As of January 2026 I decided I was tired of being fat. It wasn’t the first time in my life I had been fat but it was the most disappointing. I put a lot of effort into slimming down going into 2019 but I allowed the malaise of 2020 to settle me back into patterns that were not good for my long-term physical and mental health.

This go around it was more insidious than in the past. It used to be when I’d put on weight I would put it on fast. I grew up as a fat kid and food was how I learned to soothe my emotions. I have a Cancer stellium – I have very strong emotions that happen to love cake.

In the 2010s I drastically curbed my binge eating by learning other ways to manage myself and my life. My body and my habits changed to the point I could no longer do what I did when I was in my teens and twenties. At my heaviest I was over 300lbs so being a bit over 210 by 2020 and seeing the scale inch up 4-5 pounds each year wasn’t alarming to me, especially considering I was around the same height and build of most men my age I come across in daily life.

But it was an act of self-abandonment. Each day I carried more weight than was healthy for my body I broke a promise to my younger self that was more sacred than scripture. My father died weighing more than 500lbs. I’ve seen firsthand what obesity does to people and I inherited those loops, patterns, and coping mechanisms.

I broke a lot of that by being much healthier and lighter than he was, but I still stopped short of the work I needed to do for my own sake and that’s why I decided I wasn’t going to keep putting it off. As of now, I’m 189lbs. I’m aiming to get to 170-175lbs. I’m 5’11” and my waist is 37 inches – I’m an inch and a half away from having a healthy waist-to-height ratio. I’m aiming to maintain that for the rest of my life.

It’s not that there is a specific weight or aesthetic that is somehow spiritually “optimal.” Healing doesn’t mean the same thing to every person and not every body works identically. It does not appear that I have any form of metabolic disease, and while my genetics are not one-in-a-million when it comes to the aesthetics of my muscle, I can put muscle on fairly easily even when I’m not optimizing for it.

I am not under the illusion it would be possible for someone else to do exactly what I’ve done or that it would come as easily to them as it has for me once I dedicated myself to it. This article is also not about that – if you are looking for a detailed guide that will help you, specifically, achieve massive weight loss, this is not it. I will cover some basics but if you have specific needs or ways you want to go about things, you’ll have to navigate that on your own. The long and short of it – you can lose weight eating just about any kind of diet you like so long as you’re getting the micronutrients you need and you’re able to be consistent with it. No overpriced diet program or trendy workout routine is going to beat consistency, and among those products, the only ones that work are the ones you can do for a lifetime without burning out.

We need to have honest discussions about these things without shame. Yes, you should love yourself when you’re bigger – and part of loving yourself should include getting to a healthier weight if you can. For me, part of what delayed me from focusing on this was becoming more accepting of myself and not feeling so ashamed of how I appeared when I was larger. That was a good thing.

I was 240lbs in January – that was not.

That sneaked up on me, and from a self-love and self-respect standpoint, I have no excuse. I knew I had it in me to do better and that robbing myself of several years of my life by keeping that weight on – not to mention depriving myself of vitality and joy through poor fitness during the years I’d have – was not conducive to the life I want or the legacy I want to leave behind. I don’t believe in “do as I say, not as I do” in cases outside of when it is impossible to embody what you are telling someone else they should do, especially when it comes to kids.

If I want other people to take their health seriously, it needs to be obvious I take mine seriously.

Metabolic disease is real and there’s no shame in carrying some extra weight or struggling with whatever you’re trying to get off if indeed you are currently working on that. The most important thing is that you care for yourself the best that you are able and that you adjust your approach as you learn new things. There is a lot of noise out there. In my own case, what’s worked is simple but the consistency required to do it was difficult.

The difficult part – the real difficult part – doesn’t get enough attention. From an energetic standpoint I am convinced that the excess fat we carry contains emotions and other burdens we couldn’t process and that getting the weight off forces all of that surface. (This is a particular theory where I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts.)

It’s not “can you exercise?” or “can you eat less?” – it’s “can you face yourself when you can’t use food as a crutch?”

The Mechanics of Weight Loss

You do not need to cut carbs. You don’t need to quit eating meat. You do not have to cut whole food groups from your diet or swear off doughnuts for the rest of your life in order to get fit and stay fit.

On this go around, I’ve eaten out several times and I have consistently lost weight. For my birthday week, I gave myself permission to eat as much as I wanted for several days in a row. That was the only time my weight loss stalled and within two weeks I was making progress again.

If you tell yourself, “I won’t eat that for the rest of my life” you are almost guaranteed to not only eat it but to completely overdo it when you do. Diets where you cut out entire macronutrients or food groups work because they restrict your choices so much it’s hard to get too much of anything, but by the end your body will likely be deficient on things you need to function and virtually no one does these diets long-term.

Speaking for myself – I have done keto and I have had all the carbs I want. This round of weight loss I didn’t restrict my carbs at all. I get 90 grams of protein on days I strength train and I try to hit at least 70 grams of protein on days I don’t, but fat and carbs have been a free-for-all within my caloric targets. Doing it this way beats the pants of keto for me. I was miserable on keto. My strength training sessions sucked on keto. Even with my protein intake being on the lower side when it comes to building muscle I have seen some muscle gain doing what I’ve been doing. (That’s a bonus for me – I was only aiming to maintain what I had while dropping weight.)

