments of weakness when I wanted a midnight snack. In the note, I reminded myself what I could do instead of reaching to food for comfort, that “I got this,” and that I loved myself.

Spiritual bypassing:

Many people, myself included, will want to skip right over steps one and two and accept themselves where they are without doing the hard work of setting boundaries with their inner critic and unhealthy behaviors.

This is a form of spiritual bypassing.

It is avoiding facing the complicated patterns that protect us from the uncomfortable emotions and pain we don’t want to feel.

Before practicing self-acceptance, we must be willing to say no to those protective patterns and feel what's underneath.

Step 3: Accept yourself where you are at

Setting boundaries with your inner critic and unhealthy behaviors creates the space for you to accept yourself where you are now. When you do this, you allow yourself to experience happiness right now!

You are not waiting for some goal to be happy.

You are not resisting the truth about what is — i.e., your current situation — as an obstacle to happiness.

You realize that right now, there is nothing to fix.

Though this may seem paradoxical — to change, you must accept the way it is.

This is because when you let go of the tension of wanting to be somewhere else, you can relax into the serenity of taking action aligned with who you are in the current moment.

When you are clinging to a goal and resisting the truth, you are creating internal tension, and over time, be it tomorrow or six months, this tension will become more than your mind can handle.

And this is why we quit.

Because willpower alone is not enough.

Action becomes sustainable when it is not fighting the internal tension of clinging and resisting.

Closing Thoughts

I will close today with a note I shared with my brothers in the Man Talks Alliance in November 2021. I was reflecting on my experience in a guided breathwork meditation — a moment where I began to see what awaited me in the space of accepting myself with boundaries.

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Perfect, serene, and at peace, just as I am

November 1, 2021

When I first started daily inner child mediation, I would go back to moments of scarring and change details about those moments...

For example, in the 4th grade, I came home from school, and my Mom told me about the results of a survey we took in class where they asked us, "What kid in the class would you take your party?" and "What kid would you not take?"

She said, "I'm not supposed to tell you this, but no one said they would take you, and every kid said they wouldn't take you. I'm telling you because I want you to be better... The teacher will have you sit by yourself for now in class until you fix your behavior..."

The next day, I came to class, and my desk was at the front of the classroom, facing the marker board. I wasn't allowed to sit with the other students. At recess, I walked to the south side of the school, where all the kids were playing hopscotch and 4 square.

In my mind, I can still picture the details vividly. As I approached the kids, I said to myself, "I'm going to do whatever it takes to get these kids to like me..."

This moment has been at the driver’s seat of my consciousness for many years.

When I first started doing inner child mediation, I would go to this moment, and I would see my current day self show up right before I thought those thoughts about "Doing whatever it takes to get these kids to like me" and stop my inner child before he could think them. Then I would sit with him, our backs against the school's brick walls, and I would ask him [myself] questions like:

“What it was like at home?”

“What do you need?”

etc...

Yesterday, in Trevor Bird's guided breath session, when asked, "Who am I when I have no problems to solve?" the image of the spot where my mom's ashes are spread appeared. Her ashes are spread along a creek, just below the place where my family camped when I was in high school.

When I visited this spot on my 24-hour solo in June [of 2021], it was just after sunrise. There was a serene quiet, only the sounds of nature, the birds, and the creek flowing. I felt a sense of peace and awe. As I walked back to my car through my family's old camping spot, I was struck by how nature had taken it back. It was overgrown with dense trees and brush. You could hardly tell it had been a camping spot. A part of me wanted to break out my saw and axe and restore that spot to how it was before — but then I realized it wouldn't be serene and at peace. So I took a moment to soak in that place, letting it be.

Yesterday, during the guided breath session, when asked, "Who are you when there are no problems to solve?" that image of the spot where my mom's ashes appeared, and I realized that I am like that spot — serene and at peace.

I also realized that when I first started my mediation practice, I was changing the details of my experience; I was trying to do with my inner world what I had, for a moment, wanted to do with my mom's camping spot. To restore it to the way it was before, to fix it.

As I have experienced growth and healing, I have begun to let go of this notion of changing and fixing what was.

If I were to change what was, it couldn't just be.

Instead, I've started to relate those parts of me like my mom's camping spot — A sacred place that I visit to reflect and gain awareness so that I can connect with my inner feelings so that I can acknowledge and learn from the truths they hold — but never to change them — for they are perfect, serene and at peace just the way they are.

Because I am perfect, serene, and at peace just as I am…

I was transitioning from a weight loss journey to a fitness journey. Weight loss was no longer my success metric; I needed a new one.

Over the summer of 2023, I cultivated a renewed love for running — Running had become my new metric. After entering a couple of races, I knew I wanted to run a marathon, and in November of 2023, I signed up for the Boise River Marathon in May 2024.

In January, my training went into full swing. Right away, I began to have pain in my right hip every time I ran. At first, I tried to work around this by adjusting my training plan, taking a couple of weeks off, and going to physical therapy — It just didn’t get better. In mid-February, I saw an orthopedic and got an MRI.

The diagnosis was a gut punch!

I found out I have severe osteoarthritis and a labral tear in my right hip, most likely requiring a joint replacement. Running is no longer a healthy option for me for the time being.

My initial reaction was a bit of denial. I desperately tried to rationalize a way to keep running — my ego shouted to the universe, “I’ll show you I can run.”

After a few days and after seeing the diagnosis on paper, I finally began to work towards acceptance of this new reality.

One of the steps of acceptance was sitting with and labeling my fear.

“Without running, how will I sustain my motivation to be healthy — what if I regain all the weight I lost?”

This was when I saw my attachment to running and how I was making my happiness dependent upon my ability to do it.

One of the most important lessons of my weight loss journey was when it became clear that happiness was not an outcome to achieve; it was a continuous byproduct of the journey.

Happiness wasn’t a destination to get to someday; it was something I got to create for myself every day — The result of consistently showing up for myself!

Happiness is not an outcome to achieve; it is a continuous byproduct of the journey.

My running injury reminded me why I started running in the first place.

To be the healthiest version of myself.

It also showed me something important — I had become fixated on my marathon goal and continued to run through my injury despite the risk to my health.

At some level, I had tied my happiness to reaching my goal of completing a marathon.

In the book “Master of Change” by Brad Stulberg, he provides two important equations related to happiness and suffering.

Happiness = reality - expectations

Suffering = pain x resistance

Running a marathon had become an expectation no longer aligned with my reality. Holding on to this expectation was no longer serving my happiness; it was taking away from it.

Additionally, my resistance to accepting my injury was amplifying the pain I was feeling in my hip and leading to an increased level of suffering in my life.

It became clear that my happiness and elimination of my suffering would be dependent on my willingness to let go of running.

It was time to set new goals in alignment with my values and adjust my daily actions to be consistent with my new reality.

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Adjusting course as needed; Keeping your goals and actions aligned with your reality and values.

Throughout my weight loss journey, I used the analogy that my goals were my “mountain in the distance,” a compass to follow, reminding me I was going the right way. My focus at any given moment was always my daily actions.

If, at any point, I were to look up and realize my actions were not aimed at my mountain in the distance, it would mean I was out of alignment with my values.

All was not lost; it was just a reminder to pause and reflect. It was a sign that I had some inner work to do.

When I took time to pause and reflect on my running injury, I quickly determined that I had some inner work to do and that I needed new goals and actions that were consistent with my new reality. Goals and actions that pointed me toward my values.

My core health and fitness value is living the most extended, vibrant life possible. To show up for myself, my wife, and my kids with joy and excitement. For my kids to not experience the pain I went through of losing a parent at 25 years old

Given that I am likely facing hip surgery, my new goal is to be in the best shape I can be before my surgery by keeping up my VO2 max and improving my core, hip, and leg strength. To lose an additional ten to fifteen pounds, which will aid in reducing joint impact and improve my post-surgery recovery.

This new goal has helped me reshape my daily actions from training for a marathon to preparing for the surgery that will hopefully enable me to run again.

Normalizing challenge and adversity.

The last 577 days of my weight loss and fitness journey have taught me to normalize challenges and adversity.

Today, I know that my life will not suddenly be perfect when I accomplish some goal, be it losing 140 pounds or running a marathon.

My journey has had its share of bumps. I’ve had to face conflict with family, injuries, coming off the weight loss medication “Mounjaro,” having my gallbladder removed, and now a significant hip injury that will result in a hip scope at best and a hip replacement at worst.

During my journey, there is one muscle I have strengthened more than any other:

It is the ability to face challenges with a sense of optimism grounded in reality and to find gratitude in the lessons those challenges offer me to learn.

I have come to expect that my journey will be challenging, but I have also built a confidence that I can tackle any challenge life throws me.

I do not seek the magic bullet for my problems but instead relish in the satisfaction of facing the parts of myself that fear challenge and change.

I am becoming a master of change.

I accepted myself where I was at, all 316 pounds of me, and took responsibility for managing the feelings of shame that got me to that place.

Since that day, I’ve shown up for myself every day. I have set boundaries with my inner critic, toxic behaviors, and bad habits. I have met myself with love and a disciplined commitment to be the highest version of myself.

That commitment to myself paid off — for a long time, the weight flew off.

As 140 pounds melted away, the scale was an easy metric of success and an unconscious dopamine hit.

My weight loss was motivation in itself.

However, once my weight loss slowed and the scale stopped moving, I began to feel tension every time I weighed in. My daily weigh-in went from a source of motivation to a source of stress.

It was time for a new metric of success.

I love running. Over the summer of 2023, I had built a weekly habit of running three to five miles two to three times a week.

In September of 2023, I decided to enter the Jackson Hole Quarter Marathon. It went well, and I knew running races was my thing right away—I wanted to run a marathon.

Much like losing 140 pounds was a challenging feat, so would training for a marathon.

Losing 140 pounds required that I consistently show up for myself every day. The vision of the healthy version of me was but a pointer, the mountains in the distance. Falling in love with showing up for myself every day is what propelled my weight loss journey — not the goal of losing 100+ pounds.

Shortly after my first race — and in the wake of my now-ending weight loss journey — I signed up for my next race, the Boise Half Marathon. Training to run for 13.1 miles became my new compass. It required me to continue to show up for myself every day.

The day after completing the Boise Half in November 2023, I signed up for the Boise Marathon in May 2024.

What is motivating me to keep signing up for these races?

I realized I’m at a critical point in my life as I transition from a weight loss journey to a lifelong fitness journey.

Now that I have achieved my primary weight loss goal, it is an easy time just to let go, so now more than ever, it’s essential that I have significant and ambitious goals to keep me charging forward. Objectives that support cultivating the love of showing up for myself every day.

Training for a marathon is my new mountain in the distance. However, the marathon is just a pointer — it directs my daily actions. The why of my daily activities is the feeling I get each time I complete a run or workout.

When I run, I cultivate a feeling of love for myself, creating consistency.

The biggest thing I learned on my weight loss journey that I’m carrying forward into my fitness journey and training for a marathon is to:

Attach to the effort, not the results.

What causes most people to fail at achieving their goals and to quit doing what they know is good for them?

They have attached themselves to achieving the result.

After a few days, the feeling of motivation from setting the goal fades, and the result is nothing more than a mountain in the distance; the positive emotions of achieving the result are nowhere in sight.

OR

They achieve the result, and the good feelings from attaining the goal fade shortly afterward.

They aren’t feeling good anymore, so they stop doing the things they need to do (or did) to achieve the result.

The truth is that we set goals because we want to feel good.

The mistake most people make is that they delay letting themselves feel good until they achieve the results of their goal.

The key to success is to feel good on the path to the result.

This is how you create consistency and achieve your goals.

The way to feel good on the path to the result is to attach yourself to the EFFORT of achieving the outcome.

How do you attach to the effort?

1. Make the effort the metric of success.

Step one is to stop worrying about the results and make showing up every day the metric of success. I’m not talking about making your performance in the daily actions the metric either (though they can be a metric, too) — Make showing up the metric.

Celebrate showing up. Post on social media, share with your friends or keep a tracker.

2. Make the feeling you get from the effort your why.

Think about the feeling you will get accomplishing your goal and then work to create that feeling while working towards your goal. This is how you find joy in the effort.

When showing up becomes the metric of success, and you find joy in the effort, the results become inevitable.

You don’t need to worry about the results because it’s all about the journey, and the results are just a moment on that journey.

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One hundred forty pounds lost!

I started at 316 pounds in July of 2022 and am now at a new low of 175.9 pounds.

This week, I will dive into one of my weight loss tools. It’s called Mounjaro, and it’s a Type II diabetes medication that my endocrinologist prescribed me.

In my other articles, I mentioned my perspective on Mounjaro numerous times — I treat this medicine as just a tool. It has helped me quiet the noise my body gives me, enabling me to heal my relationship with the mental and emotional food noise I experience daily.

The emotional and mental noise would make me eat when I’m stressed with work, my wife is pissed off at me, I’m having a bad day, or even I want to celebrate.

These thoughts and emotional patterns want me to use food to soothe myself and feel good.

Mounjaro does not fix this for me.

It has created the clarity for me to know when I’m truly hungry or my emotions are at play. This has allowed me to become present with these emotions and fully experience them.

During my weight loss journey, I’ve come to accept that these emotional feelings that draw me to eat to soothe, comfort, and celebrate are not going anywhere.

They will be with me for the rest of my life!

My work has been to learn to recognize when these emotions are at play and change how I respond to them. I have learned to breathe deeply and journal instead of reaching for food when I’m stressed. To write an article like this to celebrate instead of having pizza.

I’ve also learned to see my human nature and to have compassion for myself when I miss the mark.

I’ve worked hard to cultivate awareness, find compassion, and enact behavior change.

The work I have done gives me the faith that when, later this month, when I take my last shot of Mounjaro, all my progress won’t be lost.

This work has also allowed me to acknowledge and experience my fear of life without Mounjaro — while maintaining my confidence and faith in myself.

The next phase of life — without this tool.

In June, I started the process of “titrating” off of Mounjaro. My dosage has slowly been lowered, and I have doubled the time between shots. As I’ve done this, I’ve noticed the subtle loss of the appetite suppression of the medication as I experience its half-life. By the end of each two weeks, I’m essentially experiencing life without the medication.

As I’ve done this, I have seen the dividends of doing the hard emotional work of bringing awareness and compassion to my food triggers.

This awareness has allowed me to catch myself mindless eating and then make a conscious choice around that behavior.

It has also allowed me to bring compassion to myself when the stress of work, life, or my emotions are driving me to food — without Mounjaro in my system, I’ve had to slow down and ask myself questions like:

“Am I hungry, or am I stressed?”

“Am I hungry, or am I upset?”

“What do I really need right now? — What need am I trying to fill with food?”

How Mounjaro and similar medications work.

According to Mounjaro.com, Mounjaro works by having the following effects.

• Enhances insulin secretion

• Improves insulin sensitivity

• Decreases food intake

• Delays gastric emptying and reduces glucagon levels. (which diminishes over time)

Combined, these effects result in lower glucose concentration in both fasting and postprandial states, ultimately leading to weight loss.

Many people, myself included, also report a quieting of “food noise” or the mental chatter telling you to go eat.

In my opinion and experience, this is where you have two choices.

You can use weight loss medication as a tool or use it as a magic fix.

