Modern Wisdom - #184 - Ethan Suplee - What It's Like To Lose 300lbs & Adele's Transformation

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

Ethan Suplee is an actor & a podcaster. Ethan's fitness journey has been a rollercoaster - from 200lbs at 10 years old to 550lbs in his 20's and now 260lbs at 13% bodyfat, all while starring in some of the biggest films in Hollywood including Mr Name Is Earl, The Wolf Of Wall Street & American History X. Expect to learn Ethan's thoughts on the response to Adele's weightloss photo, his advice for anyone looking to lose lots of weight, his lessons from decades of dieting and much more... Sponsor: Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ Extra Stuff: Follow Ethan on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ethansuplee/ Subscribe to American Glutton - https://americanglutton.net/ Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello people in podcast land, welcome back. My guest today is Ethan Supply, Hollywood actor, extraordinaire and fitness animal. Today we are talking about his amazing weight loss journey of nearly 300 pounds from being 200 pounds at 10 years old to peaking at probably around 550 to now walking around at 13% body fat at £260. The guy looks like the epitome of a badass. Got the trucker cap on, the hardcore beard and the biceps to go with it.

This is so cool and amazingly inspiring. We also get to talk about the difference in the public's response to his transformation photo and Adele's recent controversy when she released a photo of her having lost quite a large amount of weight and there's some really good insights there. We get into some of the specifics of diet and if you're someone who is looking to understand how to better control your eating, there is no better role model than Ethan. He has dug into the science, he doesn't stick to the ideologies. I really think this podcast could be a massive help to a lot of people. And it's just a cool story, man. Like I worked on the Wolf

or Wall Street. Well, in the United Acaprio, you know, like it's a hero. In other news, this episode of the podcast is brought to you by the Modern Wisdom Ultimate Lifehacks list. That is right. I have finally released it after two months of compiling a list of every life hack we have ever featured on this show. That is more than 200 ways to upgrade your existence. The Modern Wisdom Ultimate Lifehacks list is finally live and you can get your copy for free. Simply head to ChrisWillX.com slash lifehacks. ChrisWillX.com slash lifehacks and you can download your copy today. I'm so excited for this. I've been working on it for ages, it has been a few late nights and some sort of tears and blood and sweat and all that sort of stuff that's gone into it. But it's so sick. It's awesome for me to revisit all of the old episodes

that we used to do. And I, you know, it would have probably been a much quicker project if I'd not been pissing myself or all of the different jokes and all of the weird hacks and stuff that you've joined in myself have come up to. But this is two and a half years of condensed life hacks in one document. It. There will be so much stuff that you can take from this and apply to your life two day. There's products, there's tools, there's apps, there's resources, there's websites, and there's just different strategies for ways that we think you can live a productive and efficient life. I feel like the world needs a little bit of fun and brightness at the moment, so this is free. I don't know if it's going to be free forever, so make sure you go and get your copy now,

while it is still free, ChrisWillX.com slash life hacks. And if you enjoy it, if you use it, if you get some of the stuff from it, give me a tag, let me know what you think of it. I would love to hear your feedback. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Ethan Supply. What's your t-shirt, Simon? It says, I killed my clone today. What's that reference to? There is a martial arts, I did a television show called Chance with a fellow countryman of

yours, Hugh Worry. And I played this character where I was like basically my first official badass character. And the character was based on a real guy who is actually a military and martial arts instructor. He teaches like the elite military dudes how to fight with knives like that's his job And so in playing in meeting him and spending time with him I trained with him a bunch and he had this whole philosophy about kill your clone so every day you meet the clone of yourself from 24 hours in the past and you have to fight to the death and

of yourself from 24 hours in the past and you have to fight to the death. And if you've improved yourself by 1 1,000th of a percent that day, you will kill your clone. So the point is to kill your clone every day. So this shirt is saying that today I did that. I killed my clone. That's so sick, man. I'm gasped. I'm gasped for today's episode, dude. I've just finished training and nearly did this podcast without shorts on. I keep on needing to put shorts on, but I put shorts on. We're here.

I've got shorts on. Is, what's up, guys name? What's the? Tom Kair. Tom Kair is the real life guy that I put. He's, the character that I played was based on Tom Kair. If you ever saw a movie called The Hunted with Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio del Toro, it's about special forces guys who are good with knives. He like created all of that knife where he's a he's a true badass dude. So is it like

Krav Maga type stuff or even more? I think it's even a step in the more hardcore from when you get more hardcore than Israeli militant. Yeah, you're not serious. Serious shit. So do you think that's the pivot now for your acting direction? The sort of big badass kind of gruff.

It's always in the action film, it's the dude that's got two 50-cal machine guns in each hand. You know, the belts of ammunition, you reckon that's kind of the pivot direction? This is all the pivot I want to happen. Who knows if it actually happens, but yes, I'm in. Give me two 50-cals and belt fed machine guns and all that

and I'm fucking in or we'll have to say fucking. You can say fucking as much as you want, my friend. Yeah, that would be, because I mean, you're not going to do sweet young uncle very well anymore. I don't think you can do that. Yeah, I hope not. I don't wanna do it. I've done it quite a bit.

Yeah, you know, like you can't just play the best friend because who's that guy? It's just that's just like Uncle Bob in the corner. It's like Uncle Bob looks like he wants to kill someone. Yeah, it's such a weird thing too because with acting, I feel like I can play that kind of innocent, sweet, kind of dumb, buddy or brother very well, and I've done it a lot. But like as a little kid, I never physically matched this, but I loved action movies and shoot them up and stuff. So my dream would be for sure to do something like that. I've not gotten to do it, but I would love to.

