If You’re Struggling To Get In Shape, This Will Inspire You | Ethan Suplee EP 751

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:12I've tried to do like a self psychoanalysis on this and I get to a point where I'm five years old I go to visit my grandparents in Vermont and their reaction to me and if I look at a picture of myself as at five years old today, I see just like a normal, healthy kid with maybe some chubby cheeks, right? Their reaction to me was like, oh my God, what are your parents doing to you? You have gone to crap, right? This is out of hand. We need to get this under control. And my favorite food was lasagna, which my grandpa would always make me. Yeah. And he had it cooking. As I arrived, I could smell it, and I'm there visiting them for the first time without my mom or dad in Vermont, like, super excited.

1:04Their reaction is this, and then they basically were like, we're not, you can't have a second helping of lasagna. So in that day was the first time that I snuck food, and it was clearing the table and eating food off their plates. At the same time, like, clearing it and, like. Yeah, just stuffing in a few bites because I was not allowed to, like, I reached for a second helping. and got my hand patted. At five? Yeah, that's off limits. You eat what we tell you to do. And then the next day, they weighed me first thing in the morning, which I'd never been on a scale before, and I'm being weighed.

1:39And then it was like, okay, we're going on a one-mile walk that is for your benefit. And this did a number of things. It developed the sneaking food habit. It developed the habit of wanting to eat privately. And the idea that people witnessing me eating was not good. And it also created a weird barrier to me just naturally wanting to be outside and active. Because at five, I was very active, running around. But when it was enforced, when it was this point of like... A punishment almost. Yeah. We're not consulting how willing you are to do this. We're not saying, is there something you'd like to do outside?

2:22were saying, you must go march on this. It was like a mile to their mailbox and a mile back. And like, this is not for fun. This is for because you have gotten so overweight. That really pushed the idea of physical activity into another punishment type thing where I just didn't want to do it anymore. So it was kind of this wild confluence of new mental structures that I built where it was like, well, I'm going to sneak food now and I'm going to not do activities. I grew to really dislike anything done from a point of authoritarianism. It just was not for me. So if it's like you're going on a diet or you have to do sports or you have to study, I was not into it.

3:13Which is really bizarre because now I love nothing more than a diet I find for myself and studying something I'm interested in and finding a sport to be interested. Like I can become obsessive about these things and do them 110 % if it's my own determination. But from a point of authority, it just didn't fly. And I noticed a couple of things. I was never like a class clown, but we had an actor in my school. And so much more attention was paid to the fact that he was an actor than any of his physical attributes, any of his other accomplishments in school. it was like this this distraction this like here's who this person is but like here's this weird identity that actually has nothing to do with him that we're all going to focus on that and and there was something kind of magical about that like i can't like kill people with jokes that's just not what i do but what if i had that too that's super sexy and attractive i'm not going Yeah, but I could create this other identity that would distract people from how fat I am and talking about that or poking fun at me or even wanting to talk to me about it.

4:26Because I'll just show them this. What if I do this? And it got you out of school. Because this dude would leave school for weeks at a time and go hang out on sets and guess what's on a set? Craft services on a set. Bring food all day. And you got a trailer, like you can fill your pockets with food and go back to your trailer and eat it. Like it's this wonderful place. It was like unlimited food supply. Oh, my God. And then there was also like always going to be like some grip who had a prescription to Percocet that you could like give a wink to. You know, there was a period in 2002. I had fallen in love with this girl when I was 16.

5:10and we were really, really good friends. She says we were best friends and she had zero interest in me romantically. You were in the friend zone. I was in the friend zone. Yeah. Fine. We became romantic in 2002 and there was just a moment where I was like, if I'm going to make this work, if this really has a shot at longevity, I got to change because she likes to do stuff like take a hike and spend the day at the beach and go to museums. And I can't do that. That was kind of it. It was like, I want to have this relationship with her, so I must change. It was a bizarre kind of counterintuitive conversation that I had with her, too, because having it, I was scared, like, if I have this conversation, she'll know that I'm overweight, like, that I'm obese.

6:04As if she didn't know. As if she didn't know. It was like this thing. if I show her that this is something I want to change, not just like this masculine thing of like, I'm showing weakness. It wasn't that it was, this is the hardest. This is, this thing is so unconfrontable. I never think about it. I push it away. It's, it's almost become something subconscious. So if I bring it to the forefront and I say, let's address this, that's a very scary and narrow path to walk because failure, I figure life is failure at that point. I'm a sober guy too. So I went all in in a very, in a similar fashion to achieving sobriety, which was admit that I'm powerless and turn my problem over to somebody else and go like, I am incapable of figuring this out right now.

7:00I'm going to do exactly what you say until we get to the point that I can take over. And she was like, great. Here's what you're going to do. Went and found a guy who has a liquid diet. You can do it for up to two months. Why don't you do that? You don't have to do it for two months. You can do it for one month. You can do it for two. Let's see how this goes. And I crushed that. Two months liquid diet. 80 pounds. Wow. Two months.

7:32I am so excited for you to finish the rest of your day strong. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description and it'll take you to the full episode of my other show, The School of Greatness. Make sure to come back tomorrow for another episode of The Daily Motivation Show.