Medications like Mounjaro, Ozempic, and Wegovy are like using the bumpers in bowling. They keep the ball out of the gutter so you can learn how to play — i.e., use it as a tool.

Sure, you can throw the ball randomly down the lane, and it’ll bounce off the bumpers. You might score an occasional strike or a spare — lose a lot of weight — or hit hardly any pins or no pins — lose no weight at all — Your results will be completely random.

The thing is, if you don't take the time to learn to play — use it as a magic fix — when the bumpers get taken away, the ball will go back to going in the gutter the majority of the time — you’ll gain the weight back.

The goal of these medications is to give you the confidence to get the ball down the lane consistently and focus on your technique so that you are not touching the bumpers every time.

That way, if or when the medication goes away, you have mastered the emotional and physical (diet/exercise) things you need to do to continue to lose and eventually maintain your weight loss.

Closing Thoughts

I will close today with a note I shared with my brothers in the Man Talks Alliance early in February 2023. It was the moment I realized that doing the Emotional Work around food would be a lifelong journey for me. It was also the moment I surrendered to the fear I was avoiding about coming off of Mounjaro.

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Emotional Work In Action

February 2, 2023

I am working through some wounds this week...

Many here [in the Alliance] probably know I've been pushing my edge by publicly sharing my weight loss journey on social media and writing about it in my Substack publication.

I'm finding that by doing this, I’m coming up against my protector parts.

This week, oddly enough, the topic I'm writing on for my Substack is emotional work. It's the second component of my formula for excellence. I'm writing about how emotional work has been a critical component of my weight loss success — what it looks like for me to do the emotional work.

Fitting the universe would give me some emotional work this week.

So, this brings me to where I'm at right now...

Yesterday, on the Wednesday Morning Wisdom Circle, I shared some challenges I worked through last week. One of them involved ensuring I'm being transparent in my writing about the medication my doctor put me on to help with my weight loss. It's called Mounjaro, and it's a GLP-1 agonist.  It aids weight loss by suppressing appetite and lowering blood sugar (it's a type II diabetes medication).

My endocrinologist put me on it because of how overweight I was and that I was pre-diabetic.

In my writing last week, I discussed how I view this as a tool, just like my fasting practice. I am making a big point NOT to consider this medication as a FIX. It is helping me to separate the body food noise from the emotional and mental food noise so that I can build good habits. So I can heal the wounds around the mental and emotional noise with food.

I view fasting the same way. It is very much a spiritual tool. On fasting days, I practice being with emotions; on eating days, I practice giving up control and being disciplined with food.

One of the men on my team sent me an article about how people who come off GLP-1 agonists tend to gain weight back. A key detail in the article is that it's critical to make lifestyle changes while you are on the medication and not just depend on it so that you are more likely to maintain your weight loss when you come off.

Most people don't do this.

It turns out that that man sending me this article was indeed a gift - it triggered the crap out of me. 

Yes, that may be an odd thing to say... “It was a gift I got triggered???”

It was a gift because it showed me something I have been avoiding... 

The fact is that when I come off of this mediation, statistically speaking, I will not succeed.

I say it this way because even though I'm doing all the right things in my weight loss journey, to some extent, I have been bypassing the fear that statistic creates. 

Last night, I let myself experience the fear...

When I did, I saw something related to the parts map I created as part of my Internal Family System (IFS) Therapy.

My battle with weight loss has always felt like a tug of war between the part of me that wants to numb out from pain and the part of me that wants to push me to extremes to fix what's wrong with me through control.

Last night, I saw the third player in this dynamic. The part of me that wants to stay out of trouble.

When that part of me is teamed up with my controller, it looks like trying to get it right.

When he is teamed up with the numb-out part, it looks like being invisible but in plain sight...

In the past, this played out in my ballooning to over 300 pounds...

For the first half of my adult life, I was a reservist in the military. I was up against a standard I had to meet twice yearly. I would push and push to get it right and pass the fat test, only to let go and gain weight.  When the rollercoaster finally became too much, and the fear of getting in trouble with the military became overwhelming, I became invisible and got out of the military.

So, back to last night and the fear of coming off the medication.

I saw the part of me trying to get this right - he wants to push me past my edge. He wants to present a perfect image to the world.

I also saw the part of me that wants to be invisible - he wants to tell me I shouldn't share my journey because "what if I gain the weight back?" He tells me I'm an imposter. He wants me to bypass sharing I'm on the medication (lying through omission). Because if I'm invisible, I'm safe — I can’t get in trouble.

I'm just letting myself sit with the bombshell of insight today, allowing myself to feel it, and looking to where I can provide those parts of myself safety.

On the other side, I know I'm doing the right things. I am cultivating good health habits. I'm doing the hard emotional work around healing my addictive tendencies with both dieting and numbing out with food. 

Just a reminder that part of the road to success includes the emotional road bumps along the way, for they are where the growth is.

My mission is to live the most extended, most vibrant life possible. To show up for myself, my wife, and my kids with joy and excitement. For my kids to not experience the pain, I went through of losing a parent at 25 years old.

In the past, my goals were a destination I was fixating on in the distant future, my salvation, and the eventual source of my happiness. My goals were my perceived escape from my suffering and a distraction from the current moment. A reminder that I need to be anywhere but right here, right now.

Today my goals are my compass. They are the mountains in the distance, reminding me I’m going the right way.

If I look up and find my fitness efforts oriented to the beach instead of the mountains, I know I need to pause and work with my inner child.

Looking good at the beach used to be one of my big motivators.

It was all about NOT feeling rejected—a desire to be desired.

Something my little boy in me needed and could not get.

Every past weight loss attempt was about some version of looking good, and the beach is the perfect analogy because it's a once or twice-a-year thing for me—a massive build-up for a small moment in time.

Will the beach happen at some point this year?

Yes!

But that's not what my journey is about anymore.

The wounded boy in me sometimes still thinks it is.

It's my job to remind him that's not the why behind this journey.

That's where my mountain analogy comes in.

Though the boy in me craves the validation of looking good at the beach, he needs me to lead him to the top of the mountain.

When I inevitably catch myself looking up and looking towards the beach and not the mountains - all is not lost.

It's just a pointer to remind me to tend to the boy in me.

And then pause, pivot, and point back toward the mountain I want to climb this summer.

And then focus on the day-to-day tasks.

Going to yoga

Breathwork

Fasting

Playing with my kids

My writing, etc., etc.

Ironically, my day at the beach will still come, but its gravity on me will be much less.

The joy of living in the moment has dwarfed the gravity of looking good at the beach.

The joy caught in the moment of the picture at the top of this post.

Read my full article on fitness goals and mindset.

What I mean is the whole go big or go home approach to fitness is a setup for failure for the typical person!

You would be much better served to pick an activity or plan that you can do consistently for 365 days than trying to grind your way through 75 days of rigorous pain to force yourself to accomplish some arbitrary goal.

Not to say you shouldn’t do the 75-Day Hard if that’s where your edge is; If your intention is right, go for it!

However, most people I’ve observed attempting this challenge are doing it for the wrong reasons.

Does reaching a goal require pushing yourself? Absolutely!

In the past, every time I took on a challenge like 75 Day Hard, my intention was superficial. It was the magic bullet that I thought would fix what was wrong with me.

I took on countless diets and fitness challenges, looking for the golden ticket to health.

The catch is my intention was never to BE healthy; I was looking for a way to fix what I thought was wrong to GET healthy.

In my fantasy world, I believed I would find the solution to my triggers with food and make them go away.

I would somehow find the magic equation to discipline and effortlessly push myself to an extreme fitness level — forever.

What has changed in the past year for me in my 123-pound weight loss journey is that I am no longer looking to fix what I perceive is wrong.

I have learned to cultivate a consistent approach of being actively patient with myself.

What I mean is I am gently pushing my edge daily.

For example, when I started running again, I did not just go out and run fives on day one at a nine or ten-minute-a-mile pace; I began by running just five minutes at an eleven or twelve-minute-a-mile pace. I did this consistently and was patient with myself as I slowly expanded my edge toward my goal.

Today, after almost two and half months of running, I’m finally running five miles at a nine to ten-minute pace. I still haven’t reached my goal of a full 10k, but I have the patience to stay at my edge and actively work towards 6.2 miles.

One of the ways I have cultivated this active patience is by taking time to bring awareness to both the parts of me that want to numb out and the parts of me that want to push myself to extremes.

Create awareness through curiosity

Being aware of your inner world requires being open and curious about yourself. In my journey, I have found self-inquiry in the form of open-minded questions as one of the most effective ways to generate curiosity.

The questions I ask myself often are:

What do I need to let go of to accept these parts of myself that drive me to numb out or push myself to extremes?

What are these parts of me trying to communicate? What is the unmet need?

If I accept that my triggers with food and my instinct to respond to shame with controlling behaviors will always be present for me - what do I need to do differently so that I can respond rather than react to those triggers?

Changing the game of my life

At some point on my weight loss journey, I realized something huge.

I had been playing the wrong game my whole life.

Before this journey, the game I was playing in life was how do I never become triggered to numb out with food again and control myself to be healthy at all times.

I am playing a new game now.

Now the game I play is — How fast can I become aware that I am triggered in a way that wants me to numb out with food or feeling shame that is evoking my controlling behaviors?

When I realize I am triggered to numb out or feel the internal pressure to push myself, I can respond in that space I’ve created with love and compassion.

Often the most loving action I can take is not taking the next bite of food, scrolling on my phone, or trying to push myself harder but taking the next slow, deliberate breath.

In the clarity of that breath, I often find the patience and clarity to take actions that are truly needed for my growth and healing.

My food, diet, & exercise triggers are not going anywhere.

I recently finished reading the book "Radical Acceptance," by Tara Brach.

After reading this book, I have been working on practicing three things.

#1 - Bringing awareness to what my inner world is communicating.

#2 - Responding to what my awareness shows me with compassion.

And

#3 - Saying "yes" to whatever shows up for me.

One of the places I have been saying yes is when I feel tension in my legs. The tension is an underlying anxiety that always comes up when I feel the urge to get it right. 

When I let this tension drive me, it causes me to internally clinch and push myself — disconnecting me from my joy in the process.

When I try to push the tension away, it intensifies, making me feel overwhelmed and creating the urge to numb out — cue my addictive tendencies with food and my phone.

When I first became present to this tension in 2020, I kept trying to find a way to make it go away by solving it and fixing it.

Then in 2021, I started the practice of welcoming it in mediation. To just let it be there. Later, while doing Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, I finally began to listen to what this tension was trying to communicate to me.

However, despite all this newfound awareness, I still had an agenda. To make this tension leave me alone by somehow solving its underlying problem. I lacked a general sense of compassion for myself.

Only in the last year, amid my weight loss journey, have I finally surrendered to this part.

I have learned to say "Yes” to this part of me by asking myself, “What would it look like to accept that this part of me isn't going anywhere?”

In the space of this acceptance, I have brought compassion to this part by seeing it as a trauma response I learned as a child when facing the craziness of my Mom’s alcoholism.

The lifelong lesson awaiting me has unfolded in this surrender and acceptance.

There is nothing about me that I need to fix — I am perfect the way I am.

By accepting that my triggers with food, diet, and exercise are a challenge I will face for the rest of my life, I have found the grace to surrender to the truth that my weight loss journey has no end — it is a lifelong journey.

Healing is a lifelong journey.

One of the gifts of my weight loss is seeing that my healing is a lifelong journey of continuously cultivating awareness of my inner world, bringing compassion to what I find, and saying yes through surrender.

In yoga recently, during the ending meditation called Savasana, I felt the tension of trying to get it right come up.

As I lay there breathing slowly and deeply, I saw this as an opportunity to say “Yes” to my experience.

I let myself see this younger version of myself, just trying to get it right. When I saw this, I felt gratitude and said, "Thank you." Thank you for protecting me. You are always welcome here.

When I did this, the tension was released and changed to a vibrant comforting energy.

A personal reflection during Savasana

What if we said yes to the broken parts of ourselves?

What if we took time in stillness to say thank you to our protective parts?

What if we met them with love instead of pushing those parts away?

What if instead of trying to fix the parts of ourselves we do not like, we saw those parts for what they are, a wounded child just doing the best he can to survive his dangerous world?

What if we listened to those parts with empathy and love, seeking to understand the unmet need they are trying to communicate?

What if instead of pushing ourselves to extremes, we provided loving discipline by recognizing our limits, offering the flexibility to press our edge gently and the intuition to know when to relax?

What if we treated our broken and protective parts like we would treat our own child?

What would the world look like if we all loved ourselves in this way?

Saying yes to what shows up allows me to view the lessons behind my challenges.

For example, I practice alternate-day fasting as part of my health and fitness routine.

Recently I had a rough fasting day.

Rather than try to grind my way through it, I paused to breathe and bring awareness to my feelings.

I noticed wanting to comfort myself with food and then being pulled in other directions to distract myself from this discomfort.

Sitting in this discomfort, I took time to ground myself and become present with my emotions. In this space, I found I could respond to what I was feeling with compassion.

Doing this showed me a more important lesson. It showed me what I needed to see to give me faith in maintaining my weight loss for the rest of my life.

I can do one day of fasting three times a week, no matter what. It might be challenging, but it will never be so hard that I can’t make it for 36 hours. By accepting that there always be occasional difficult days, I saw the light — I became aware of the inner strength to maintain my fasting lifestyle.

And in those 36 hours, I will find space to cultivate the awareness and compassion to say yes to the wounded parts of me once again.

Closing Thoughts

I will close today with a note I shared with my brothers in the Man Talks Alliance early in 2022. It was the moment I began to surrender to the idea that my emotional triggers were not going anywhere and that I would be better served to surrender to them than try to make them disappear.

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Intentional Dialog with your inner thoughts…

February 16, 2022

I’ve had a lot of success using intentional dialog and the tools from the book Getting to Zero with my eight-year-old son. Really sitting with his feelings, listening to him, validating him, and saying, “That makes sense you would feel XYZ, buddy; what else are you feeling?”

Yesterday instead of doing my normal breath work routine, I switched it up and did something different, unguided and self-led. Afterward, I felt some negative emotions, and tension came up in my legs. I was feeling stressed.

I had a thought, “What if I related to this part of me like I do my son?”

So I sat and listened.

A thought played, “You didn’t do the guided routine like you normally do; you are losing your edge,” so I said to myself, “That makes sense you would feel that way, you do that routine consistently every day, and today was different”... 

A memory flashed…

I was sitting in the highway patrol car right after my mom had jumped from my truck on the freeway in Wyoming when I was in college. My girlfriend at the time, and I were driving her home after she relapsed in our apartment. On the drive, she went into the delirium tremors, flipped out, and kicked us both. In an attempt to keep my mom from killing us, I had gotten into a wrestling match with her in the car.

At one point, I was forced to punch her in an attempt to subdue her and protect myself. Somehow she had gotten the back window of my truck open, and she slipped out of my arms and out the window. A feeling of failure and panic came over me as I felt my empty arms and watched my mom leap from my moving truck onto the freeway, a semi-swerving at the last minute.