Bro, it's happening. It's happening so hard. And I'm going to be there. Me and Michael Malle is going to be there with a huge, huge tub of popcorn. Well, Michael wants these little counting calories. But I'll be there with a huge tub of popcorn. Michael will be there with a diet drink.

It might be refeed day. You never know. Right. And then he'll have bubblegum Flavor ice cream. That guy, man. Do you see that he's doing, what was it he told me? He's doing a cream egg challenge. Do you tell you about it?

I don't know, I don't know about this. Every week, I get a message on signal from him that's like, dude, am I one of your countrymen yet? And he's ordered every different type of British jam that he can get. Do you see his cereal? The thing when he was doing all that different cereal? Yes.

What on earth? Malice, I know that you're listening, man. Like, I love you, but I get worried because some day someone's gonna send you something in the post, which is 45 year old, like confectionaries or something. And it's gonna kill you. And I don't want that to happen.

I don't want to say that for me. But and it's gonna kill you and I don't want that to happen But he's gonna have fun. He's gonna go out and style man. Yeah Fossilized chili from the 5,000 years ago or whatever it is that he's managed to find on eBay the guys are savage And so look man, why don't you I want to know about sort of your fitness journey Starting at when you were at your heaviest and taking you till now? Right. My fitness journey has been a bit of a roller coaster. I mean, if we go back to like five years old, at five years old, I think if you looked

at me today, I would not look like an overweight five-year-old. I had chubby cheeks. I definitely had a bit of excess fat, but I wasn't fat. I went to visit my grandparents and they were like, holy fuck, this kid's loss. This kid's parents are doing nothing for him. We're putting him on a diet. And so I kind of developed this way of eating very early on,

which was I would sneak food, I kind of developed this way of eating very early on, which was I would sneak food, because at five food was restricted, and if I wanted a second helping of food, I'd have to eat it in the kitchen very quickly before anybody could see. And so then I just kept getting put on diets throughout my life, but I was very good at treating at diets, because I didn't want

to be on a diet. It was kind of like this authoritarian thing of like, you're on this diet now. Yeah. And my mom, bless her heart, was always very excited when the nutritionist or whoever it was would say like, oh, you understand it's not that he eats too much. It's that he's eating this food that is poisoning him. If he could just handle Candida, he wouldn't be fat anymore. Or I remember, as a kid, there was a period.

I don't even know what the diet was called, but where it was like white foods are bad. As long as he doesn't eat anything white. And it was literally like white potatoes are bad. And white cabbage are bad and white cabbages bad. Red cabbages fine. You know like apples are bad. Oh no no not apples. Green apples are bad. Man is is bad. Cottages anyway. And then there was a subsequently years later a red phase where it was like anything red

is bad. White cabbage is good. Red cabbage is bad. cabbage is good red cabbage is bad anyway fucking chaos right and so by the time I became kind of autonomous and Started working as an actor and had money. I was like The greatest thing you can do is hit a fast food drive through at two o'clock in the morning I didn't really like eating in front of people and so at that point my weight skyrocketed by and so at that point my weight skyrocketed by 2,000 that was 536 pounds. Now I say 536 pounds because I'm fairly sure I was heavier than that at some point but I had weighed myself once because that you can't you don't have a scale that can tell you that weight at your house So I went to a place that had a special scale weighed myself

Left and was like well fuck it. I mean that's the number. I What do I do and I gained weight from there too? So I have no idea what I actually got you were um 200 pounds at 10 years old right? Yeah 10 years old. I were 200 pounds at 10 years old, right? Yeah, 10 years old, I was 200 pounds. And that's when my parents started putting me on diets. Prior to that, my grandparents had put me on diets, but after 10, my father was like enough of this.

What age were you at the 536? 536, probably 21. And not long after that, I met a girl. The girl never brought up my weight once. She was hot and I had been with girls that I didn't really care about before that that you'd meet at a nightclub and you girls that I didn't really care about before that. That you'd meet at a nightclub and, you know, I wasn't, I never thought about future with girls. And so suddenly I'm with this girl and, and I'm starting to think about like

wanting to have a long-term relationship with her. And, and I realized that the things that she enjoyed doing, I wasn't necessarily cut out to do. She liked hiking and spending days at the beach and going on trips to Europe and walking around all day. And I was like, no, Europe, you sit at a cafe and you just eat and then you have a car hired to take you somewhere else.

Like you don't walk around, I'd never taken public transportation and she's like telling me about how great the train systems in London and Paris are. And I'm like, I'm not just not going to do that. So I started to think about weight loss and that. So the first time I decided that I needed to lose weight, it was about maintaining this relationship with the girl. And I had the most bizarre situation where I had to ask her for help.

And in asking her for help, I was scared because she had never brought it up and it was almost like I have a secret. I have to tell you this secret. She might not know. She might not know that I'm overweight and I need to be overweight, right? I'm 500 plus pounds.

And I really had this like fear of like if I tell her that I'm overweight, she'll know. How will she ever be able to look at me the same way again? I don't want to ruin this. And I finally broke down and said like, I don't know what to this. And I finally broke down and said, like, I don't know what to do. This is crazy. I got to let you in on this secret.

I'm 500 pounds. I have some excess weight. Could you help me take it off? And she was like, oh yeah, we can do that. No problem. Here's this diet. Let's just do something extreme. Here's this, I'll figure it's just do something extreme. Here's

this, I've figured it all out. You don't think about anything and like, found this diet, which was a liquid diet of like protein shakes and a fucking handfuls of supplements, vitamins and fiber and shit like that in a ton of water. No solid food. Which by the time I got through that, I lost 80 pounds in two months. And that 80 pounds plus the next 20, like so that hundred pounds, I never gained weight back into that. That was weight that I kept off.