If keto works for people, great. If it works for you and you can you stick to it long-term, do it. I have no problem with that. Same for vegan diets, intermittent fasting or whatever else people do. I can’t stand evangelicism around different diets or shunning entire macronutrients.

What I will tell you is that if you – like me – love cake, don’t commit to a lifestyle where you’ll never eat it again, and don’t shame yourself when you have a slice. It’s a whole lot more important to develop a healthier relationship with food than it is to swear off certain foods altogether, and if you do swear off things, you’re all but guaranteeing you won’t have a healthy relationship with food.

I can foresee a future where I never have another doughnut. I have not forbidden myself from having doughnuts. It’s fine for me to ignore them because I’ve lost interest. I’m a whole lot more likely to lose interest because I don’t think it’s the end of the world if I have one even if I get it from the gas station and it’s full of corn syrup, GMOs and ingredients I can’t pronounce.

Would that be the best dietary decision? No, but being neurotic about every little thing I consume is a whole lot worse for me than having something I “shouldn’t have” once in a while. The key part is “once in a while.” I can do a lot all at once and then go light on my meals the following day or I can have one as a treat and not have it disrupt the rest of my regimen. What I can’t do is have 3-5 every day. No one balloons out several pounds over one slip-up. Even when weight goes on fast it’s only a couple of pounds per week. People catastrophizing their slip-ups and saying to themselves, “I already ordered a burger; I may as well get the large drink, too” is what gets them into trouble and turns a one-time indulgence into a long-term problem.

The core principles for weight loss are very simple:

1. Calories-in-calories-out is the most important; you won’t out-exercise a bad diet and if the scale isn’t moving, you’re getting too much food. In cases where metabolic and hormonal issues are present, you may be getting too much of a certain kind of food; you’re not consuming what is balanced for you and you’ll have to study and adjust until you figure out what the issue is. When, what and how you eat doesn’t matter. If intermittent fasting has worked for you in the past it’s not because intermittent fasting is some kind of magic; it’s because it gave you a structure that made it easier for you to stay within a caloric threshold where you lost weight. All that matters is your total intake relative to your body’s energetic needs. If you eat less than you need to sustain your weight, it will burn fat for energy.
2. Muscle and bone mass are vital for preserving and improving your metabolic health. For the actual weight loss, most of the work is done in the kitchen. An hour of cardio doesn’t even burn off a Big Mac. (You still want to do cardio to maintain your health and extend your life.) Muscle, however, is hungry, and it makes it easier to prevent yourself from putting weight back on after you’ve lost it. Men, women – doesn’t matter; everyone benefits from adding some muscle to their frame, and the more you train the stronger your bones and joints get which will help immensely when you’re older. (And ladies – don’t be afraid of hulking out. That doesn’t happen to anyone who isn’t explicitly going for that. Nearly every example is someone who is on, shall we say, “special supplements.”)

So eat less than you currently need and at least try to maintain what muscle you have while you’re losing fat. I know that’s not very helpful on its own – you could technically eat 800 calories of Twinkies every day and take an extensive list of vitamins and you’d be able to get the weight off but you’d be ravenous and miserable the whole way through.

The approach that’s worked best for me is to prioritize protein and fiber. Fiber is mainly for digestion and hunger control. Protein is also for hunger but also to make sure my body has enough of what it needs to maintain my lean mass so it burns fat instead of going for my muscle. Lentils are magic; I make a stew with them with veggies that’s less than 400 calories for a three cup bowl. On days I strength train I add 6 ounces of cooked ground beef to a pound of stir fry vegetables in a pan. You want to figure out meals like that – very filling with a conservative amount of calories.

You will be hungry while you’re losing weight but you should not be ravenous. If you are ravenous it means that your body is deficient in something and you likely need to get more electrolytes or vitamins in what you’re eating or you’ve cut one of your macronutrients too aggressively. I know we’ve developed a fetish for protein the past couple of years but fat is crucial for maintaining your hormonal balance and carbs are fuel for your muscles and brain.

Nobody who is selling you a program is giving you the unvarnished truth. Never trust a diet plan that has its own candy bar and don’t take people seriously who feel like they need to evangelize their particular way of eating like they are offering salvation to the world. I do not believe there is some kind of keto-Christ who died for my sins and will raise me to heaven to be with him if I eat bacon slathered in butter. I do believe I’d go wherever I’m going sooner rather than later if I tried that. (I don’t believe a death that could have been prevented by a triple bypass surgery would earn me entrance into Valhalla.)

I do believe in following what works best for you and your body. You know your body better than anyone else does and you’re the one with the most skin in the game. Pick what works for you and let the results speak for themselves.

The Discomfort of Leaving Old Crutches Behind

Every time I have lost weight I have had something to face and process. This time it was immense anger. I know there is more to it than just my own personal experiences and whatever got repressed in my youth. The world itself feels like it’s inflamed, and when I feel into Gaia’s energy, there are times I think I will go mad if I don’t disconnect and ground afterwards. The world is in a rocky place right now.