As I saw myself sitting in the highway patrol car following this event, I felt the same feeling I felt earlier during and following my meditation. I said to myself, “It makes sense you would feel overwhelmed and failure; it was traumatic when Mom jumped from your truck like that….” Instantly I felt a “letting go,” and energy replaced the tension in my legs as if that part of me was saying, “Finally, after all these years, I feel heard”...

This morning I had a thought.

What would happen if I began to treat my inner world this way every day?

What if I didn’t treat the shadow of my inner world like some criminal on the street?

What if I strive to treat my shadow sides like I strive to treat my spouse and my kids? 

What if, instead of resisting my negative thoughts, pushing them away, or negating them, I validated them as real and listened for the unmet need they are trying to communicate?

What if instead of trying to fix and change the parts of myself I do not like, I accepted them as they are and instead looked to change how I react to them?

What if I got to know those parts so well that I could anticipate how an environmental queue would trigger them, and I could be there, already prepared?

What if I could create a structure in my life that accommodated those parts instead of minimizing them?

What if I stood for three with myself, tying my metaphorical boat to the boat of my inner child, and sailed the seas of life with them instead in spite of them?

A month earlier, I had surrendered to my health situation and began to make small incremental changes resulting in my first ten pounds of weight loss.

One of the significant changes I made in my life was shifting the intentions and mindset driving my health and fitness efforts from trying to fix myself to aligning them with my bigger why.

A trap I have often fallen into is looking for the “golden ticket” that will save me from all my problems.

Until my moment of surrender on July 31, 2022, every diet I had ever done was an attempt to fix myself. Every time, I had gone into it thinking this was the “magic fix.” I became attached to the diet and its intended outcome as what would fix me and make me happy.

In my moment of surrender, my mindset shifted from “Something is wrong with health and fitness” to “What do I need to heal to be the healthiest version of myself.”

Getting into Action

The truth, however, is that you need more than mindset alone to accomplish your health and fitness goals. You will have to take action to get where you want to go.

The key is how you view those actions.

Are they a fix, or are they just the tool you are using?

This is why mindset is essential to any health and fitness journey.

When I showed up at the endocrinologist's office in September of 2022, I had already shifted my mindset and intention. I wasn’t looking for a fix. In fact, I went in into his office in acceptance of the possibility that he may not be able to offer me anything that would help. I was completely open-minded to any possibility.

When he presented me with my options, I was given the opportunity to CHOOSE what I felt would work best for me based on my values and my lifestyle.

He recommended two things.

First, I take a medication called Mounjaro, a Type-II Diabetes medication that lowers A1C and has been shown to aid in weight loss.

Second, I Choose an eating plan in one of the following categories:

1. Low-carb (Atkins, Keto, South Beach, etc.)

2. Fasting (preferably alternate day) or

3. Whole Food (whole 30, paleo, vegan, etc.)

He explained that all the plans that tend to be effective in reversing type-2 diabetes/pre-diabetes and obesity fall into one of those three categories. That all the plans in a given category are 80 to 90% the same, with their unique “catch” to sell their book. More importantly, each of those eating plans does two things, reduces insulin resistance and creates a calorie deficit.

His advice was really that simple; in less than five minutes, he gave me the answer I had spent my whole life looking for.

I was able to receive it because I was open to feedback. I had accepted where I was for what it was, the facts and not my story.

I chose to go on the medication he recommended, but I didn’t view it as a fix. I choose to view Mounjaro as just another tool in my health and fitness toolbox.

I also choose to pick alternate-day fasting as the tool for my eating plan.

Viewing Mounjaro and fasting as my chosen tools opened me up to see what they were doing for me.

They were quieting the food noise my body was giving me so that I could focus my efforts on the more important thing, the mental and emotional food noise.

Mounjaro and fasting were also doing two other things, managing my insulin and creating a calorie deficit so that I could lose weight in a way that was compatible with my lifestyle.

This is the gift of mindset and acceptance. It opens us up to growth and understanding.

In this space of growth and understanding, I cultivated my capacity for something new - creating a healthy lifestyle instead of taking on yet another magic fix.

My Fasting Lifestyle

I’ve been doing Alternate Day Fasting now for almost a year. It has become more than something I’m doing to accomplish my weight loss goal. It has become my lifestyle.

Each week as I look at what we have planned as a family, I determine which days will work best for me to fast. My goal is to do a total of three 36 to 40-hour fasts. During my fasts, I eat no food, and I drink only plain water, black coffee, sparkling mineral water, or water with a dash of sea salt. I do not add flavor or sweetener of any kind to my food.

This does three things for me:

#1: Creates a calorie deficit while creating higher insulin sensitivity.

#2: It allows me to practice emotional regulation without food.

#3: It lets me practice letting go of control when it’s time to end my fast.

#1: Calorie deficits & insulin sensitivity

The intention of this publication is not medical or scientific in nature, so I will not dive deep into the science behind fasting but only point out its two main benefits related to weight loss.

One, fasting creates a calorie deficit, a requirement to lose weight.

Two, fasting restores higher levels of insulin sensitivity.

The role insulin plays in weight loss is up for debate in the health fitness community; however, based on my experience with weight loss, my endocrinologist’s advice, and the work of Dr. Jason Fung, I believe that insulin plays a significant role in weight loss.

For more information about the science behind fasting for weight loss, I recommend reading The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung or visiting The Fasting Method website.

Dr. Fung explains the science behind fasting and provides detailed guides on facilitating your fasting journey.

In reality, fasting is just a tool for the calorie deficit and insulin aspect of weight loss. It is what works for me and may or may not work for you.

More importantly, in my weight loss journey, I have found that the spiritual aspects of fasting make it a powerful tool for me.

#2: Fasting for emotional regulation with food

Some of my weight loss journey's most stressful or emotional days have fallen on fasting days.

I am eternally grateful for this.

Fasting has created the space for me to become aware of the emotions I would have otherwise eaten.

In this space, I’ve had to learn to sit in the discomfort of stress from work, conflicts with family, and my emotional pain. I’ve had to learn how to regulate how I respond to my emotions.

I have also learned that any addictive behavior will leave a void in its absence.

In that absence, you have three choices. Fill it with something healthy, fill it with something unhealthy, or go back to the original addictive behavior.

As I’ve become aware of emotions I used to numb with food during my fasts, I’ve also observed my tendency to want to cover them with something else.

The absence of addictive behavior creates a vacuum, and if you don’t actively practice healthy alternatives, you will be drawn to fill the void with other addictive behaviors. In my case, I have noticed a tendency to doom scroll on my phone.

Here are some practices I have started to create healthy alternatives and to prevent the void of not emotional eating from being filled with other unhealthy behaviors.

• Daily morning breath work and meditation.

• Daily yoga sessions.

• Cold showers and cold plunges.

• Daily texts and phone calls to the men in my men’s group.

• Placing my phone across the room when I’m working.

• Journalling and writing.

• Awareness prompts in the form of sticky notes.

• Pausing to breathe in moments of stress.

• Writing this publication.

• A workout routine.

• Reading books and listening to podcasts.

• Writing myself daily love notes.

The key is that I am committed to showing up as the best father, husband, and man I can be - in the wake of that intention, my awareness is becoming more and more attuned to when I’m when I am filling the void of not having food to numb out by numbing out with another addictive substitute.

There is one other crucial key to emotional regulation.

The goal is not to be perfect. You are going to make mistakes and lapse.

You will catch yourself mindless eating on an eating day or doom-scrolling on a fasting day.

At some point on my weight loss journey, I realized something huge.

I had been playing the wrong game my whole life.

Before this journey, the game I was playing in life was how do I never become triggered to numb out with food again and control myself to be healthy at all times.

I am playing a new game now.

Now the game I play is — How fast can I become aware that I am triggered in a way that wants me to numb out with food or feeling shame that is evoking my controlling behaviors?

When I realize I am triggered to numb out or feel the internal pressure to push myself, I can respond in that space I’ve created with love and compassion.

Often the most loving action I can take is not taking the next bite of food, scrolling on my phone, or trying to push myself harder but taking the next slow, deliberate breath.

#3: Ending a fast and letting go of control

In the past, one of the behavioral patterns that perpetuated my fat-thin yo-yo cycle was responding to the shame of my numbing behaviors with food by becoming hyper-controlling and pushing myself to extremes with diet and exercise.

I would overcome the feelings of self-hatred that resulted from overeating by making unsustainable health choices. I would become hyper-controlling and take my fitness to extremes. I took on every diet and fitness challenge you can think of Whole 30, 75-day Hard, low calorie, low fat, low carb, Keto, Paleo, and even a potato diet…

Eventually, the feelings of self-hatred would become too painful, and the “grind” of my unsustainable health choices would become overwhelming. I would reach a point of internal capacity and go off the rails.

My life became a never-ending pattern. A yo-yo of extreme diets and extreme unhealthiness. It felt like a Tug-O-War.

This is where following my weekly fasting regimen to the letter has been critical.

Each week I plan which days I will fast, and that plan is always only 120 hours of total fasting in a week.

Anytime I am trying to plan something more than what I have committed to, I know that I am trying to overcorrect for some form of shame that I am feeling.

Every time I get to the planned end of my fast, I am invited to give up on controlling the outcome of my weight loss journey. I have to surrender to where I am in my journey at that moment in time.

When I experience my red flags of trying to overdo my fasts or pushing myself too hard, I am invited to do the emotional work of healing the wound causing me to go beyond my edge.

Closing Thoughts

I will close today with a note I shared with my brothers in the Man Talks Alliance a couple of weeks after I met with my endocrinologist and started my fasting practice. It was the moment I realized that fasting was more than just a logistical weight loss tool for me. This was when I learned that fasting was one of my spiritual practices.

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Fasting both sides of the coin

September 22, 2022

I want to share a profound realization I had this week while fasting.

As I shared in a previous post, I saw an endocrinologist early last week, and he put me on an alternate-day fasting protocol. This means I'm doing three 36 to 48-hour fasts a week and not eating on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

This week my Monday fast fell during an incredibly emotionally challenging day. I made a point to be observant of what was happening inside me throughout the day, and I began to notice when I wanted to soothe my emotions with food... I found this incredibly powerful, opening an opportunity to be with emotions I would have otherwise numbed with food.

Even more profound was that on Tuesday, the day I was supposed to break my fast and eat, I learned a family member would be hospitalized (they are okay now). This triggered a cascade of emotions and created disagreements with other family members.

As Tuesday progressed and it came time to break my fast, I became full of fear. I could feel the tension in my body and my legs. As I sat with this, I realized I was afraid to break my fast out of fear of losing control. A fear that once I ate, the emotions and events of the day would be too much, and I would mindlessly eat...

I let myself be with this uncomfortableness for a while. Then I consciously chose not to use control or numbing in this situation. I deliberately broke my fast with a healthy meal. As soon as I ate, I decided this would be my one meal and began my Wednesday fast early.

This experience was a huge moment of growth and awareness. I could see both sides of the coin and respond with loving action from an integrated place of being.

When I talk about gratitude, I’m not just talking about gratitude for only the good things, like my weight loss; I’m also talking about the hard stuff.

In my healing and weight loss journey, I have found that gratitude is the ultimate mindset reset tool. Gratitude keeps my mindset in alignment with my values through the practice of detachment and the power of surrender.

Desire and attachment are at the root of all suffering.

Detachment is the process of letting go of grasping and clinging to the things we are attaching to our happiness — for example, being skinny.

Gratitude has allowed me to let go of clinging to my weight loss successes by connecting me to the bigger why behind them. Each time I bring gratitude to my journey, I see that it is not about getting to a certain weight or looking a certain way — it’s about cultivating the feelings within of love, joy, and peace. It’s about creating harmony in my life.

The avoidance of pain and discomfort can also cause suffering. We avoid or reject what we perceive to be the cause of our pain because we desire not to feel a certain way or for things to be different — we fear experiencing the pain and discomfort.

The problem with avoidance is we don’t make our pain go away or create any lasting change — we delay experiencing it until later and continue the behaviors that cause the underlying conditions we don’t want.

For example, by not dealing with the pain and grief of my mom’s death from alcoholism, I just transferred it to my body in the form of the many pounds I gained. I became further entrenched in my health and fitness yo-yo because I did not want to accept my lifelong way of dealing with pain.

I did not want to accept my cycles of eating and dieting as a form of addiction — like my mom’s alcoholism. There was just too much pain for me to go there.

My avoidance perpetuated my yoyo cycle with weight loss and weight gain.

Until I was willing to accept this truth and surrender to a power greater than myself, the change I so desperately wanted would not happen.

To surrender is an act of accepting what is while simultaneously giving in to a force greater than our own will. A force that connects us to the more profound meaning and lesson behind our pain and struggle.

Gratitude has allowed me to accept what is true about myself and then surrender to the more important lesson behind it, finding myself in the process.

When I asked myself the question, how can I find gratitude in weighing over 300 pounds, I saw that lesson and opportunity that lay before was practicing discipline consistently for a long time because I had so much weight to lose — My yoyo of the past was not an option because to get to healthy weight would take me changing my lifestyle, there was no easy fix.

Finding gratitude for weighing over 300 pounds eliminated my suffering by connecting me to my values and purpose. I began cultivating the feelings that bring me joy long before accomplishing any goal or objective.

Creating a practice of gratitude in your journey will help shift your mindset to align with your values.

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Gratitude as a form of detachment…

It wasn’t until recently that I fully understood the true power of showing gratitude for what I perceive as positive.

When we hold what we view as positive in gratitude, we connect to the deeper meaning and feeling behind it, releasing our attachment to the object itself — for example, when I bring gratitude to being able to run again, I connect to the feelings running cultivates in me. If I wake up tomorrow and find out, I can never run again; I can wake up in peace because I am not attached to running. I can move on to the next thing that will bring me those same feelings of aliveness.

This is what it means to be detached — you are not clinging to the people, things, places, and experiences of life. You are merely present to the feelings that arise as they unfold.

The following prompts can serve as a gratitude guide.

Take some time to breathe deeply and bring yourself to a state of calmness. In a journal or on a piece of paper, complete each prompt.

As you go through the prompts, pay attention to your body's sensations.

#1: Today, I’m grateful for…

#2: This is important to me because…

#3: How this makes me feel is…

Gratitude as a form of surrender...

When I started doing a gratitude practice, I focused only on the good things in life. Though this was powerful, as it taught me to appreciate what I have and helped me practice detachment unconsciously, something still felt missing in my practice.

One day I had a thought.

What if I showed gratitude for the hard things in my life? What would that look like?

When I started finding gratitude for the hard things in life, the profound power of a gratitude practice showed up for me. I became empowered when I started focusing on finding gratitude for my struggles and traumas, those things I had tried to avoid or fix.

Finding gratitude for the things I was trying to avoid or fix allowed me to create space for them to exist and to surrender to them. It allowed me to face my pain with an open heart.

When I was avoiding and rejecting the hard things, I was rejecting what is, rejecting the current moment; I was not present.

My ego did not want to accept my reality. It wanted it to be different. When I sat back and found gratitude in those struggles, I gave up rejecting the current moment and became present with reality.

Often when engaging in gratitude in this way, I am presented with insight into what I need to let go of to be happy amid the challenge. I separate from my ego.