Just chopped off the top, the very top of that, yeah. Boom, I never, now when you get down into like under 400 pounds, I've been back and forth a couple of times. Um, and that was really a lot of trying to figure out what I was going to do. Like, you know, I'm a sober person. My wife is not. And, uh, I'm not like some kind of like an absent, an abstinence fiend or anything like that. Have you always been sober?

No, I've been to rehab a couple of times, and so sobriety is something I need to do rather than want to do. I have no, it's not something I necessarily enjoy other than the fact that I know it allows me to have the life I have. But like when I look at my addictive nature with food, which is similar to everything else, I, having given up drugs and alcohol, there is something kind of, I don't want to say easy because I don't want to disrespect anybody who has trouble with that, but the idea that you just are either doing something or not doing something

is that level of responsibility seems easy to me. You cannot do that with food. Food like it or not, if you have trouble with it, there is going to be some situation where you have to eat. Expose to food, yeah, exactly. So it's been a long, hard journey figuring that out. I started, I lost weight, I then did a job for a number of years called my name, the Zorro, I gained weight back. After that, I started, became obsessed with cycling. I lost a shitload of weight.

I got actually thin, was not comfortable with that. Decided to lift weights and put muscle on. Did that was loving that? Then I worked better as a fat guy. So continued to go to the gym, but ate everything in sight and got really big, close to 400 pounds again. I bet you was strong at that point though. Yeah, I was lifting weights every day, but I wasn't lifting weights in the way I do now. I just went to the gym and picked up whatever heavy, like, you know, how heavy can I go on the

bench press? Oh, I can do 405. Like, I'm just gonna do 405 then. That's what I'll do. And I wasn't even like really doing I just lift it until I couldn't lift it anymore and then that's done with that you know it wasn't the smartest like I it took me a long time to like get smart about all of this I got really big again but also much more muscular. And then I was doing that show. I mentioned to you with Hugh Laurie called Chance. And I was really big, very strong. And for the second season, I was like, what would this be?

If I took a little bit of the fat off, but kept the muscle. So I did that the second season. I'm in better health, better shape. And then after that show ended, we did two years of that show. I was like, I wanna lose weight, but still be a big guy, because I'm comfortable, more comfortable being kind of big. And for a year I did keto,

trying to maintain muscle mass. And I would notice through, I would get dexascans and notice that like 30 to 40% of the weight I was losing was lean tissue. And I was getting smaller, but my muscle wasn't staying as big. I was losing strength, which was a bummer. So I just got really scientific about it, increase my protein, which in doing that,

it kind of defeats keto. Is that right? There's enough protein, not you out of ketosis? Yeah. I eat about 280 grams of protein a day and the amount of fat that I'd have to eat in order to not have any of the protein go through glucogenesis in the liver would just be astronomically high and you wouldn't be in a deficit, a caloric deficit. And so you know, it's very difficult then to use ketosis to lose weight while maintaining muscle, because the requirement that you have on your fat is proportional to the protein, and if you drop your protein down so much,

inevitably your muscles are going to atrophy. I, listen, if you tried to do keto, I'm sure there's a version of you doing it and not damaging your muscles. You could probably do that. But when you're looking at losing 100 pounds of fat, which is roughly what I wanted to lose, that's just such a long period of time of weight loss that it is going to be hard to maintain all that muscle mass.

So I get into these things where people are like, you're dead wrong about keto and I'm like look I'm not knocking keto keto. I fucking lost a ton of weight and keto might be perfectly fine for a person who's fit or who wants to lose a couple pounds and Maintain all their muscle that might work, but when you're talking about doing it for years to lose huge amounts of weight, you're going to sacrifice lean tissue. You just are without enough protein. And if you raise your protein high enough, you're not going to be... You've got to have you fat to then keep you to not be knocked out. Kytosis, which then puts you over the deficit. Okay, yeah. It's, it's where I haven't, it's something I haven't done. I remember messing around with it when it became cool, like maybe sort of eight years ago.

And I have such low fat in my diet all the time, just naturally, I don't tend to eat fatty foods. And it really didn't agree with me. I don't operate tremendously well. So, but I totally get it as well. Michaela Peterson, I was recently on her podcast. That girl eats beef salt and water. She's got the the Madness diet on the planet. A lot of the people that follow her stuff are either on beef salt and water or some version of keto, always kind of like the overarching theme of that. I would just listen, I'm not even against it. I'm not advocating against it.

I'm just saying I would be willing to bet she came to it at a place where it wasn't like, I need to lose a hundred pounds of fat and maintain my level of fitness. So I just think it's like, woo, woo, woo, you know, if you're going to be doing something that puts you in a deficit for years, you've got to look at what you're focusing on. That's all.

So what did you, what did you settle on? After all of that, playing around with all different diets, what, what did you settle on to keep the weight loss sustainable? You low fat high protein moderate carbs. What were your macros or your calzat around about? I mean for maintenance, I'm like 3500 to 4000 calories a day for maintenance. My deficit is around 2500 and the first thing I do is go like how do I get 260 grams of protein, 260 to 280 grams of protein today, and then the next thing that I work out is carbohydrates, and it changes, you know, almost month to month, it's going to be different a little bit, and depending on, you know, if it's my day off, I'll lessen my carbs and increase my fats a little bit, but fat is definitely the guy

getting short-changed. And I will sometimes go solo fat that I got to take a handful of Omega-3s just to hit my fat markers. Yeah, I don't feel like I have double cream in coffee on a morning in a desperate attempt to remember to get some fattings. If I don't, I'll be so far under. So I think similar to you. So I mean, that without getting sort of super technical into it, a if three and a half to four thousand cows was maintenance for you and your deficit was two thousand five hundred, that's a fairly aggressive put.