Nonetheless, back in April and May I was walking 25k steps per day just to burn off the extra energy. I felt like I could punch a hole through the sun.

Being heavier disrupts my hormonal balance and chills me out. It makes me a lot more willing to tolerate things that are intolerable when I feel more vital and alive. It allows me to think things I otherwise have to feel.

It was stronger this time than it ever had been in the past and more than once I found myself wishing I could go back to my old coping mechanisms. I knew they wouldn’t work anymore because even as my weight slowly climbed over the past few years my relationship to food had transformed enough that I had to sit with discomfort when it rose. I couldn’t tolerate the binging I used to do and I didn’t get the relief from sugary foods I used to experience.

There was an alchemy that occurred as I got lighter and I could halt that alchemy by getting out a caloric deficit, but it was obvious the only way out was through and putting it off would likely make it worse.

See, there are all these techniques and fads and programs that tell you “it’s not your fault” (and there’s some truth to that – the food system is terrible, especially in the US) and that there are things out there that can make weight loss easy and effortless. You don’t even have to try!

But as with so many things, the most important skill in this is being able to sit with discomfort. If you can feel your stomach grumbling slightly at the end of the day but go to bed and wait until breakfast to have more food, you’ll be able to lose weight. Some nights will be like that. Some won’t. If you can make that choice once, you can do it however many times you have to in order to reach your target. And if you can’t do that, no program will work – it certainly won’t work long-term if it stops your hunger by loading you up on fat and protein (or protein and carbs – I’m sure the low fat craze will make a comeback someday) and cuts out foods you’ll eventually want to eat again. You will have to figure out how those foods fit into your life one way or another and it’s better to do that while you’re dropping weight instead of having to develop a brand new set of habits at your goal.

Weight is not a willpower issue. Nothing long-term and lasting is a willpower issue. It is a structural issue first and foremost. Do your daily habits and systems support your long-term health? If you have to expend mental effort and use discipline every single time you cook a meal or work out, you won’t stick with it. It’s too taxing. You need to do things that eventually become automatic. You don’t have to love exercise when you start but you want to do something you can learn to enjoy and that gives you enough of a high that it becomes self-sustaining after a while. Sticking with things you have to force yourself to do even after months of doing them will guarantee that you’ll eventually fail, and that’s not your fault. Nobody can stick with something they hate doing forever. It’s not a failing to figure out what you like and can stick to and structure your life accordingly. Allowing perfect to be the enemy of good is exactly why so many people don’t make progress.

Shadow work also isn’t a willpower issue, and it takes a lot of shadow work and integration get healthy and stay healthy. That applies to both ends of the spectrum. Sometimes people who start heavy get way too light and that’s not worth it. I have only ever seen weight loss as a vehicle to better health. Looking better is great, but I want that as an extension of being healthier. I think everyone should have being their healthiest self as their primary goal when they do something like this. That applies mentally, spiritually, emotionally and physically. Weight loss on the surface is focused on the body but all of those things are involved. When it becomes about vanity at any cost, that is simply self-hatred in a different form; you can radically change your body but you will not change within if you do it that way. The first time I got to a healthy weight was 2010 – the sole reason that didn’t stick is because I changed my body without changing myself.

The nights where I’ve gone to bed hungry are a whole lot easier than the times I was stressed out of my mind and didn’t reach for a candy bar. Most of what we tell ourselves in these situations is distracting from the emotional content of our own psyches that is screaming for us to acknowledge it. More often than not what we are called to do is feel but what we’re feeling isn’t pleasant.

A lot of shadow work is not thinking or journaling or taking action to shift our state; a lot of shadow work is just acknowledging something and allowing it to be and dissipate on its own. I’ve had to do a lot of that this year, especially with the anger that surfaced in the spring. In moments like that it can be hard to tell what’s mine and what I’m picking up on in the world, but the answer is the same either way – see it and let it pass.

Sit with the discomfort without judging it, resisting it, shaming it, or trying to force it into being something else.

On the strictly personal level, it is love to look at yourself in the mirror and not have to envision a skinnier and healthier version of you before you extend respect and compassion toward yourself. It is love to see your own judgements toward yourself and to not allow yourself to slip deep into shame. It is love to catch yourself when you are slipping into a deeply self-hating frame of mind but refocus without beating yourself up over it once you notice it.

I think that singular skill – being able to sit with discomfort and direct your attention without shaming yourself for what you experience – is more important than the calorie counting or the exercise for a lot of people.

The spiritual is not separate from the mundane. Matter is alive and our spirits are experiencing through it. The body is important even if it is temporary. In the grand scheme of things we don’t keep our bodies very long yet how we view them and how we treat them and how they are treated has a profound effect upon us.

If you can sit with discomfort, you can accept yourself. Sitting with discomfort is itself an act of self-acceptance. This is part of laying the groundwork for the stillness necessary for magick and manifestation to come in. It is a necessary element to any form of permanent change much less change that follows your will.

Whether or not you are someone who has struggled with this particular issue, if you have indulged me by reading this far, I hope you have been entertained by these words and have found something in them that will help you in whatever work you are doing.