For example — Early in my weight loss journey, I took a moment to step back and look for gratitude for where I was at. When I did this, I saw an opportunity to let go of clinging onto the past. I had tons of clothes I was holding onto from years ago — from when I was skinnier. Every time I saw them, I was reminded I was not how I should be. It created tension in me. When I let them go, it made space for me to accept myself at that moment and to face the pain I felt about my current state of health. I found happiness even at the beginning of my weight loss journey.

The following prompts can serve as a gratitude guide in pain or struggle. In a journal or on a piece of paper, complete each prompt.

As you go through the prompts, take some time to take slow deep breaths and pay attention to the sensations in your body, particularly tension and anxiety.

#1: My current pain, struggle, or challenge is…

#2: Where I feel this in my body is…

#3: What I am avoiding or trying to fix is…

#4: What I really desire to feel is…

#5: The lesson this experience is trying to teach me is…

Take a moment to breathe and embody that lesson

#6: I’m grateful for this challenge because…

#7: This is important to me because…

#8: How this makes me feel is…

Closing thoughts

I’ll close today with the journal entry I shared with my brothers in the ManTalks Alliance before I started my weight loss journey. It was the moment I learned to bring gratitude to my pain and struggle - the moment I realized that gratitude could be a form of surrender.

Learning the Power of Gratitude

September 13, 2021

I’ve taken on a daily gratitude journal from Connor Beaton’s four pillars emails.

Today I’m grateful for…

This is important to me because…

How this makes me feel is…

More and more, I find myself writing gratitude for the hard things. Fights with my wife, getting covid, my mom’s alcoholism, etc.

I’m finding that placing my gratitude in the areas that cause me pain or struggle is helping me see the bigger lesson it has to offer and let go of my attachment to it.

Last weekend this had a very big impact on me.

I had been listening to Connors's podcast with Gary Zukav. He says:

Instantly I was brought to my mom’s alcoholism and addiction. All the pain and trauma I went through as a kid and the pain of throwing my everything into trying to save her when she relapsed in my twenties.

Suddenly I felt gratitude.

I remember when I started doing my work, writing something to the effect of “I ask myself why did addiction have to take you.” I would find myself asking what the meaning of it was.

That day I reflected on my mom’s addiction's impact on my life. I came up with the following:

The purpose of my mom’s alcoholism was to teach me to see the good in someone’s soul, even in the depths of their hell. To give me the experience and wisdom to understand the nature of trauma.

My gratitude entry from that day…

Today I am grateful for my mom’s alcoholism and the pain it brought to my life.

This is important to me because it gave me the experience and wisdom to know the nature of trauma so that I can support my fellow men.

How this makes me feel is awe, peace, and humility.

Part of the success of my now 112-pound weight journey has been shifting the focus of my efforts from something in the distant future to focusing on the current moment.

I had to learn to practice mindfulness by keeping my weight loss journey centered on the steps before me.

I’ve learned to take things One Day at a Time - One Night at a Time.

In the past, my focus was entirely on the future. I would daydream about looking good on the beach while simultaneously being disconnected from my actions in the present moment. My mind was clinging to the outcome I desired in the future - this created suffering for me in the current moment.

The source of this suffering was twofold.

One - What I needed to be happy was somewhere else. It was in the future!

Two - What I was doing in the present moment was not connected to my why. What I was doing wasn’t cultivating the feelings that bring me joy!

I was suffering because my action in the present moment was not filling my bucket.

This suffering made all my past weight loss efforts miserable — I would inevitably fail, and a cycle of shame would kick off.

I would numb the shame with food and TV — My shame-induced binge would blow away all my gains and dig me deeper into despair.

The answer to suffering is mindfulness.

In my weight loss journey, I have learned to practice mindfulness by seeing the future as just an aiming point. The purpose of my vision is to serve as my compass that keeps me on the right path; that’s it.

If I find myself ruminating on something superficial, for example, looking good at the beach, I know I am temporarily off course and not present with my current state of being.

My bigger vision is to be the healthiest version of myself and live the longest possible life. I want to be there long into the lives of my wife and my kids so they don’t go through the pain I went through of losing a parent at 25 years old.

I only have two simple near-term goals that align with this vision.

#1: Run a 10K by the end of June.

AND

#2: Hike the continental divide on the 4th of July with my family.

My vision and these goals align with my values and serve as my compass. Together they inform the actions I’m taking at the present moment.

The present moment is where my focus is. The run I’m going on tomorrow and the fast I’m completing today.

Another critical aspect of my weight loss journey is that I’m not delaying the celebration of the journey until the completion of my goals. I’m celebrating my wins daily.

Celebration connects me to the feelings that are in alignment with my vision.

As my weight loss journey has progressed, I have begun implementing the following mindfulness strategy to ensure I align my efforts with my values and stay present with my feelings in the current moment.

#1 - ORIENT on your vision:

As I shared in my article, “Mindset, The Foundation to Excellence,” mindset is the foundation for achieving personal excellence. Our mindset sets the intention behind every action we take.

Your mindset and vision give the actions you take in your day-to-day life direction and meaning.

Before you can orient your vision, you must understand your intention. You can do this by taking the following actions.

1. Create a Strong Foundation - Find Your Why:

Ask yourself, “What moves me?” When you do this, connect with and write down the feelings that come up.

Write down a vision statement of why and what you want to accomplish that aligns with your response to “what moves me” and the feelings that came up.

2. Set Goals and Take Actions that are Alignment With Your Values:

Using the feelings and vision statement from step one as a guide, set some meaningful Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART) goals.

Instead of I want to weigh 150 pounds - Try something like “I want to hike the continental divide with my family by the 4th of July” — Remember meaningful equals in alignment with your values.

3. Shift from Making Decisions to Choices:

I’ve realized on my healing journey that the difference between making a decision and a choice comes down to how I’m left feeling afterward.

It’s all about intention.

A decision is about logically picking something to accomplish an objective - its agenda based.

A choice is about taking your time to analyze the choice before you, setting that logic aside, and then picking what FEELS right based on values.

When you focus on making choices instead of decisions, you shift your efforts from Have-Tos to Get-Tos.

4. Cultivate Rituals, not Routines.

Just like choices and decisions, rituals and routines are all about intentions.

Routines are something you do to accomplish an agenda, like making your bed every day so that your room is clean. Routines are a means to an end; the only meaning behind them is the agenda itself.

Rituals are similar to routines, with a big exception. They are something you do to cultivate a feeling. Rituals are less about the outcome and more about the meaning you put into them.

5. Acceptance of The Current Moment

If your intention is going to align with your values and bigger why you have to be willing to take one critical action - accept what is true right now in the current moment.

When we are attached to an outcome, for example, losing weight, we have outsourced our happiness to that result. We are left feeling anxious in the current moment. We suffer.

The key to acceptance is viewing what is true in the current moment as just what is and not adding meaning to it.

We must drop our story and focus only on the facts to do this. This requires objectively looking at the story you are telling yourself about where you are at and seeing it for what it is - a story.

6. Choose Your Tools Without Attachment

The truth is Mindset alone is not going to accomplish your health and fitness goals. You will have to take action to get where you want to go.

The key is how you view those actions. Are they a fix, or are they just the tool you are using?

When you align your mindset and vision with your values, you can ORIENT your efforts on your vision.

#2 - FOCUS on the step in front of you:

Now that you have oriented on your vision, the next step is to focus on the action in front of you.

This is the workout today. The food you are eating today. The things you are doing today.

OR

You are setting your intention for things you will do tomorrow — For example, setting your gym clothes out before you go to bed so that you are ready to go in the morning.

The critical thing to do here is to keep your current actions aligned with your vision and connect with how they make you feel in the present moment…

And know that your ego WILL try to pull you off track.

My ego has a remarkable doing this.

It has a way of hijacking my efforts to be healthy and taking them too far.

It can be subtle but starts with a feeling of shame that I quickly skip, followed by thoughts of fixing...

For example, if I eat poorly the following day, when I wake up, there will be a moment of shame followed by a stream of thoughts of wanting to go on a long fast or be super strict with my diet to fix...

Or I might think of a vacation we plan to take this summer, and pretty soon, I’m thinking about how I will look in July.

I've learned to become aware of this tendency very fast.

When I become aware that I’m doing this, my next step is to look up and determine if my thinking and actions are taking me in the right direction. Are they cultivating the desired feeling or creating tension and suffering?

Am I facing west towards the mountain I want to climb in July? Am I taking the actions that will get me there and filling my bucket right now? — Or Am I facing south toward the beach, imagining having a body that will get me validation? Are my actions leaving me feeling empty?

#3 - CELEBRATE the step you just took!

The best way to keep the action you are about to take aligned with your vision is to celebrate the step you just took!

Success IS a constant feedback loop of wins and challenges that reenergizes and informs your mindset along the way.

Celebrating my success and challenges has been critical to sustaining my momentum throughout my weight loss journey.

Each time I celebrated a small win, I connected to the feelings I wanted to cultivate in the current moment.

When discussing celebrating success, it’s easy to focus on the wins. In my view, it’s just as important to talk about our failures and challenges because that is where growth happens.

When we have an opened-minded Mindset, our failures and challenges are no longer presented as obstacles to accomplishing our dreams. They become the Sensei of life, teaching us the lesson we need to learn to grow.

Our failures and challenges point us to the Emotional Work we must do as we become more integrated human beings.

As I reflect on my weight loss journey, I can see that the most meaningful times were found in failure and challenge — The moment I accepted that failure or challenge and surrendered to the lesson it was trying to teach me.

Every time I accepted my failure and challenge and surrendered to life’s lesson, I was unburdened by the weight of a wound from the past.

Closing Thoughts

I’ll close today with a post I shared with the Men of the Man Talks Alliance. It was the moment I first discovered the source of my suffering around my weight loss and health. This moment of awareness set off eighteen months of emotional work that led to my current weight loss journey.

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Discovering the Source of My Suffering

December 16, 2020

I recently discovered my "addictive" pattern of using "discipline" to fix myself. It happened for me for years with diets, but it took me becoming obsessed with my morning routine of breath work, journaling, walking, etc., to see it. When I finally had a break in the pattern, a vacation, I completely fell off the wagon and went to my other addictive habit of numbing out to social media, news, eating, and thinking. I turned something good for me into this ugly "have to" to fix myself.

For the past few months, I've been playing with just doing small things, with some success and some failure. I recently committed to one small round of breath work and a short mediation every day (transparency, I'm about 50% on this).

This morning I did my round of breath work and then mediated, and I got present with a feeling in my legs. It was tension. As I sat with it, I became aware of fear. I am afraid of discipline because of the addictive pattern it brings out in me. I'm also scared of the inevitable failure that follows.

The pattern's origin became crystal clear as I looked back at my childhood. I would overachieve somehow because I wanted my Dad to take me with him, away from my mom's alcoholism. When I would fail and be stuck with her, I would numb out to protect myself.

I discovered dieting as I grew older and put on weight from the numbing. Around the 8th grade, during wrestling season, I lost 30 pounds and, for the first time, was a "skinny" kid. All of a sudden, I got attention from everyone but especially girls. I went from trying to win my Dad's love to winning everyone else's.

I'm sitting here trying to sort out what to do with this. I can see how my fear has me stuck. For now, I'll keep taking baby steps and taking on small things, but I know this is an area for me to work on.

In my previous posts, I talked about how shifting your Mindset and doing the Emotional Work to heal the wounds that keep you stuck are the critical first steps to a successful weight loss journey.

There is actually one small but MONUMENTALLY critical prerequisite for starting this work.

You must get real with yourself about where you are at!

AND

You must take responsibility for YOUR actions and behaviors that got you there!

I did nearly three years of personal growth and healing work before I was finally willing to get real with myself and take responsibility for where I was at with my health and fitness.

During those three years, I made magnificent strides at healing the wounds I carried from the pain I endured at the hands of my Mom’s alcoholism. However, each time I came up against the truth about what was holding me back with my health and fitness - my addictive tendencies - I pushed it away.

I pushed it away because I didn’t want to FEEL the pain this truth revealed about me.

That there was a part of me that was like my mom’s addiction.

I avoided this pain by numbing it out with Netflix and pizza.

OR

I tried to make it go away by looking for a fix for what I perceived was wrong - I had a quest for the magic weight loss bullet.

Each time, whether I was numbing or fixing, I was looking for something outside of me to fix what I perceived was wrong - so that I didn’t have to experience the pain of the truth.

Only when I admitted the truth to myself - to the world - that I, like my mom, have my addictions was I able to finally shift my Mindset and begin the REAL Emotional Work of discovering that I didn’t need something outside myself to heal.

It was within me the whole time.

Looking back at my weight loss and healing journey, I can see four distinct realizations that lead to four specific actions that set me free:

Realization #1: Avoidance is a Coping Mechanism

• Action: Get Honest & Get Started

Realization #2: Rejection of What is Creates Resistance

• Action: Accept Where You Are At

Realization #3: Personal Responsibility Creates Personal Empowerment

• Action: Take Ownership

Realization #4: Pain is the Gateway to Freedom

• Action: Experience What You Are Afraid Of Feeling

Realization #1: Avoidance is a Coping Mechanism

Avoidance is a mental drug.

It allows you to bypass unwanted feelings by placing your awareness somewhere else.

The problem is that avoidance delays experiencing unwanted feelings. The result is that those feelings are ultimately amplified and get recycled over and over. A toxic cycle perpetuates.

Action to Take: Get Honest & Get Started

There are two critical actions to take when it comes to avoidance.

1. Get Honest - put into words what you are avoiding. Write it down in a journal and tell a trusted friend or accountability partner.

2. Get Started - once you have got honest about what it is you are avoiding, commit to getting into action. Be specific: I will take action X by time Y.

In my weight loss journey, I was avoiding being consistent with my nutrition and getting physically active. In April of 2022, I discovered I would have hip surgery in June. When faced with the surgery, I was forced to admit I was avoiding getting to the gym. I had to get into action and start working out to be ready for my surgery.

Where I stumbled was I was hesitant to fully commit to taking on a nutrition plan. It wasn’t until the end of July, after I regained the weight I lost in the months leading up to my surgery, that I was willing to finally be honest that I was avoiding taking on my nutrition.

Only after being completely honest about where I was did I create the space to start making real progress. This ultimately led to all the actions I have taken to be healthy - it led to real weight loss.

Realization #2: Rejection of What is Creates Resistance

There is a paradox in self-development and healing work.

You must accept yourself fully to change.

At first, this idea seemed confusing to me. Until one day early in my weight loss journey, while looking at my then 300-pound self in the mirror, I had a thought.

”…I could lose 100 or even 150 pounds, and if I don’t heal the parts of me that are triggered by the stress and emotions that drive me to eat - those triggers and behaviors will be waiting for me on the other side. And I will most likely gain the weight back...”

It was like a mic drop. This was the moment I chose to accept myself fully.

And that was the moment real healing began - weight loss began.

Seeing this truth allowed me to choose to accept everything about myself, my strengths and flaws alike. Even weighing over 300 pounds...

My world began to change when I started to accept rather than reject my reality.

I finally understood that rejecting what is creates internal resistance to change. It does this because rejection pushes the very thing you need to heal away from your presence - preventing you from healing it.

You have to feel it to heal it. When you reject what is, you are creating resistance to feeling what needs to be felt to heal. As a result, you can not heal.

When I finally accepted the truth about my addictive tendencies with food and dieting, I created the space to heal the wounds that got me over 300 pounds.