That's a pound and a half to two pounds a week. That's what I'm trying to do on a cut. Yeah, I'm trying to hit like one percent of my weight per week. Fuck man. What did you feel like mentally cognition? Cause you've got to perform, you've got to go out there, you've got to do a thing, you know, I can, as long as I've not got a podcast to do

I can sit behind the laptop do the emails send a message read some books prepare for a guest do whatever I need to do Like you've got to be a game Biggest blockbusters up against like Hugh Laurie Leonardo DiCaprio like they're bringing the fucking fire. You can't be rolling in going, well, I'd love to be a 10 out of 10 guys, but actually, this 1000 calorie deficit, I've only got 7 out of 10 in the tank. What we doing there? I've done every version of diet while working, and I've even done like, you know, the fucking really stupid diets. It's like everybody eats 600 calories a day for two months and, you know, you're going

to be lightheaded every time you stand up. You're going to be constantly cold like you're not going to have any energy at all. And it's not, it's not really worth it trying to do something like that at work for me. So now when I go to work, if I'm doing intense 15, 16 hour days, I try to do maintenance. I do maintenance calories. And I always take my own food. I don't mess around with the catering or craft services at all because there's just no telling what's in any of that stuff.

And if it's a packaged food, I try to not eat a lot of pre-packaged food anyway, that I haven't packaged for myself. But yeah, it's rough doing an extreme diet while trying to work. It's rough doing a diet and going to the gym and having kids and like having a house that I have to participate in also, you know, but I've found that the difference between the diet I'm on now and the diets I've done in the past were mainly because when I was doing keto for years, the idea that I had was that it was just carbohydrates. And by the way, it took a couple years

to get to the idea that it was all carbohydrates because leading up to that, it was just gluten. All white food, all red food. Yeah, and it was this idea that it had nothing to do with me and my personal responsibility. It was this evil food that was poisoning me and shifting my mind around because in fairness, the first three or four days of eating carbohydrates, I gained nine pounds and was freaking out. Like, so when you switched from keto to counting calories and macronutrients added carbs back in you gained

Nine pounds in three days, which In a cut it was a cut it was I didn't go from Keto to maintenance to a cut I went from Keto to a cut Yeah, and I gained nine pounds and all the alarm bells went off the I just was sitting there dude going like how long Am I gonna do this like am I gonna gain 30 pounds hoping that I lose weight like it was crazy Yeah, it was a lot to it was a lot to overcome Mentally I shouldn't have been getting on the scale every day at that point I should have gone like give me a lot do it in a week I'll getting on the scale every day at that point. I should have gone like, give me a lot of do it in a week.

I'll get on the scale and see what happens. But again, this is the benefit of hindsight. You know, there is someone listening right now who's on a long-term, multi-month, multi-year cut who's got a lot of weight to lose and they're thinking, I might try and go to counting calories and macronutrient profile instead of doing keto and they're going to have what happened to you, but not stick it out. Yeah. Yeah.

By telling them that, you know, that is that is gold in information, but you have to earn it in the the fire that is the crucible of personal experience, right? Yeah, and it becomes such a mind-fuck because depending on what diet book you've read or what your group of friends are doing, you become religious about these ideas about food. And I've, there's a movement in L.A. about lectins, which is just maybe a broader word for nightshades, I guess.

I remember as a kid hearing about nightshades being bad, and now it's lektans. Take a look at what lektans are in. Lectans are in everything. You can't find a vegetable that doesn't have lektans in it. So I'm going like, what are you guys talking about? Now plants are toxic. now vegetables are toxic. Like this is crazy. But if it's working for you, I say good for you.

I just don't, I think like the trouble I have with it is going, it's this type of food. It has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with my habits and behavior. And then when I tried to change it up, three days of weight gain, I was going like, well, this is insane. This clearly doesn't work. And it's the evil food narrative kind of comes back in again. Yeah. I made it through those three days. Therefore, I lost two pounds. So I'm still seven pounds up in my cut. And, and I just was like,

I got to try something different because what I'm doing, I'm losing 40% lean tissue every two months when I get my dexascam. And I, and I, that's all I just didn't want to do that, you know, over the course of a hundred pounds, that's 40 pounds of muscle that I've lost. Hard earned. Hard earned, I mean, listen dude, I went from just about 200 pounds to just about 400 pounds in the gym lifting weights every day. I've put on a shitload of muscle in that in those years of lifting weights and eating everything in sight.

And I had fucking giant traps and my thought was, what would it be like if I just took the muscle? If I'll be a fucking bodybuilder, I was so excited. And then I went to keto and like, I probably gave up 30 pounds of muscle and I listen I don't know that I need 30 pounds of muscle from where I am now I have 230 pounds of lean tissue right now so 250 pounds that is like you're getting near to like bodybuilder size I mean you're I'm probably technically bodybuilder size now Once I get to like 7% body fat. Hopefully I'll look like a bodybuilder, but like I Do have that thing of like what is my goal?

And I want to do the thing that gets me to my goal the best. I don't want to do a thing because I have this preconception that's not necessarily scientifically sound, that I can't eat gluten or I can't eat fucking bell peppers or whatever it is. And red foods and orange foods. Yeah, that's just, I think that's, it becomes disingenuous. And so now I can basically eat whatever I want. And I will say to go from keto, which became very easy for me. Chicken, and like there's a couple different modes of keto.

