How do you know a junkie is lying?    He’s breathing. 

Like a junkie, I find myself in a place I never thought I’d be…after a relapse I am opening my eyes to the fact that I am face down in a puddle outside of a flop house. My face covered in scars, my body bruised, and my mind completely unaware of how I got to this place. With a pulsating pain somewhere deep in the abyss of my organs. 

Before the PC police come and turn their sirens on, first off fuck you! Second this is a blog, and this is my perspective. Also note the thing I used to medicate myself with is everywhere, I can buy it legally, and oh by the way if you don’t consume it you die. Third according to an NIH study:

“Food intake, particularly consumption of highly palatable and calorie dense foods, stimulates dopamine activity…Similar to food, drugs of abuse stimulate release of dopamine in the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system,⁷⁷ which causes a subjective experience of pleasure and euphoria that makes drug use highly reinforcing.”

So…Fuck You!

Am I comparing myself to some addicted to heroin, yes I am!Is it the same? Apparently, the chemical response in my brain is…If you ares truggling with drugs take your lies somewhere else, when the bottom hits you in the face then seek help.

I use this analogy for two key reasons, my struggle with my weight parallels the roller coaster ride an addict takes from junkie to sober, and I’m fucking tired. It’s exhausting losing, then gaining, then losing, then gaining, and it all stems from the fact in the past I lost weight by getting off of my ass and moving, moving all the time, killing it in the gym. I took action every day sometimes 4-5 hours a day in the gym. A byproduct of this movement was a change in diet because I needed to consume foods which provided me a better fuel source.

Did you catch that order? Movement first, and diet second. My concern was the result on the outside.

What changed?

I spent 3.5 days jumping up and down, yelling, singing, hugging, massaging, and learning strategies to achieve a peak state all the time. I attended Tony Robbins Unleash the Power Within. I highly recommend this to anyone looking to achieve optimal performance in anything. In Tony’s world the roadmap to success is simple, THINK–>FEEL–>DO. At the heart of this process are the beliefs we have, for Tony “A belief is a feeling of certainty about what something means.” The meaning we place on things, events, people, circumstances, life, will drive your outcomes. Let that sink in, the meaning we place on anything will determine how you respond, act, or fail to act. 

Here’s a video of a Ted Talk on the power of beliefs from Tony:

As powerful as the beliefs which drive us, there are a whole set of other beliefs which prevent us from moving forward. They make us inert, or respond in ways we don’t like or understand. They hold us back. These “limiting beliefs” prevent us from achieving our true potential. They prevent us from being great. The limiting beliefs that tie us down do so by creating a story or stories that we manifest into realties. They are the negative narrative we repeat over and over. We say things like “I’ll never found someone to love”, “I’m too old”, “I’m too young”, “I’m too stupid”, “My dad was a laborer so I was born to be a laborer”, etc.  Destroying your limiting beliefs allows you to become unfuckingstoppable. 

My Limiting Belief

From elementary school on, I believed I would be overweight forever. As much as I desired to be thin or fit, something deep inside me always said fuck you fatboy. I believed my body type was meant to stay overweight. So I felt fat. I hated it, but I felt fat. My subconscious consistently reinforced this belief, if I failed at something it was because I was too fat, if someone didn’t like it me it was because I was too fat, if I felt unloved it was because I was too fat.  

Thus success and failure became correlated to fat and thin. Why bother trying anything when you are going to be fat forever. Further let me try everything so I can win, and not be fat. This is the power of a limiting belief. 

Even 5-6 years ago when I was around 220 lbs, doing CrossFit 5-6x a week, climbing mountains, running road races, I lived in absolute fear. I was scared shitless the momentum would eventually stop, and I’d gain it all back. The momentum did stop, and I did gain it all back…

After UPW, I know I gained all the weight back because I never dealt with the larger issue. Somewhere deep inside my soul, I didn’t think I deserved to be healthy. Somewhere deep inside the depths of who I am, I was certain morbid obesity was my physical home. My equilibrium point.

I believed I would be obese for my entire life.

In the past 3 years at one point or another I’ve been prescribed everything from Adderall to Lithium, and it was all because I was depressed. A depression brought on by a deep unhappiness. An unhappiness stemming from limiting beliefs that governed my world view in a highly skewed way. When all I really needed was 3.5 days of attending a concert/therapy/cult/orgy (UPW) with 10k other people.

What’s next?

Going back to the parallels between food addiction and drug addiction, the aforementioned NIH study found “Physiological tolerance and withdrawal are currently prominent among the symptoms for substance dependence”, however these symptoms were less salient in overeating. Meaning while food addiction appears to mimic in our brains the chemical reaction experienced by drug addicts, withdrawal symptoms did not. So, the sugar crash you think is withdrawal is fucking meaningless compared to detoxing from heroin.

Ask this guy:

What does that mean for me? It means I’m in enough control to make the changes within who I am, and what I eat to lose the weight forever. I don’t need the baggage anymore. 

On December 17^th2018, I am returning to regular blogging because my soul needs it. I’m hoping through sharing my experience someone somewhere also gets off of their ass and starts moving. Further I am starting from the inside this time and being in great shape will be the by product of the choices I make in how feel, what I eat, then how I move.

My approach is the same. Work my ass off in the gym, sleep, eat better, and take care of my soul. The difference today is a 2mm shift in that I will focus on the inside and who I am becoming as a person, with the physical changes being the byproduct.