The pounds began to melt away as I tapped into the pain I was unknowingly clinging to.

A space was created for me to give myself the love I so desperately was craving from the world. When I started cultivating this love for myself, I no longer looked to the world and food to fill that void.

Action to Take: Accept What Where You Are At

You might ask yourself, “how do I accept what is? How do I accept where I am?”.

The answer is that you must become aware of the truth and see what you’re attached to that is creating resistance to that truth.

I have developed a personal journaling exercise to help me to get to acceptance of what is. This is a mantra of questions I came up with while reading "Awareness" by Anthony De Mello.

These questions help me see my ego and what I'm attached to. Working through them helps me let go and choose happiness in the current moment. I keep this posted on my vision board above my desk:

How fast can I recognize I'm triggered and start asking myself the following questions?

1. What is the underlying desire that's causing my suffering at the current moment? And can I follow that desire back to a more significant wound that needs to be healed?

2. Am I feeling what needs to be felt?

3. What do I need to let go of right now to be happy in the midst of being triggered?

4. What is the lesson this moment is trying to teach me?

When I work through these questions, I become clear on what is blocking me at the current moment.

*note: sometimes, when the trigger or block is really big, it is helpful to get on the phone with a friend and talk through it so they can mirror what I am avoiding and feeling.

Realization #3: Personal Responsibility Creates Personal Empowerment

One of my core protective behaviors that I learned in childhood is to defend myself at all costs - especially when I think my mistake results from something I perceived to be caused by an external source.

One of the things I love about my wife is that she expects me - and my kids - to own my actions, no matter the reason.

Before I started my personal growth work, this was the source of many of our conflicts, as I would defend myself to the death.

As I’ve done work on myself, I’ve come to see my wife’s core value of accountability as one of the greatest gifts in my life. It has led me to show up as the best man I can be.

And as I’ve shown up with integrity in my marriage, I’ve shown up with integrity for myself.

What I’ve learned is that personal responsibility creates personal empowerment.

No one can make me eat pizza.

No one can make me go to the gym.

And no one is coming to save me.

It’s all on me.

That may seem harsh to hear at first. However, this realization is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.

Because when you take personal responsibility for everything you do, you have the power to bring about the change you desire.

You will no longer look to the world, someone else, or the future to change you.

You will become the change you seek.

Action to Take: Take Ownership of Your Past

The first action you need to take to take personal responsibility for where you are is to take inventory of what got you here in the first place.

Take some time to journal about what isn’t working

For example: “I am 150 pounds overweight. My obesity could lead to my early death. I got here because I haven’t been physically active, and I have been overeating. I haven’t dealt with the impact my mom’s alcoholism had on me. Instead of using healthy tools to manage my emotions, I turn to food”.

Once you have taken an honest inventory of where you are and what got you there.

Then take some time to see what actions make sense next.

For example: “I commit to walking for 30 minutes daily during my lunch hour. I will not eat after 8 pm and will cut out added sugar. When I feel stressed or emotional, I will pause and do five minutes of intentional breathing and journal my feelings. I will join a Men’s group and deal with the unhealed pain from my mom’s death”.

Realization #4: Pain is the Gateway to Freedom

Avoidance of pain is the cause of suffering.

Pain is just a messenger. It contains the information we need to point us in the direction that will lead to our growth and healing.

When we reject and resist feeling our pain, we push this message away and do not learn what we need to know to heal. As a result, we continue to experience this pain over and over. Every time I came up against the truth that I have additive tendencies with food and dieting, I was faced with the pain that I might be like my mom - an addict.

When I rejected the negative parts of me that I perceived to be like the negative parts of my mom, I also dismissed the positive parts of me that were like the positive parts of my mom.

I rejected the very attributes about myself that I needed to help me to heal my relationship with my addictive tendencies.

Thus I repeated the same pattern over and over.

Action to Take: Experience What You Are Afraid of Feeling

The key to getting through pain is to let yourself experience it. This may seem scary and counterintuitive, but on the other side of pain is freedom.

On the other side of my pain, I have found so much more than losing over 100 pounds ~ I have discovered who I am.

Closing Thoughts

I’ll close today by sharing one of my moments of clarity that I shared with my Brothers in the Mantalks Alliance. It was one of the moments where I paused to admit the truth and take responsibility for where I was at - It would still be two and half months after this moment before I would fully tap into the power of surrendering to the truth. But this was one of the many steps toward that moment.

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What have I been avoiding?

May 12, 2022

What have I been avoiding? My physical fitness…

I left the National Guard five years ago, and when I did, I let myself go. Honestly, part of the reason I got out of the military is I had already let myself go - I didn’t want to face the humiliation of failing my body fat test.

Three years [2019] ago, I started my healing journey, and two years [2020] ago, I joined the Alliance.

During that time, I’ve worked on everything but my physical fitness…

I was avoiding it. Somewhere inside, thinking that by fixing what was wrong in my mind and soul, I would magically just become fit.

During each cycle of working on myself, I kept returning to my fitness and my shadow hiding in that place. Each time I rejected looking there and rejected feeling the deep wounds and emotions within its depths.

Until now…

This is my work now. I’m facing what I’ve been avoiding. This is where I must heal…

Four weeks strong going to the gym. I have been feeling the wounds and feelings that come up as I venture into this place. As I do, I’m feeling my strength come back and feeling a fire being lit that I’ve suppressed.

For most of my life, my perfectionism is what got me stuck - especially in the area of my physical fitness.

My perfectionism took shape in the conditions I put on starting. It was the thing that kept me from moving forward and caused me to trip and fall.

Until I started doing my personal development work I thought I wasn’t a perfectionist - most of the time.

I always thought my problem was laziness…

As I did my work, I realized was my laziness was a symptom and byproduct of my perfectionism.

What I ended up finding was that my perfectionist standard is what kept me stuck.

Sometimes it got me stuck in rigorous patterns of overworking, but more often than not it kept me stuck in doing nothing.

The reason for this is simple:

I would set such high standards for myself to get started that I ended up spending most of my time just waiting.

It kept me waiting because those perfect conditions would rarely happen.

And when by some miracle of the universe things would finally align in a way that I would start, I had such high standards that I would push myself beyond my edge. The result of this was I would burn myself out or get disenchanted by my lack of results and I would quit.

Healing my relationship with my perfectionist standard is what enabled me to break through the weight loss barrier that kept me stuck at over 300 pounds.

Looking back I can see I took five actions that freed me of my perfectionism.

• Action #1 - Stop Waiting To Start

• Action #2 - Finding an Accountability Partner(s)

• Action #3 - Fully Accepting Myself

• Action #4 - Letting go of “My Way”

• Action #5 - Making the Way I Feel Be the Measurement of Success

#1 - Stop Waiting To Start

The first action to take to free yourself of the prison of perfectionism is - Just start!

Stop trying to figure out all the details of how you should be doing it and just start moving forward. You have to remember that “trying to figure it out” is a protector. The job of this part of you is to keep you safe from perceived danger and it does this by keeping you stuck in your comfort zone.

Comfort zone = safety

Safety = no action

Taking action without having all your ducks in a row feels dangerous to the subconscious.

Trust me it’s not!

The key here is to take baby steps. Maybe it’s going for a walk, maybe it’s just getting to the gym, or maybe it's a choice to cut out the extra snacking throughout the day. It doesn’t need to be complicated. It just needs to be a SIMPLE action that you can practice CONSISTENTLY that points you in the direction you want to go.

There are only two rules to action number one:

1. Only push yourself to your edge…

2. Don’t wait to start; Do it now!!!

#2 - Find an Accountability Partner

The second critical action to free yourself from the filter of perfectionism is to find an accountability partner.

An accountability partner will remind you of who you have committed to being, especially in the moments when you just want to quit. They will call you forward when you are reverting to the protective behaviors that keep you stuck. They do this by mirroring the blindspots of your shadow that you can not see back to you.

Having an accountability partner also builds a sense of community and tribe. The road of discipline is easier traveled in a community than alone with your thoughts.

#3 - Fully Accepting Yourself

Once you have started the wheels of your committed action in motion the next action is to do the Emotional Work required to fully accept yourself for who are, what you have done, and where you are at.

You must heal the parts of you that scream some version of “I’m not good enough” or “there is something wrong with me”.

The first step of this healing is to slow down and listen past the voice in your head. You must be willing to hear that critical voice not as an adult but as the child who first internalized your negative thoughts. You must be willing to sit with and experience the feelings that your little inner boy or girl was not able to process and feel.

Once you have stepped through this gateway of pain from your past experiences you will see a simple truth.

There is nothing to fix.

Your thoughts and negative emotions, just are.

Your past actions are just something you did, they do not define your future.

And when you do this a space will be created for you to bring compassion and love to those wounded parts within. You will no longer seek to avoid or reject them, but love them as if they were your child.

When I did this for myself I saw something that resulted in a shift…

I gave up trying to be happy someday. I stopped looking for something in the world and for something in the future to make me happy.

And when I did this I was given a choice to be happy right now in the current moment, over and over…

When I accepted this choice to be happy right now I was given another choice.

To accept everything about myself, my strengths and flaws alike. Even weighing 316 pounds...

And when I began to accept rather than reject my reality, my world began to change.

The pounds began to melt away as I tapped into the pain I was unknowingly clinging to.

As I gave myself the love I so desperately was craving from the world, I no longer looked to the world and food to fill that void.

I’ve recently passed the 100-pound mark of my weight loss journey (316 lbs to 212).

The reality is it’s been a four-year journey of healing from the grief I was holding onto from the battle I waged against my Mom’s alcoholism. A battle that led to her death in 2007 ~ I had internalized a failure to save her from herself. Over time failure after perceived failure stacked on until one day, I woke up and the scale read 300+…

During the first 3 years of this healing journey, the scale did not budge, despite all the work and all the awareness… I could not sustain any kind of discipline.

In 2022 I made a shift. A shift from seeing “something is wrong here” to finding complete acceptance and surrender to where I was at. Even when I still weighed 316 pounds.

The moment I choose to fully accept myself and where I was at a space was created for compassion and love to enter… And the pounds started melting away.

Discipline was no longer a grind, discipline became an act of love…
- Matthew Maes, via Instagram

#4 - Letting Go of “My Way”

The next action to free yourself of perfectionism is letting go of “my way” of doing things.

My perfectionism results in me having close-minded thoughts and rigid behavior.

It is an unrealistic ideal that I hold myself to. It either keeps me stuck by thinking that the only way I can start is to have all my ducks in a row, or it makes the experience of what I’m doing miserable through rigidity and obsession.

The “My Way” thoughts that keep me stuck sound like this:

• Once I get motivated I will…

• I’ll start on Monday…

• When I get a personal trainer…

• After my birthday…

• Once the kids are done with soccer season…

• When I get a little more time…

• I just need to figure out…

• Maybe if…

• Maybe when…

The “My Way” behaviors that make me rigid and obsessive when I’m in action look like this:

• No flexibility for life to happen around me. When something comes up that feels disruptive to my agenda I become anxious and grumpy.

• My actions become the center of my world; For example in the past when I would diet it would consume my thoughts and it was all I would talk about.

• I push myself beyond my edge which always leads to burnout.

• I am driven by a need to get it right, there is no room for mistakes or failure.

There are two key “red flags” that I’m in my perfectionist mindset:

1. I’m putting conditions on doing what I need to do.

2. I’m thinking or saying some variation of “I have to” or “I should”…

The way to move past “my way” behaviors and thinking are to align our Mindset to our bigger why. We must commit to get started and to be open-minded to whatever comes up for us along the way.

This open-minded mindset will create the space for us to bring awareness and compassion to the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that keep us stuck and make us rigid.

We must also bring awareness to the underlying desire that motivates those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

It is critical that we also bring compassion for ourselves when we do this Emotional Work of bringing awareness to these shadow parts of us. Compassion allows us to hold what awareness shows us with love.

Compassion keeps us from pushing action into obsession and rigidity.

Compassion allows us to practice discipline lovingly.

Together awareness and compassion allow us to see and hold our protective parts with love ~ so that we can let go of the pull they have on us.

#5 - Make the Way You Feel the Metric of Success

The final action to free yourself of your inner perfectionist is to intentionally let how you are feeling be your metric of success.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t celebrate tangible victories. You should!

It is still very important to celebrate all your wins.

The key is that you don’t let those tangible wins become the focus of your journey.

Do not let the outcome-based wins become your why…

You have to keep the “why” of your journey aligned with your values.

When the why of your journey is aligned with your values and not the outcome - you shift experiencing the gratification of the journey from the destination to the current moment.

Success is no longer experienced by attaining an outcome ~ it is experienced in the feelings you cultivate in the current moment.

The way you feel in the current moment becomes the metric of success.

Tips for working with the inner perfectionist:

1. How do you know when you are not in the current moment?

Bring Awareness:

What I have done is to bring awareness to the moments when I catch my mind drifting off into the distance.

This is a practice of getting to know your thought patterns that take you away…

For me these are the moments when I catch myself thinking about someday with thoughts like “when I weigh 160 pounds…” or “I’ll look great on the beach”…

2. What do you do when you realize you are lost in the future or the past?

Bring Compassion:

Recognize that the ego will always pull you away from the now, it’s what it does.

There is no need to react to yourself with shame or renunciation.

The game is not to not to fall into the trap of distracting yourself from the current moment. This is just another from of perfectionism.

The game is how quickly can I become aware that I have fallen into the trap.

Then respond to yourself with love…

I do this by saying things to myself like:

“It makes sense you would want to lose weight to look good for the beach ~ but you know what, your family will love you no matter what, I will love you no matter what”…

Closing thoughts…

I’ll close today with a post I shared with my brothers in the Mantalks Alliance. It was the moment I saw that my perfectionism was not just the behaviors that push me to extremes but also the thoughts and beliefs that keep me stuck.

Meeting My Perfectionist

August 29, 2021

I had a prompt today that I struggled with in the book “Claim Your Power”…

“In my creative life what I am letting go of is?”

I struggled to come up with something that felt right. All I could think of is waiting for the right time and being creative to get approval.

Later in the day my wife and I were talking and she asked me when I was going to help my daughter make another YouTube video for her channel. That it’s been a long time since I made one with her and it’s really important to her.

I started going off on my excuses of how busy we have been and she says “all I hear is it isn’t important”.

I said, “I see that, but it takes hours to make a video and everyone gets upset when I spend a whole Saturday editing”.

She responds “I could make a video on my phone in 30 minutes”…

I responded “but to make the video right and make it special it takes hours to edit…”

Then my wife hit me with a freight train.

She said, “It doesn’t have to be perfect, you keep waiting because you’re trying to make this perfect video and all she wants is something simple”.

I sat in silence and she could tell she struck a chord with me.

My wife showed me where my perfectionism holds me back.

I have this story that I have to put everything into something and if I don’t have time then I can’t do it. So I put that thing on hold.

The two areas of my life this impacts me the most are my creative expression and my health.

So the answer to my prompt for the day is:

What I’m letting go of in my creative life is perfectionism.

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I learned a lot about myself losing 100 pounds. I have learned to surrender to and accept that I have my own addictions... 

Just saying the words "I have addictions" is new to me. Four years ago I would have never said that. I would have rather had my fingernails ripped out than say those words. 