If I'm doing a fucking, I don't give a fuck keto. I'm eating hot dogs without the buns and dipping them in not your cheese sauce, right? Which today I'm going like, how the buns and dipping them in nacho cheese sauce, right? Which Today I'm going like how the hell did I do that? That's to me seems poisonous now And if I was doing a very strict version of keto It would be chicken thighs and broccoli covered in olive oil and I learned Eventually that even doing that mindlessly. I wasn't losing weight

So I'd have to do that in moderation to really lose weight. And the weight I was losing was also lean tissue. Let's take it like high level then. So you can go back to the year 2000, 536 and you can send a nice big email drafting out a diet plan and a training regime. What do you send to yourself? Struggling. I think the thing my wife found me who was my girlfriend at the time, the liquid diet. I think at 536, that's perfect. I think that because there's something about my level of responsibility where I'm so overwhelmed by food at that point that the taking it down to just be responsible

for drinking the shake three times a day and eating this handful of fiber, or whatever the vitamins were. That's it, that's all you have to do. Don't think about counting calories, don't think about removing omega-6s and increasing omega-3s. Don't think about that. Just be responsible for this. And then the problem I had was once, because you can't really do that forever, that's not a way to live, once you kind of get through that and you have this sense of responsibility over this thing, it's the increasing it. This is what I think about with Carnivore folk and I'm stoked that Carnivore

works for people too, but when I look at Carnivore, I go like, that's an extreme reduction. Be responsible for beef, salt, and water. Fine. But eventually, I think you want to build out on that. So once you kind of get your feet stable and you go, okay, this isn't hurting me. I'm not allergic to any of these things. I'm not having an adverse effect. Let's dip our toes into vegetables and see how do we feel when we eat red peppers and how do we feel when we eat cucumbers? And if you don't have a bad reaction, you know that those are safe foods and you've now built into your arsenal of things you can be responsible for. And you know, let's see what happens if we have a bowl of rice and then

work out an hour later. How do we feel in the gym? You know what I mean? I think there's levels to all these things. I again, I'm a relativist. So if it works for you, then fucking keep doing it. The end of the day, the only thing that we'll bother about is the results, right? So okay, so you'd say there might be some people listening in fact, I'm absolutely certain that there will be some people that are like, I have a lot

of weight to lose. A potential good starting point would be this liquid diet. What was the shakes and then where would you move yourself onto there and when? I think if you have hundreds of pounds to lose that doing something radical and extreme like that isn't such a bad thing. First of all, you have so much stored energy that you're not in risk of damaging yourself by going extremely low calorie, right? And also, if the way you and I die today, if you map it out, you go like, if you have hundreds of pounds to lose and you're losing them very, very slowly, it's going to take years and

years and years, which I think you do have to confront those fact that if you've gotten to the place of hundreds of pounds of excess stored energy, that you are going to be looking at something that is a life-long alteration of eating habits. That's fine, but you want to kind of get, you want to get to goals as quickly as possible because you want to build that foundation that keeps you going, I think. So doing something radical and extreme to start it, I have no problem with and I would advocate to do that again. It's figuring out the usefulness and workability of the next diet when you do start eating again. And the problem I kept running into was this kind of belief system that had to go along with any diet I was doing. So it was, you know, gluten is bad, and that's the trigger, or that's the thing

that's causing me to store excess fat. So I'm gonna get rid of that. And I would just say like, get rid of those ideas, and if you don't like gluten, or you have an adverse effect from gluten that is objective, fine, cut gluten out. There's a diet for you. If you don't like fat or you have trouble digesting fat or you don't feel good after you eat it, there's a diet for you.

If you like fat, there's a diet for you. But I think it's more important to be aware of what you're actually experiencing versus, you know, somebody selling you on lektans are bad or gluten is bad or, you know, GMOs are bad or pick your poison. I think there's a school of thought that would point a finger at any kind of food group, you know, from vegans to carnivores. There's that spectrum is so. Avoid the ideology. Avoid the church of gluten free or, or the church of keto,

or the church of carnivore, or the church of whatever it might be, and focus instead on energy balance, what's going in, what's going out, am I losing weight, am I checking the scales regularly, am I tracking my food? What's your streak on my fitness pool? What's your longest streak? Oh, man, that was actually what I used at the beginning because I was writing everything down and there was so much math that I would

write, I would like double check my math every day and sometimes it would be wrong and I would be like completely fucked. I think I had like three or four months of check-ins on my fitness pal at one point, which was great. Yeah, that's serious one. I think I had like three or four months of check-ins on my fitness pilot one point, which was great. Yeah, that's serious one. I think it does become, you know, in a cut, certainly I write everything down every day still, just to make sure. But like on maintenance, I'm not even really looking. I've learned over the past year and a half or so what that looks like, what it feels like.

And that's the other thing I'd say to anybody who's thinking about going to calories and macros. It is an adjustment, figuring all this stuff out is an adjustment, but kind of you kind of get the hang of it real quick. I would also suggest anybody who's doing keto to spend a week writing down their calories. I bet they'd be surprised at how many calories are in a tablespoon of olive oil, you know, and what what kind of energy that's providing them with. Dude, that coffee that I talked about in the morning, which is like a shot of double cream in a coffee, is like 7% of my daily calories, and it's the size of a couple of cubes of sugar, but it's mad. So I wanted to, oh, actually, before I do that, where are you at now? What's weight and body fat at now?

Have you got an idea? Yeah, 260, 13% body fat. Oh. Which is good. And this is, by the way, with calipers, I'm at 9%. This is a Dexascane, which I always like to talk about because I just think it's a more hardcore test. Is there any residual visceral fat? Is there any sort of long-term organ,

organ sort of fat, which is taking more time to get off? Because I was learning today about brown adipose tissue and white adipose tissue? Yeah. It's literally reading about that this morning so that I could drop that knowledge bomb for you right there. Yeah, that is an amazing knowledge bomb. Yes, my adipose tissue, I don't know that they're telling me whether it's brown or white in the Dexas game,

but I do know that I am on the high end there. But we're talking not about a huge amount in comparison. Like the adipose tissue, I think I'm at like four pounds or three something, which to me I go like, that's nothing. But if you think about what it is, it's this very, very thin sheet of fat that's surrounding all your organs. So I don't know if that's just the last place your body takes fat from that I've built it up. That's when you know, man, that's when you know you lean when you're pancreas lean. When you can see, when you can see it's secreting hormones, that's when you know that you've nailed

it. But do that's sick you know that you've nailed it. But do that's sick. And the next goal is sub-10%. Sub-10% is the next goal. This cut will take me to sub-10% to cut I'm doing now. Fuck man. Yeah, which I'm stoked about. How sick?

And then, mass phase. Then mass phase, which I haven't done, I mean, the mass phase I did was completely mindless and it was a hundred plus pounds of massing, which is so upsetting because, you know, I just didn't do it right at all. You've got the thing about anyone that does a bulk, and this is even the hardest of hard-gain teenagers at 17 years old, taken mutant mass. Like, you have to lose that at some point. Yeah, but I wasn't even thinking in those terms. I was just thinking, I wanna put on weight

because for work, I think work will like me more bigger. But I like lifting weights. I've got like exercising. So I'm just gonna do both. I wasn't thinking in those terms at all, like the terms I'm thinking in now are, can I put on a pound and a half of muscle and then lose the 10 pounds of fat that come with that. Like, you know, I'm thinking about it scientific. You're going to, you are going to absolutely love a well-adjusted mass phase with some good output.

Your training is going to feel better. Lebedo's going to be better. Everything's going to improve. And I've been telling Males this over and over again, man, like it was me that told him on this podcast, ask your coach about a refeed day because I feel like you might be pushing the deficit a little bit hard. You're struggling with your training output. And the red pill that he's going to get fed and that I feel that you're kind of on the on the way to eating as well is that when you start to do that, when you start to build those calories

back up, it becomes like you you stay the same condition and it starts to fill out and you're like, this is sick. My lift is going up, I feel great, I'm sleeping well, I'm full all the time. Like it's just, it is awesome, man. So I'm super, I'm stoked to see what happens when you start to do that. I can't wait. I will say just on maintenance, because I've been doing maintenance for about three months now. My whole quarantine has been maintenance

until June 1st I started my cut. I felt physically incredible. Like, it's been so awful not to be able to go to a gym because I'm really strong and have all this energy. And like, it's a little bit of sweet that I'm starting this cut and gyms will open eventually soon and I'll be on a cut, you know. I was strong two months ago, I swear.

Yeah, yeah. In my basement, you know, I'll listen to my kettlebell. I was an animal. Yeah, honestly, I promise. And so I wanted to bring up something that I think is quite timely, which is the difference in the public response to your transformation and the public's response to Adele's transformation. What are your thoughts on that?

I want to back up for one minute to say that it is stark from what I've looked at in the news and even comments I've gotten on social media and even conversations I've had in life. And it's kind of heartbreaking that I've gotten only seemingly, only accolades. You know, every, for every 200 comments on social media, there's a guy going, you're still fat. And I'm like, okay, I can't win with you. You're a dick. Yeah, nothing I will ever do will be good for you.

So you're not my guy. And to hear anybody say any, that look, I will get pictures of Adele at any point and I think she's a pretty girl an attractive girl But I see the most recent I think there's only one picture I've seen of her recently where she's like she is ecstatic and she is glowing and she is doing a look at me picture, right? And I'm like, she's not nearly as happy in these other pictures.

She's winning awards and she's fucking hot. She's dope, singer, like all of this and she looks clearly happy, but she is not as stoked in those earlier pictures. So I'm, how can you be anything but like stoked for this girl and go like, I wanna to pat her on the back and say, you did great. The fact that anybody can tie any kind of psychological bullshit that only exists within themselves onto her and say that she's harming people or whatever, I think is ridiculous.

You know, she's a girl who had a goal who made made her goal, or got as close to it as she possibly could. I have had that in 2012 or 11, when I was obsessively bicycling, and I got what I felt like was too thin. There were stories that paparazzi would follow me around riding my bike and take pictures of the loose skin on my legs and write like the downside of weight loss and look at how terrible he looks like. I had I experienced that. So I don't know what it is. I certainly wasn't

as confident in myself then. So I kind of would see these stories and go, yeah, they're right. I don't look great. They're right. I couldn't argue with them. And this time, I was releasing pictures of myself going like, I fucking fuck you if you think I don't look good. I know. First off, if anyone has the balls to come up to someone who now looks like you and say that, they're a very brave person, you know? Yeah, I will crush you. If you want to fuck me.