Why?

Because in fighting my mom's addiction to alcohol for the first 25 years of my life I put my own addictions in my shadow.

For me, addiction feels like a sneaky snake. He hides in the shadows and strikes at his unsuspecting victim, unleashing his venom into them and transforming his victim into a raging bull - Destroying everything. 

Addiction was my enemy and must be fought at all costs - for him to exist in someone meant something was wrong with them. For him to exist in me meant something was wrong with me.

By refusing to acknowledge that I, like my mom, have the sneaky snake of addiction within me, I had allowed him to slither freely in my shadowlands.

Only by facing myself in the mirror and acknowledging my unwanted parts could I see this.

Facing My Shadow

Before I embarked on my weight loss journey I spent nearly four years working through and healing the grief I carried from my Mom’s battle and death from alcoholism in 2007.

I also had to face the pain I had buried deep inside from being abused as a small child at the hands of my Mom’s addiction. The pain I so clearly carried in the many pounds around my waist.

At some point, this work brought me an awareness of my own addictions. 

My addiction to numbing out pain with food.

This is a coping mechanism I developed around age eight or nine - When the overwhelm and trauma of my mom’s alcoholism were just too much for my young developing mind to comprehend and handle.

At first, when my awareness shined a light on this painful truth I felt immense sadness and shame.

"How could I let myself develop an addiction"?

I had fought my mom’s addiction with everything I had only to have it show up within me.

Shame would have me push this truth away through renunciation; Through pushing myself with my other addiction - Fixing myself, which in the case of my health manifests through extreme diets and exercise. 

This other addiction has always led to burnout and then going off the rails by numbing out with food.

See a pattern?

The last four years of healing work brought my awareness to my shadow. To my addiction to numbing out and fixing.

However, despite all the healing work and all the awareness it was not until about seven months ago that things began to really change in the area of my health and fitness.

They changed because throughout 2022 I began to shift from just having an awareness of my addictions to actually bringing true acceptance and surrender to them.

Surrendering to the truth about my addictive tendencies created a space to hold myself with compassion and love.

Radical Acceptance - Embracing My Truth With Love

The last seven months of my weight loss journey have taught me something.

Awareness alone is not enough.

We must also hold ourselves with compassion.

There is a duality between awareness and compassion…

Awareness allows us to see our addictions and weaknesses...

Awareness allows us to become present to the feelings that come up...

Awareness allows us to see the underlying desire...

Compassion keeps us from taking awareness to a place of shame and renunciation.

Compassion allows us to hold what our awareness brings with love.

It allows us to be with what is.

For example, compassion allows me to say to myself:

"It makes sense you really want that pizza; It sounds really good; It smells really good; It would taste really good..."

Compassion allows me to be with my desire without pushing it away.

However, compassion alone is not enough either.

Compassion unchecked would have me indulge my desires or wallow in self-pity and despair.

Awareness keeps our compassion in check. Awareness keeps us from indulging in those desires just to feel good. Awareness keeps us from dwelling in self-pity and despair.

We do this by bringing our awareness to the consequences and suffering that indulgence of our desire or dwelling in our self-pity would bring... 

In the example of pizza, I bring awareness to the shitty way I would feel tomorrow if I ate it...

And then, I let myself make a choice at that moment...

I recently found that when presented with the consequences of suffering simultaneously with feeling desire, the desire tends to dissolve. It losses its grip.

Which tells me what? 

In my example above - I didn’t really want the pizza. I wanted the way the pizza would make me feel.

And when I held that desire compassionately and presented myself with how I would feel the next day ~ I didn’t have to push the desire away anymore. It just naturally dissolved.

A space was created for me to cultivate the feeling I was seeking internally without some external addictive substance like pizza...

This duality between awareness and compassion is called “Radical Acceptance” and it is the key to recovery from all addictions.

Before radical acceptance can be possible we must do the hard Emotional Work of shining the light of awareness on our shadow. We must be willing to face the truth we are avoiding and experience the pain and grief that are waiting for us there.

We must be willing to see our pain and grief as life’s teachers ~ to receive the lesson awaiting us on the other side of it.

I’ll close today with the moment I first shined the light of awareness on my truth. It was the moment that I began my process of receiving the lesson held in my pain and grief.

This was the letter I wrote to addiction. The intention of this letter was to separate my Mom from her addiction ~ through the process of writing the letter and separating my Mom from her addiction I was finally able to see addiction in myself.

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Letter to Addiction

December 2, 2020

Addiction,

Fuck you. I fucking hate you. You do not deserve to have a “dear” in the salutation because you are the worst. You took everything from me. You took my mom, you took my childhood, you took my twenties, you took my dreams, you took my traditions, you fucked it all up. 

Under my sadness, I am filled with anger. I feel it in my bones.

I try to understand why? Why did you have to get in the way of my mom’s healing? She was a beautiful soul. She had beat you, why didn’t you just stay away?

When you are suppressed you are like a sneaky snake, creeping in the background and waiting to strike. When you unleash your venom you transform your victim into a raging bull. Destroying everything. 

Your thirst is unquenchable. My mom lost everything feeding you. She sold my violin to feed you, she sold her wedding ring, my dad's wedding ring. She spent her half of the divorce money on you.

You caused my mom to lock me outside in the snow. You turned love into hate. Right now I feel anger rising in me. From my chest radiating out. My eyes are squinting, my face is burning.

When I feel overwhelmed by the pain you have caused, I numb out and check out. I distract myself from you, from discomfort and pain. I endlessly scroll, if a device is not accessible, I endlessly think, scrolling through thoughts in my mind. I can eat without thinking. Where scrolling is numbing, eating feels good, for a minute.

I am afraid of you. Afraid of you slithering into my life, my spouse or my kids, into me. In my teens, I avoided alcohol and drugs because I feared you were in me. In my twenties I binged and partied playing with my edge, going far enough for you to be a threat but not far enough for you to creep in. Keeping in Control.

Control is my addiction. The place you have slithered in. I plot and scheme to keep my world safe and comfortable. Taking risks and living big would mean leaving this safe space and giving up control.

I have fought you my whole life. The battleground has not always been the same. Sometimes it was within me, sometimes it was with others.  

When I was little it was a literal battle for my safety. Defending myself from the raging bull you transformed my mom into. I had to navigate the craziness of my mom’s ups and downs. I was sent messages like “I love you, go away”. I became anxious, walking on eggshells, and hyper-vigilant to emotional cues. My dad was the safety net from the battleground you created with my mom, I became the golden star to get his attention, so he would take me with him.

When I was a teenager the battleground was my will against my moms. She had supposedly recovered from you, but really you just migrated from alcohol to control. She controlled her world to keep you away from her and from me. Little did she know you were in the driver's seat the whole time.

In my twenties, we faced off fighting for my mom’s life. She ultimately lost her “control” and alcohol came creeping back in after 13 years. The raging bull was back. It destroyed everything. Our family, my mom, our traditions, everything. 

Desperately I fought you for my mom. I got her into rehab, but she relapsed. I brought her into my home, only to have her relapse and have to drive her home. When, in the last year of her life, she went missing, I got adult protective services involved and she was put in the state hospital, only to check herself out. Finally, in the last week of her life, I begged her to get help, to dry out, only to have her die trying.

After her death, I unknowingly allied with you as I became addicted to controlling my world to avoid failure.

The thought that I could let you trick me like that makes me feel shame, sadness, and anger. Anger at you, anger at me. Time fucking wasted. Part of me wants to go back and redo my twenties and early thirties. I could have been someone great. I am filled with deep regret over the time wasted controlling my world.

Not anymore, I’m done letting you run my life. I choose presence, awareness, and love. I have dug, and continue to dig up the pain you caused. I have felt the sadness you have brought, let the anger I have held back come out. I have more to feel, more anger to let out, but I am not going to avoid you or the feelings you have brought anymore. I surrender to control, I can not control control, so I will just be with it.

-Matt

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In week one I talked about how Mindset sets the Foundation for Excellence. How our mindset sets the intention behind every action we take. That shifting the intention behind my actions from fixing myself to being in alignment with my bigger why led to not only achieving weight loss, it led to internal peace and harmony through actions of self-love.

In the second week of the series, I broke down how Emotional Work unlocks the resistance that holds you back. By doing the hard emotional work around my addictive tendencies with dieting and then numbing out with food I was shown the blindspots that were keeping me stuck in my weight loss journey.

Finally, last week I talked about how Disciplined actions are actually acts of love. When you are disciplined you take consistent daily actions out of a commitment of love for yourself. These consistent disciplined actions are the multiplier that manifests personal change.

Consistently aligning my Mindset to my bigger why, doing the Emotional Work of feeling and healing what has come up along the way, and taking daily Disciplined actions of self-love have led to my weight loss Success.

This week I am going dive into what Success really is.

But first, let me tell you what success is not…

Success is NOT about the result at the destination of a journey.

So if success is not about the result at the end what is it about then?

Success IS a constant feedback loop of wins and challenges that reenergizes and informs your mindset along the way.

As I have progressed on my weight loss journey a critical element to sustaining my momentum and reenergizing my mindset has been celebrating my success.

It seems like universal synchronicity that this week, as write this article, I am hitting a major weight loss milestone of success.

I have lost ONE HUNDRED POUNDS! And this article is a form of celebration!!!

Throughout my journey celebrating my success and challenges along the way has been critical to sustaining my momentum. I have discovered that there are four critical elements of success.

1. It’s Not About the Destination

2. Celebrating Wins Sustains Motivation

3. Sharing with Community is a Must

4. Failures and Challenges are Where Growth Happens

#1 - It’s Not About the Destination

In my past weight loss endeavors I was always focused on attaining an outcome to fix what I viewed as wrong with me. My celebration of success was reserved for meeting the goal. Delaying my celebration of success had everything to do with aligning the intent of my weight loss efforts with achieving an agenda. An agenda that would have me feel good “someday” when I reached my goal.

Shifting my Mindset from fixing myself to aligning with my bigger why meant that the destination was no longer relevant. My focus was no longer on the distant future but right now in the present moment. Success was no longer about attaining a goal but cultivating a way of being.

When we fixate on a goal or outcome it becomes our prison. We outsource happiness and vitality to the future.

Freedom is found in the present moment, in choice.

I’m choosing actions not to attain some future outcome. I am choosing actions because they cultivate a way of being in the present moment.

If I’m choosing my actions to cultivate a way of being right now in the present moment, then inherently I can choose to celebrate my success at any given time.

Success is no longer something I’m attaining someday, it’s something I’m continuously creating right now.

#2 - Celebrating Wins Sustains Motivation

Celebrating my weight loss wins helped me to tie the actions I have been taking to be healthy back into my bigger why. It has fueled my momentum, which has kept me going.

Each time I celebrated a small win I connected to the feelings I wanted to cultivate in the current moment. I felt the peace, love, and harmony that was the real objective of my weight loss journey.

Continuously connecting to the love behind my disciplined actions began to create its own motivation. Like an avalanche that gathers energy as it moves down the mountain, my discipline began to create its own force...

Celebrating my success daily fueled this sustaining force of disciplined energy.

My celebration of success took shape by creating daily rituals of celebrating the love behind my actions.

For example, though out my weight loss journey every night I have written myself a love note and left it on the fridge. I have done this for two reasons.

First, to encourage and support myself in moments of weakness, when I wanted a midnight snack. Second, and most importantly, to celebrate me for the win of the day.

I also made a daily ritual of every morning acknowledging that “I did it, I made it through another night” by taking the note from the night before and moving it from the sticky notepad to the top of the fridge.

As I continuously celebrated the small wins I started noticing that I didn’t feel the "have to's" anymore, I started to experience the "get to's"... I began to notice that each day discipline began to feel natural.

#3 - Sharing with Community is a Must

Sharing my weight loss wins has kept me accountable to my commitments and connected to my purpose.

Every time I share my journey I am called into action to continue to be disciplined. If I share my journey and I am not continuing to do what I need to do to be healthy then I am out of integrity with my word...

Sharing my journey has become an action that calls me to be in integrity with my commitments.

Every time I hit submit on my Instagram videos or share a link to a post on Substack about my weight loss journey I alter the trajectory of that day and week. I know without a doubt I am going to get up and go to the gym; I am going to hit my fasts and do my breath work.

All the noise of the excuses of why it would be okay to skip today become just that, noise, they lose their pull on me.

Additionally, if posting my writing and sharing videos of my journey on Substack, Facebook, and Instagram inspires just one person, including myself, then I am living my purpose.

Sharing my writing and videos is an action that calls me to be in integrity with my purpose…

Finally, sharing my wins directly with the people in my life keeps them connected to and invested in my journey. They are there for me when I need support because I have made them a part of my experience. They become the tribe that holds me accountable for my values.

I also get the opportunity to inspire them to take action for themselves.

#4- Failures and Challenges are Where Growth Happens

When we talk about celebrating success it’s easy to just focus on the wins.

In my view, it’s just as important to talk about our failures and challenges because that is where growth happens.

When we have an opened-minded Mindset our failures and challenges are no longer presented as obstacles to accomplishing our dreams. They become the Sensei of life, teaching us the lesson we needed to learn to grow.

Our failures and challenges point us to the Emotional Work we must do as we venture toward becoming more integrated human beings.

As I reflect back on my weight loss journey I can see that the most meaningful moments were the moments of failure and challenge. Specifically the moment I accepted that failure or challenge and surrendered to the lesson it was trying to teach me.

Each and every time I accepted my failure and challenge and surrendered to life’s lesson I was unburdened by the weight of a wound from the past.

I’ll close today with a win I shared with the Men of the Alliance at the milestone of fifty pounds lost. It was a moment of not only celebrating a win but letting myself celebrate learning the necessary lessons of my weight loss journey. It was also a moment I experienced how necessary community and accountability were for success in my journey.

The first 50 pounds

November 4th, 2022

50lbs lost! I’m down from 316 pounds to this morning I weighed in at 266 lbs!!!

This image captures the essence of my journey with this…

Peeling back the layers of weight I put between the real me and the world… A wall to protect me from it [the world] ~ or maybe to protect it [the world] from me???

As I’ve dug into this work of healing the part of me that numbs with food, the universe has given me challenges and conflicts to test me.

Somehow I managed to take on my health and fitness at the same time I’m addressing a long-standing conflict.

The result was I was forced to feel things I didn’t want to feel. Many times the heat of the conflict happened on a fasting day. Forcing me to sit in the emotions without food to numb out with…

A couple of times the conflict dragged across multiple days, meaning it started on a fasting day and stretched into the day I was supposed to eat. This forced me to face another part, my controlling part, as I became aware of the fear of letting go of the fast during emotional turmoil and “losing control” with food…

Finally, I’m finding two critical tools I’m building to support me in this journey ~ Rituals and Tribe…

One day a few weeks ago I had just completed my morning ritual of going to the fridge and honoring that I made it through another night by pulling my nightly love note off the notepad on my fridge and placing it above the pad under a magnet.

Each night before bed I remind myself that the win of the night and day before is in the past by crumpling up that note from the day before and throwing it away. Then I write the next love note.

This particular morning it struck me that last night was a really big win. I wanted to cave in so badly, but I didn’t, something in me was stronger than that.

Then I saw the fear… “What if the fire dies down.”