If you look, I've got two 50 cows, right? I've got one 50 cow on my left hand, another one in my right, and I've got a belt, fed machine gun, chain of bullets around my, don't fuck with me. Yeah, yeah, I don't, I think girls have it harder than guys do as far as the aesthetics go, you know, which is maybe that's publicly because I know like guys with each other, like me and my friends are constantly picking each other apart, you apart, and talking about bizarre things

that really shouldn't matter, but they do matter to us. And, you know, how does your bicep being rest at the exact center of your bicep or is it cocked over to one side? And how do we fix that, you know? We all know each other's pain points as well, right? Like, you know, the thing you can say to your buddy,

like everyone's got that one lad friend who's going a little bit thin, a little bit early in life. And you know, you can always be like, dude, just put something on your head, like the shine off the top of it, killing me. Or you've got like the guy that's a bit short, or the guy that's a bit whatever, you know, they do that. And I wonder, I don't know, man,

I was fascinated watching the Adele situation unfold. And the layers upon layers of people saying, congratulations Adele, you've done really well. This is great. You're a role model for people to lose weight. Then there was the reaction that was big girls don't think that just because Adele's lost weight to conform to society's beauty ideals that you need to lose weight as well, you're beautiful too. Then there was the like third layer of people that were saying how dare these people say that she shouldn't have lost weight. This is and I'm like, this is like Dante's in Ferno. We're just descending through all the layers of hell here. Like, there are certain things that are un-argable facts.

A basically is an all cause mortality risk. Fact number one. Yeah, you die sooner of everything if you're fat. So anybody that says you, singer in the public limelight anybody that says you singer in the public limelight should sacrifice your health literally sacrifice your life your mortality your risk of everything to be a role model for other people to also shorten their lives that that sort of blew my mind but on the flip side of that, when especially when I contrasted that with your journey, I'm like, wow, there is something going on here between, is it because of who you are? Is it because of the industry you're in?

I don't think so. Is it because of your gender? I think it is. I think the vast majority of it is that guys have a bigger overt and window, like a larger leeway of guys can kind of get real thin, guys can get real fat, and it's kind of just like, we just still a bloke. You know, there is no beauty standard for men. There's like a hotness standard, but you're supposed to have like a long hair coming out you know, as that you haven't seen once in a while, which gentleman under the age of 30, these random things are going to begin happening to you. Where you're just going to find like an elephant hair in the middle of your forehead and

times are cruel, mistress. Like all this stuff's going to happen, but you're right, like there's still sort of this beauty standard for women, even as you get all that damn Judy dense, you know, being graceful as she gets towards later age and stuff like that. And I don't know what it is, man. I don't know what I do know is that I was real disheartened by women's response to a Dell. Yeah, me too. And man, but it's some men too, who are, you know, feminists who are like, but yeah, man, it's just looking to please some group by saying they were playing the ple-pleas the women game. Yeah. But like girls and guys were supportive of you. Yeah. And vast majority of guys that I saw commenting online were either commenting on women slating Adele or complimenting Adele.

Yeah. But then the girl's side of stuff, I wasn't seeing much vitual from men. I was seeing a lot of vitual from girls. And it's like, hang on a second, are we not supposed to be backing our own team here? Like, you need to gas up the people who you want to do well in life.

Like Adele is an amazing role model for girls. Yes, maybe that makes someone who is overweight, uncomfortable at the fact that Adele was showing me that you can be both successful and overweight. But now you have someone who is showing you that if you are overweight, you can be in a healthy range, not because of society's beauty standards. Forget that, like I'm not playing that game. I'm playing the game of you will live longer and by the judgment of her photo and as you identified yourself, this glow that she had, potentially be happier. Yeah. I think that I think there can be a lot of things that are true at the same time, which for me,

there does become a level of subjectivity of health. So yes, if we are urging towards long-term survival, not being overweight, benefits that. Sure. But at the same time, I go like, what business is a mine, how people choose to live? So I'm like, you wanna drink, you wanna do drugs, you wanna drive your car too fast, you wanna do reckless things, you wanna get coronavirus.

I don't really care. Don't fucking mess with me and don't do unsafe things to me, and we're good. And I know there is some argument that talks about the burden on healthcare with obesity, that it suddenly does become an effect at larger numbers of people. And I go like, that's too abstract for me. If we're talking about individuals,

how an individual chooses to live doesn't really matter to me. And I won't criticize them. I've noticed quite a bit recently of young girls who when I was a kid, you would never see an overweight young girl in kind of a midrush showing her belly. You wouldn't see that. And I see it today.

And the girls seem to have, I choose girls because this is, I have four daughters and I'm just more aware of their friends and like what girls are doing. Then I am with young guys There is a higher sense of confidence certainly or a less of a shame around being overweight Which I think is a good thing because I don't think I Think that it's for me. There was something about being introverted and most of my eating was, which I do consider to be harming myself, self-harm was being done privately because I was ashamed of it. And I didn't ever have the confidence in myself to try and change that until I met a girl

who didn't seem to care about it at all. And then I went like, fuck, I'm more flotter, you know, I'm gonna do something about this. And it was kind of this kind of magical confluence of events that led me to be able to do that. So I wouldn't pause it, my ideas on Adele, but you see it quite a bit in people who become successful and then lose weight. And it's a, you know, it could be part of that, like confidence boost. When I have tens of thousands of private messages

on Instagram, which I will never get through all of them. It's just not possible. And every now and again, I'll open it and I'll pick one at random. And more commonly than not, it's somebody saying, you made me less ashamed as a fat person because you seemed to be very successful and were a very confident fat person, which is not necessarily true. I was not a super confident fat person. And now that you've lost the weight, you've inspired me to also do that. That's like a double whammy. Yeah, man.

Fucking don't I feel good about myself, you know. Dude, that's so amazing. It's amazing because I don't think people should be going around ashamed about their bodies. I think that's not necessarily good. And what my ideas are about health for myself. And even if I think about what I think is right for health for other people, I don't wanna put that on them and say that anybody should or should not lose weight. However, I think more often than not, people have the idea of wanting to do something and then feeling incapable of doing it.