In pure synchronicity, right at that moment I received a text from another man in the Man Talks Alliance asking me to be an accountability partner in an area he was working on.

That’s when I realized that’s where accountability comes in…

I committed to reaching out to him if ever the urge to cave in on my commitment to not snacking comes up. To reach out for support if life's emotions become overwhelming and check in regularly on how it’s going.

What I found interesting was that my weight loss successes had been found in cultivating rituals of self-love…

The timing of his text seemed to be synchronous for us both as if the next step before us was integrating tribe.

Creating tribe within our personal rituals of self-love…

In week one I talked about how Mindset sets the foundation and intention for all your actions.

Last week I shared my view that Emotional Work is the lynchpin of my formula because it unblocks the resistance and breaks the patterns that keep you stuck.

This week I’m going to dive into Discipline, which I believe is the multiplier that manifests personal change through consistent daily actions of self-love.

I call this practice of daily actions of self-love, Loving Discipline.

Loving Discipline consists of four actions.

• Action #1 - Shift your Intentions from Control to Love

• Action #2 - Disciplined Commitments

• Action #3 - Practice Daily Rituals that Cultivate Love

• Action #4 - Consistently Show Up for Yourself

When the four actions of Loving Discipline are practiced consistently the result is cultivating a sense of internal peace, harmony, and love within.

Action #1 - Shift your Intentions from Control to Love

Reflecting back on my weight loss journey I can see how in the past I was scared of discipline. I was scared of it because I mixed up being disciplined with being in control.

When I am driven by control, the intention behind my actions comes from a desire to achieve an outcome that I believe is necessary for my happiness or survival.

This leads to actions and behaviors that are:

• Rigid; I don’t have the flexibility for life to happen around me. When something comes up that feels disruptive to my agenda I become anxious and grumpy.

• Obsessive; My actions become the center of my world; For example in the past when I would diet it would consume my thoughts and it was all I would talk about.

• Exessive; I push myself beyond my edge which always leads to burnout.

• Perfectionistic; I am driven by a need to get it right, there is no room for mistakes or failure.

When I am being rigid, obsessive, excessive, and perfectionistic I think I am being disciplined but the reality is that I have become attached to the outcome I am seeking. Everything I am doing is centered around the outcome to which I have outsourced my happiness, love, and joy.

These behaviors leave no room for failure because I have outsourced my happiness, love, and joy to the outcome.

As a result, when I inevitably fail I am filled with shame. This shame creates a wall of fear that prevents me from taking further action.

A cycle of doing nothing perpetuates.

Breaking this cycle requires I shift the intention of my actions from trying to control the outcome of my life to cultivating love.

To shift to love I must practice the first two steps of my Formula for Excellence:*

1. Shift My Mindset so that the intention of my actions is aligned with my values

2. Do the Emotional Work to feel and heal what comes up.

*Note: If you have not read the first three articles of this series I highly recommend starting at the beginning with Mindset + Emotional Work x Discipline = Weight Loss Success

Action #2 - Make Disciplined Commitments

Once you have shifted your intentions from control to love the next step is to make disciplined commitments that when practiced consistently will lead to the accomplishment of what was meant for you.

In my case shifting to love allowed me to make disciplined commitments that would lead to health and vitality and a sense of peace and harmony within:

• I push myself to my edge with physical activity every day, no further. I let the fire within come forward and manifest in my physical fitness.

• I follow my fasting protocol and only eat within my allotted eating windows. I bring awareness to the emotions and thoughts that come up along the way.

• I am compassionate with myself when I slip and fall. I listen to the inner child within. I provide him reassurance and a structure to come back to.

• I write every day, be it a sentence or ten pages. I face the resistance that keeps me from my passion and I put ink to paper.

Practicing your disciplined commitments will mean you have given yourself a choice. A choice to ignore the pleasures of the current moment for the rewards of the future — but you allow yourself to make that choice not to control the outcome but out of the love you feel for yourself at that current moment.

Action #3 - Find Daily Rituals that Cultivate Love

In my article on Mindset, I talked about the difference between routines and rituals.

Routines are something you do to accomplish an outcome, they are a means to an end.

Rituals are something you do to cultivate a feeling.

One of the greatest ways to sustain your commitment to discipline is to create rituals that cultivate love and then practice them on a daily basis.

There are going to be days on your journey when you just feel like “I don’t want to do this anymore”.

These are the days when daily rituals of love are so important. They become their own source of motivation and power by bringing you back to the love behind your commitments.

For example, when I first started off on my weight loss journey, I would write myself a love note every night and place it on the fridge so that I could read it in moments of weakness. In the moments when I wanted to give up and have a midnight snack to make myself feel better. In the note, I reminded myself what I could do instead of reaching to food for comfort, that “I got this” and that I loved myself.

Action #4 - Consistently Show Up For Yourself

Consistency is the glue that will hold your discipline practice together. If you do not show up consistently then you will not attain the results that are meant for you.

Consistency is more important than intensity. It is critical to only push yourself to your edge and no further.

For example, if your edge for physical fitness is a ten minute walk, then only do that much every day. Anything more than that would not be an act of love because you are no longer creating health, you are hurting yourself.

One of the greatest gifts I gave myself was starting off my weight loss journey while I was recovering from hip surgery. My doctor had given me physical limitations and boundaries that set my edge for me. I knew that I must not press beyond the edge he defined or I risked undoing what the hip surgery corrected.

This forced me to use the crawl, walk, then run approach to physical fitness. I had to take baby steps.

By showing up every day in small consistent ways I built the self-trust and confidence I had lacked in all my previous attempts at weight loss.

Learning that discipline is an act of love that requires consistent actions has been one of most important the lessons in my life

I’ll close today with an ah-huh moment I shared with the Men of the Alliance in February of 2022. It was my first moment of clarity, the moment I began to cultivate what loving discipline looked like for me.

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Am I disciplined or am I at war with myself?

February 5, 2022

I used to think being disciplined meant I had to force myself to do what needed to be done to fix myself. I fought an inner war, a part of me pushing and yelling at the other parts to get in line to win the battle to destroy what was wrong with me.  It was an act of self-hatred.

It came in the form of doing things in extreme. Not getting the results I want, I'll get up at 4:30 am instead of 7:00 am. Not losing weight fast enough, find some crazy insane diet and follow that. Wife mad at me? Dance around on eggshells trying to accomplish every possible chore and task under the sun.

I used to love to run, the pain of the grind. I thought this grind was a form of discipline, two labral tears in my hips later the collateral damage of my inner war keeps me up every night.

The problem with going to war with myself is that I create a state of "armed conflict" inside. War brings destruction, chaos, and pain. Inevitability my other parts would have enough of the inner turmoil and revolt. After every episode of going to war with myself, I would spring back in an equal and opposite reaction, inner chaos would ensue and any tactical gains would be lost. I would be overtaken by shame.

In the past year, I've come to see discipline as a form of love. It is a commitment to do what needs to be done to create inner harmony, health, and peace. It is an action in alignment with what is, acceptance of the current moment. 

It looks like waking up 30 minutes early to do breath work and meditation but doing so without an agenda. Accepting whatever comes up, feeling whatever comes up.

Sometimes discipline isn't fun, it’s facing the inner resistance to doing what I don't want to do, but only doing so at my edge.

It looks like going for a 30-minute walk instead of some insane HIIT workout when the only movement I've had for the last six months is my office chair to the kitchen. It’s baby steps.

Discipline is picking myself back up with compassion when I slip and fall. It’s viewing each day as an experiment of aligning myself with my bigger vision.

It looks like meditation and reflection when I inevitably fail. It’s feeling the feelings that come up and giving that ten-year-old boy inside the reassurance he needs. It’s having a structure in place for those parts to come back to, but also being willing to tweak that structure when something doesn't work anymore.

Discipline is being flexible and open-minded. A willingness to bend but not break. A commitment to try out new things and accept that some things just don't work.

It looks like doing five minutes, even one minute of breath work instead of 30 when the morning has gotten out of control. It’s giving up the pattern of crazy diets that worked but really didn't.

Discipline is working with my inner parts. It’s understanding that the ten-year-old inside needs to be guided not yelled at and forced to comply.

It looks like love notes left to myself in a moment of strength to be read by myself in a moment of fear or frailty, reminding myself of my bigger vision and that I got this.

As I've been working towards giving up the inner war with myself and turning toward loving discipline my life is beginning to transform. I'm steadily working towards my greater vision, but doing so in acceptance of what is, surrendering to the current moment as I go. I am finding peace and happiness each day and in each moment.

Mindset + Emotional Work x Discipline = Success

This week I’m going to dig into Emotional Work, which I think is the critical element of truly creating personal change.

Doing emotional work shows us our blindspots and unlocks the resistance that holds us back from becoming the highest version of ourselves. If we skip over doing the hard inner work of experiencing our grief and pain we are bound to keep repeating the same old patterns over and over again.

In my view, emotional work involves continuously repeating five actions.

Action #1 - Be Honest About What You Are Avoiding

From an open-minded mindset take an honest assessment of what is holding you back in your current struggle.

Grab a piece of paper or journal and write down the following question:

What am I avoiding with [fill in your current struggle] is?

Write down the first answer that comes to you, before the protective parts of you push it away or deny it.

The answer to that question will very likely make you feel icky, give you a pit in your stomach or make your heartache. This is a good thing, it is your intuition pointing you to what you need to heal!

As I shared in a previous post, in my struggle for weight loss I was avoiding the truth that I use food to numb pain and that I use control to fix the resulting shame.

When I first faced this truth I felt shame and embarrassment (icky feeling). This is why an open-minded mindset is such a critical first step. If we are not open-minded we will succumb to our instinct to push away or numb out the uncomfortableness of the truth.

Coming at my truth from an open-minded place I was able to see that the addictive relationship I have with food and dieting was in control of me because I was avoiding it.

First, I would put all my energy into fixing what was wrong with me by dieting. This would result in pain and burnout. Then I would go off the rails and binge to make myself feel good and numb out the pain with food. I would never actually get the results I wanted because I was so wrapped up in the yo-yo of going from super controlling to super lazy. The yo-yo itself was keeping me stuck.

When I let myself surrender to the truth about my addiction to using food and dieting to numb and fix I took my power back.

Being willing to sit with the uncomfortableness of the truth of my addictive behaviors with food and dieting gave me the clarity to see what I could do differently.

Action #2 - Feel and Experience the Emotions You are Holding On To

Once you are clear on the truth you are avoiding the next step of emotional work is to let yourself feel and experience the emotions you are feeling, in particular, pain and grief.

Emotions are just “energy in motion”. Like waves at the beach, emotions come and go.

When we don’t allow emotions to just naturally pass through us we create a dam inside - in our attempt to avoid or numb unwanted emotions we end up holding on to them.

Holding on to and avoiding feeling our unwanted emotions keeps us stuck because the actions we take to avoid or numb those emotions turn into unhealthy patterns.

I had been holding on to my perceived failure of gaining so much weight. I didn’t want to feel the uncomfortable feelings around the truth that I had let myself go.

In my attempt to reject feeling the pain of failure, I perpetuated my addictive patterns.

• I would eat to numb out from the pain of my failure…

• Then overcorrect the wheel with unhealthy diets to fix the resulting shame…

• The diet would result in pain and burnout…

• Then I would numb out from the pain…

• Rinse and Repeat - Over & Over…

Admitting the truth to myself that this yo-yo was an addiction and then letting myself experience the resulting feelings of failure, shame, & embarrassment ended the cycle.

It freed me from the weight and power those emotions had over my psyche.

sidenote:

The pervasiveness of the pain and grief I was carrying was much larger than just my perceived failure for gaining weight.

I spent nearly three years working to heal the pain and grief from my Mom’s battle and death from alcoholism ~ On the other side of that healing work I arrived at the pain of my own addictive behaviors with food and dieting.

I plan to include future posts with more details about that healing journey with my Mom’s addiction in the future.

Action #3 - Give Your Self the Love and Safety that is Needed

Once you have experienced the emotions that you have been holding on to the next step in emotional work is giving yourself the love and safety that is needed.

How do you determine what is needed to provide love and safety?

The answer is found in the underlying desire of the truth you were avoiding and in the felt experience of the emotions themselves.

Ask yourself this question:

When I am avoiding the truth that [ ______ ] what I am really desiring is [ ______ ] so that I can feel [ ______ ] ?

For example:

When I am avoiding the truth that I have an addiction to dieting and binge eating what I am really desiring is to put an end to the internal tug-o-war and feel at peace and harmony within.

Once I determined what the void was that I was trying to fill by avoiding the truth I connected to what I truly needed to feel love and safety. From this place, I gained clarity about what I could do differently moving forward.

When I realized that what I really desired was to put an end to the tug-o-war of binging and dieting so that I could feel peace and harmony I was called to take the following actions:

• Creating a daily practice of self-love. I began to write myself love notes reminding myself that I didn’t need to turn to food to numb out.

• Practice loving discipline by consistently taking actions that my body needs to be healthy. Aligning those actions with my values and not a superficial goal.

• Continuously practicing letting go of control and rigidity by being flexible with my approach to diet and exercise. Letting life happen, without being rigid or by doing the opposite and going off the rails.

• Completing embodiment practices of breath work and meditation on a daily basis.

• Using my writing to process my emotions and express my love & creativity.

Action #4 - Let Go of What No Longer Serves You

In my journey, I’ve come to see every challenge, every time I get emotionally triggered, as a gift.

It is a gift because each of those moments of hardship is providing me with the lesson that I need to grow into becoming the highest version of myself.

Each and every one of the lessons showed me something that I need to let go of because it no longer served me. It showed me that what I was holding onto was blocking me from experiencing happiness.

The question to ask yourself is:

What do I need to let go of right now to be happy in the current moment? What no longer serves me?

When I asked myself this question the answer I got back was:

I need to let go of tying my happiness to my weight loss and choose to be happy right now even though I weigh over 316 pounds…

As I shared in my article The Myth of Happiness, happiness is a choice. It's a choice to accept life as it is, right now in the current moment, regardless of the circumstances. 

Happiness requires only one action on your part. Letting go of what you are clinging to as a dependency of your happiness. When you do this you are no longer waiting for someday to live your life, you are living it right now.

Action #5 - Practice Awareness and Presence

The final step to emotional work is to realize you are never done doing emotional work.

It is a continuous, lifelong process of practicing steps one through four.

You do this by making a conscious effort to be present with your emotions and thoughts at all times. You look to bring a high sense of awareness to yourself and to see the story you are always writing out in your mind.

One important note here.

The game is not, to not fall into the trap of thinking you will never avoid the truth again or never fall into repeating your past protective behaviors again.

The game is seeing how fast you can become aware that you have fallen into the trap and begin the emotional work of:

1. Admitting the truth

2. Feeling the emotions that come up

3. Providing yourself the love and safety you need

4. Letting go of what no longer serves you

Emotional Work in Practice - A Recent Example.

In my last article on Mindset, I shared about the medication my doctor put me on to help with my weight loss. It's called Mounjaro and it's a GLP-1 agonist.  Basically, it aids weight loss by suppressing appetite and lowering insulin (it's a type II diabetes medication). Because of how overweight I was and that I was prediabetic my endocrinologist put me on it.

I recently read an article that talks about how when people come off GLP-1 agonists they tend to gain the weight back. A key detail deep in the article is that it's critical to make lifestyle changes while you are on the medication and not just depend on it. This is important so that when you come off you are more likely to maintain your weight loss (most people don't do this).

It turns out that seeing this article was truly a gift because it triggered me in a huge way. It was calling me to do the emotional work on what I was avoiding.

When I realized this I started the process of doing the emotional work around my trigger with the Mounjaro.

Action #1 - Be Honest About What I am Avoiding:

Answer: The fact is that when I come off of this mediation statistically speaking I will not succeed.

Action # 2 - Feel and Experience the Emotions I am Holding On To

Result: I felt FEAR!!! I had been bypassing the fear that statistic creates. I took some time and let myself really sit with and be with that fear.

Action # 3 - Give Myself the Love and Safety that is Needed

Result: Once I let myself fully experience the fear of the statistics about coming off Mounjaro, a space was created for me to see the reality of my situation. I was able to connect with my underlying desire which is to achieve peace and harmony by embodying a healthy lifestyle.

From there I objectively accessed what was true:

First, I went into using Mounjaro by viewing it as just a tool in my health and fitness toolbox, it’s not a fix or magic bullet.

Second, the whole time I’ve been on Mounjaro I’ve been building healthy habits and doing the emotional work of healing my relationship with eating and dieting.

Finally, I realized it’s critical for me to double down on leveraging my accountability and support network in my journey.

Action #4 - Let Go of What No Longer Serves Me

Answer: It no longer serves me to hide from the truth of the statistics about coming off GLP-1 medications. By sharing in the open my fears of coming off Mounjaro I free myself of the anxiety those fears bring.

Action #5 - Practice Awareness and Presence

Result: Once I got really present with the fear that was behind my avoidance of the statistics of coming off Mounjaro I was able to get back to practicing awareness and presence. I realized this fear is going to keep coming up and that’s okay. It’s just an opportunity for me to reflect and access if I am practicing and cultivating the habits I need to succeed in the long run.

Emotional Work is a life long journey. Currently, I’m diving into another chapter of emotional work with the Men of the Alliance as we dig into Conner Beaton’s new book Men’s Work. I highly recommend this book for any man that wants to create lasting change in their life.

I’ll close today with a note I shared with my brothers in the Man Talks Alliance in September of 2022. It was right after I lost my first twenty pounds - a moment where the emotional work of the past three years began to pay off in changing the patterns of my relationship with my health and fitness.

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My First Big Weight Loss Win

September 22, 2022

I want to celebrate. I'm at nearly a month of consistent daily wins in my health and fitness journey ~ I'm seeing the results, I'm down from 316 pounds the month after my surgery to this morning I weighed in at 292 pounds.

Part of my success has been a shift. A shift from trying to use shame to fix myself to making a daily practice of taking it "One Day at a Time, One Night at a Time" and consistently cultivating self-love. 

One of my rituals of cultivating self-love is every night before bed I take out a sticky pad and write myself a love note. I write this note to the younger part of me that wants to numb out from life, from pain. 

Over the course of the month, this note has evolved to become a form of self-acknowledgment. I remind myself of the win of the day and what I've overcome. Finally, I include some encouragement for when I inevitably wake up in the middle of the night and go to the fridge for comfort. When I'm done I stick the note on the fridge.

I have also created a morning ritual of celebrating the win of the night by taking the note off the fridge handle and placing it on the fridge door when I wake up each morning and then acknowledging that: I did - I made it through one more night.

This morning as I did this I had a thought "I'm one bad choice away from unraveling everything"...

I instantly thought of my mom and her alcoholism. My heart opened and I was filled with newfound compassion for her.

My mom was drunk most of my adolescent years but she recovered from her alcoholism when I was about 11 years old - She maintained her sobriety for 10 years, until around my 21st birthday, when she made one bad choice and everything unraveled. Her relapse destroyed her life and four years later she was dead.

The thing is my mom didn't maintain her sobriety for 10 years out of self-love. She grit her teeth and clenched her fists every day, keeping her demons at bay with control, until one day she didn't have it in her anymore, and that's when she made the one choice that destroyed her.

As I thought about this I could see all my past attempts at "fixing" my health and fitness; That they had been a form of control. I had grit my teeth and clenched my fists and it was exhausting...

I realize that part of "One Day at a Time, One Night at a Time" is not putting the pressure of one bad choice unraveling everything on myself. I have the faith and resolve that if I were to make this choice I would pick myself back up and go again; However, I also recognize that there is a naive part of me that would use this logic to tell me why it's okay to make that bad choice just this one time...

So as I stood there this morning looking at my note I was reminded why daily rituals that cultivate love are critical for my continued success in my journey.

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This week I am going to deep dive into how shifting my mindset has been the foundation of not only my weight loss success but success in my overall healing journey.

Shifting my mindset involved six powerful actions.

Action #1 - Create a Strong Foundation - Find Your Why

If a building is built upon a faulty foundation it will crumble and fall. Much like a building if we do not create a solid foundation to hold our vision, our efforts with health and fitness will crumble and fall as well.

For much of my life, I built my weight loss efforts on a faulty foundation.

My underlying motivation for weight loss was all about achieving an outcome so that I could get acceptance and avoid rejection. My thinking process was if I lose weight I will be happy.

The intention behind my actions was not tied to a bigger why that was in alignment with my values. It did not light me up inside. In reality, it actually created fear, anxiety, and resentment.

Each time I would take on health and fitness goals they would be centered solely on behavior modification. I attempted to use willpower alone to push myself toward my goals.

The problem with this approach is that we all have a limited supply of willpower. It just can’t last in the long haul.

I was missing one critical ingredient to successful self-change, INSIGHT!

Before I could move forward with weight loss I had to reflect internally and connect to my bigger why.

The previous years of my healing work had shined a light on my why. I began to reflect on what actually moved me:

• Creating a sense of harmony and peace within me.

• Cultivating self-love through healthy actions.

• Being able to do the activities I love like running, biking and hiking.

• Being there for my spouse and kids long into their lives; Not putting them through the pain of losing a parent at 25.

As I connected to my why I began to feel the internal resistance towards my health and fitness efforts drop.

Action #2 - Intention - Set Goals and Take Actions that are Alignment With Your Values

Once I aligned the foundation of my fitness efforts to my why I was able to set goals and choose actions from a place of clarity.

The intention behind my actions and the goals I was choosing started to come into alignment with my values.

• I view each day as an experiment that informs my next steps, I do not seek perfection, only what works. 

• I look for gratitude in my health and fitness triumphs and challenges alike.

• I maintain separation from my ego and my story through daily embodiment practices of breathwork and meditation.

• I push myself to my edge with physical activity every day, no further. I let the fire within come forward and manifest in my physical fitness.

• I follow my fasting protocol and only eat within my allotted eating windows. I bring awareness to the emotions and thoughts that come up along the way.

• I am compassionate with myself when I slip and fall. I listen to the inner child within. I provide him reassurance and a structure to come back to.

This shifted the energy behind those actions and goals from something negative - fix what’s wrong with me - To something positive, providing deeper meaning and fulfillment.

When the intention behind our actions is focused on achieving an agenda it is not sustainable, it depletes our energy. This is because we are seeking a feeling that we hope to get at some point in the future “someday”. As a result, we are left feeling empty right now in the current moment.

When the intention behind our actions provides meaning and is connected to our values and purpose it becomes sustainable because it creates a feedback loop that reenergizes us. We are continuously cultivating feelings that are in alignment with our why right now in the current moment. As a result, we are left feeling fulfilled.

Action #3 - Shift from Making Decisions to Choices

Is there a difference between a decision and a choice? After all, either way, you make a selection from a subset of options and then move forward.

I’ve come to realize on my healing journey that the difference between making a decision and a choice comes down to how I’m left feeling afterward. It’s all about intention.

Here is the definition I use:

DECISION: A selection made after making various logical considerations.

CHOICE: A selection made after making various logical considerations, exploring them, setting them aside, and then connecting to what feels right.

In other words, a decision comes after using your mind to logically analyze something and pick what you think will work best to attain an outcome or result.

A choice involves looking at all the options, examining and exploring them, then setting them aside and doing what feels in alignment with your truth…

A decision involves eliminating and narrowing options and picking what best serves the desired outcome; It involves an agenda.

A choice is all about what feels right and comes from a place of creation and possibility; It results in freedom.

When you make decisions you experience the “Have-To’s”.

Ie: I have to go to the gym today.

When you make choices you experience the “Get-To’s”.

Ie: I get to go to the gym today.

My experience has shown me that the get-to’s take me a lot further than the have-to’s.

When I shifted to making health and fitness choices instead of decisions the internal resistance to my actions dropped. I actually started to enjoy the process.

I experienced a sense of internal freedom.

Action #4 - Cultivate Rituals not Routines

Just like choices and decisions, rituals and routines are all about intentions.

Routines are something you do to accomplish an agenda, like making your bed every day so that your room is clean. Routines are a means to an end, the only meaning behind them is the agenda itself.

Rituals are similar to routines with a big exception. They are something you do to cultivate a feeling. Rituals are less about the outcome and more about the meaning you put into them.

For example, every night before bed I write myself a love note to remind myself that “I’ve got this and I love myself” so that if I were to wake up in the middle of the night and be tempted to midnight snack I will be reminded of my bigger why.

Nine times out of ten I never have to look at my love note in the middle of the night. That’s because the action of writing the note has already accomplished the meaning I’ve put behind it, it has cultivated self-love.

Action #5 - Acceptance of The Current Moment

If your intention is going to be in alignment with your values and bigger why you have to be willing to take one critical action - accept what is true right now in the current moment.

For example, before I made the shift to accepting where I was at I was rejecting that I weighed 316 pounds. In other words in my mind, I was saying there is something wrong with me because I weigh this much, I must fix this.

This created suffering and resistance within me. It shifted the intention of my actions away from my values and why to fixing what I viewed as wrong with me. The result was the cultivation of negative feelings and an attachment to the outcome.

When we are attached to an outcome, for example, losing weight, we have outsourced our happiness to that result. We are left feeling anxious in the current moment. We suffer.

The key to acceptance is viewing what is true in the current moment as just what is and not adding meaning to it.

To do this we must drop our story and focus only on the facts. This requires objectively looking at the story you are telling yourself about where you are at and seeing it for what it is - a story.

My story was that I did not know how to balance my tendency to be pulled to the extremes of laziness and hyper-controlling fitness efforts. I believed that because of this I was stuck. I also rejected that I was okay as a person because I weighed 316 pounds.

When I dropped this story I accepted that I was fundamentally a good person, even though I weighed 316 pounds and I created the space to objectively look at the facts about my health condition. I became opened-minded and connected to my following value:

• I do not have all the answers, nor do I have to figure them out. I am open to feedback.

In this space of acceptance and open-mindedness, I met with an endocrinologist. He confirmed that I had reached the point of being labeled pre-diabetic.

I asked him “what do I do to become healthy”. He recommended two actions.

First, I take a medication called Mounjaro, a Type-II Diabetes medication that lowers A1C and has been shown to aid in weight loss.

Second, I Choose an eating plan in one of the following categories:

1. Low-carb (Atkins, Keto, South Beach, etc.)

2. Fasting (preferably alternate day) or

3. Whole Food (whole 30, paleo, vegan, etc)

He explained that all the plans that tend to be effective in reversing type-2 diabetes/pre-diabetes and obesity fall into one of those three categories. That all the plans in a given category are 80 to 90% the same, with their unique “catch” to sell their book. More importantly, each of those eating plans does two things, reduces insulin and creates a calorie deficit.

His advice was really that simple, in less than five minutes he gave me the answer I had spent my whole life looking for.

I was able to receive it because I was open to feedback. I had accepted where I was for what it was, the facts and not my story.

Action #6 - Choose Your Tools Without Attachment

A trap that I have fallen into many times in my life is looking for the “golden ticket” that is going to save me from all my problems.

Up until my moment of surrender on July 31, 2022 every diet I had ever done was an attempt to fix myself. Each and every time I had gone into it thinking this is the “magic fix”. I became attached to the diet and its intended outcome as what was going to fix me and make me happy.

The truth is Mindset alone is not going to accomplish your health and fitness goals. You will have to take actions that will get you to where you want to go.

The key is how you view those actions.

Are they a fix or are they just the tool you are using?

When I showed up at the endocrinologist's office in September of 2022 I had already shifted my mindset and intention. I wasn’t looking for a fix. In fact, I went in into his office in acceptance of the possibility that he may not be able to offer me anything that would help. I was completely open-minded to any possibility.

When he presented me with my options I was given the opportunity to CHOOSE what I felt would work best for me based on my values and my lifestyle.

I choose to go on the medication he recommended but I didn’t view it as a fix. I choose to view Mounjaro as just another tool in my health and fitness toolbox. I also choose to pick alternate-day fasting as the tool for my eating plan.

Viewing Mounjaro and fasting as my chosen tools opened me up to see what they were really doing for me.

They were quieting the food noise my body was giving me so that I could focus my efforts on the more important thing, the mental and emotional food noise.

Mounjaro and fasting were also doing two other things, managing my insulin and creating a calorie deficit so that I could lose weight in a way that was compatible with my lifestyle.

This is the gift of mindset and acceptance. It opens us up to growth and understanding.

Mindset and acceptance create the space and set the intention for the next component of my formula for personal excellence, surrendering to the emotional work of processing the feelings that come up along the way.

I will close today with a note I shared with my brothers in the Man Talks Alliance the week before I met with my endocrinologist. It was one of the moments I shifted my mindset and intentions from fixing to cultivating self-love.

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Learning to Cultivate Self-Love

September 6, 2022

I was asked yesterday "How is your progress with health and fitness going?" 

How I deal with what is uncomfortable is at the root of my struggle with my health and fitness.

I have come to recognize the part of me that gets overwhelmed and wants to check out with his phone or distract from uncomfortableness and pain by shoving popcorn in my mouth as one of my protectors from an age when I didn't know how to deal with my mom's alcoholism, so I checked out. I have vivid memories of my childhood (good and bad), with the exception of age six to ten or eleven, when I checked out by eating and watching TV. 

For the past ten years, I've dealt with really bad hip pain. It keeps me up at night, and often I don't sleep for more than one or two hours without waking up in pain. When it gets super uncomfortable I tend to midnight snack ~ I know I am doing this to numb out from the uncomfortableness. 

Since my hip surgery in June, I have had some improvement with this, but there are still nights when my hips keep me up.

Last night I left the part of me that wants to numb out at three AM with a little note of encouragement… (I've done this before)

When I woke up in the middle of the night and saw the note I remembered my commitment and that my metaphorical car of consciousness was being driven by the part of me that wants to numb out.

My note got me through the night without snacking to numb out; Actually, it wasn't really the note, but the intention behind it that got me through the night.

Today, I realize that this note is not a fix. I can’t just stick that note on the fridge every night and expect to succeed.

It has to be one day at a time. One night at a time. The love behind the note, be it writing one every night or some other ritual, must be cultivated CONSISTENTLY.

I don’t need to be held accountable for not midnight snacking.  I need to be held accountable for consistently cultivating the love my inner child needs to make it through the night, for he is still protecting me from the pain long ago...

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