And so to say like you can do it, it's totally possible, it's some hard work. And here are these points of inspiration which you could draw from. I think is only a good thing. So I get very torn in many directions with like, of course Adele should be patted on the back. She's fucking did something she wanted to do. She didn't do that because somebody said she was gonna sell more records or Because her boyfriend don't sell more records than Adele. She's already sold all the records. Yeah, there you go She's she got to a point in her life where she's what for whatever reason and who knows what they are

She decided to do this and she did it and she's happy about it, and we should only applaud her. We shouldn't build our psychosis into her motives or anything else, I think it's not fair. And I don't know if the men are more, give her more affinity for this goal because men are generally or statistically more attracted to them. I have no idea what it is, but I see the same thing as you. It's very, very disappointing.

It's just layers to it, which you said, and it's not just, this isn't just like three or four things being true at once. This is like 10 things. 10 different things being true at once. This is like 10 things. 10 different things being true at once. And as we know, people struggle with complexity. It's significantly easier, especially on Twitter. You know, Twitter doesn't have the room, actually does not have the spatial capacity for new ones.

You have 360 characters, something like that. You can put across like, Adele's fat, Adele's thin, Adele shouldn't have got thin, Adele should have got, like you can only do a small number of these stories that you put across. But man, I think if you have got messages like that that said, not only have you given me confidence to be successful at the way I'm at,

but then also to make that transition into being someone who is a more normal BMI. Wow. Like that. That for me is the highest compliment I could have gotten because I don't think people are going to be super successful at achieving a goal, a physical goal out of shame. I just don't think that's true. Shame could be early impetus or whatever. I don't know exactly, but I don't think long-term success will come out of shame.

I think you need to have confidence in yourself and your abilities and work more from that position. I don't know that a lot of these girls who are body positive have never thought I'd be happier. Look, for me, at the end of the day, I just want to fit in an airline seat. I just want to not have to ask for an extension. And there's no part of me that thinks they need to make

airlines seats bigger. I think those are built for averages. Now, as society gets bigger, maybe they will eventually. But even today, the averages say that that's the seat. So you don't need to make a bigger seat. I would rather just have a body that fits in the average seat. That's all. There's two approaches when you see that happen.

There's one person who says, good for you, and I want to use that. And another person who says, oh my God, this identifies my shortcoming as long as Adele or Ethan remain overweight, that justifies my being overweight. Is they're able to do it? Oh, balls in my court now.

Yeah. You know, like one less fat person is one less person on team fat. Yeah. And one more person on team. I think unfortunately that we move, we seemingly move into the realm where the group kind of sets the truth and there is less and less individual truth. And so like, if I like strawberry ice cream and I think it's the greatest ice cream, nothing you say about strawberry ice cream can alter my feeling about strawberry ice cream.

So I don't see why anything you say about my feelings about myself could be able to alter my feelings about myself, but we've gotten into this space where the group can dictate how people view themselves, and not only that, the group must dictate how people view themselves, and I go like, you've lost me, I can't play that game, I can only know what's true for me, I cannot say what's true for you, I will not say what's true for you, but I know what's true for me. I cannot say what's true for you. I will not say what's true for you, but I know what's true for me. And you can offer a bunch of evidence that may alter my view of what's true for me. That's possible. And I welcome you to do that because I'm always looking for new fucking. If I had just stuck with Keto, I wouldn't have the muscle definition that I have now.

I just wouldn't. And I'm so happy that I'm really pleased with my body right now. That could be sound like the most fucking materialistic vein thing to say, but I work my ass off and have been for 20 years on having a body I'm happy with. And I'm just finally going check me out, you know what I mean? Like it takes the right lighting, but with the right lighting, I've got a six pack. That's fucking wild, dude. You know what I mean? You're a sub 10% you're gonna have cum gutters,

ab veins, the full works. I can't wait. Like that is exciting, you know what I mean? And that's just for me and my wife I guess. Yeah, I mean, what an investment by her as well, you know? One little, one little suggestion of a diet. And then before you know it, sort of decade goes by. And then you've got like the 21st century beaded incarnation

of Rambo. Yeah. Next to you, you know, like fuck this. This is easy, man. What a glow up. And she and to her credit too, I was kind of going along just like a couple years ago after I had been going to the gym and gaining weight and all this. And then for the second series of the show, Chance, I decided to the gym and gaining weight and all this and then for the second series

of the show chance I decided to lose weight and I was just really hiking and at one point she was like you're spending a lot of time out there hiking in the hills behind our house. What don't you work on abs? She says to me and I'm like, oh, abs, okay, that's interesting. Okay, I'll do that. And it became this intense focus, you know, but she definitely bounces me around and it was literally just her going, I bet you could go to the gym for an hour rather than spending five hours hiking around in the hills. And she was right, ultimately. They're wives, unfortunately, they just tend to be,

don't I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't know. I'm hopelessly, hopelessly single, which isn't being helped by either this moustache or by lockdown, but it is what it is. Dude, man, this has been awesome. Yeah. Feel like we could have gone on forever. So you got your podcast, American Glutton.

American Glutton, which is so much fun. Yeah, and as soon as we're allowed to work, we'll see what that is like. Belt and machine guns. Dude, I'm so ready for that, you know. Yeah. So ready for it. Look, links to Ethan's socials. Here's fantastic podcast American Glutton, which you should absolutely go and check out.

We'll be linked in the show notes below. If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to give me a message. You know what, I find me at Chris will X on all social media. Man, thanks Ethan, it's been sick. Thank you, it was a pleasure. Let's do it again sometime. I'm in. All right. you Yn yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw you