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- All right, Brad, if you can see this,
I think I just activated tracking.
- Chris has been working on his health.
I've been supporting him, and we've been a bit lost.
I realized this shortly after asking myself
why we made this mushroom bourguignon.
Did I share it with Chris
because I thought it looked delicious?
Maybe I thought the YouTube algorithm would like it
or it could simply be that it sounds French as (beep),
pardon my French.
I think there's some truth in all of those things
but what I was sure of
is that I didn't pick this recipe
with Chris' health as the priority,
which, if you haven't been following this story,
is the entire point of this show.
So what the hell is going on and why are we presenting you
with a dish that we feel isn't serving our goals?
That's an excellent question.
Let me explain.
(gentle music)
When the first episode of this show released
in March of this year,
I had been supporting Chris with his health
for just shy of a year.
His progress was exciting,
he had lost 96 pounds
and positive changes were showing up in the rest of his life
in the form of career moves, moves across the country,
and diving into therapy for the first time.
But not long after these episodes started coming out,
we experienced some difficulty.
Chris's move across the country
and leaving his community of friends behind,
unsurprisingly, introduced some loneliness into his life
that hadn't been there before.
And Chris shared with me
that he went back to food for comfort
to help get him through it.
And over the summer,
Chris gained about 30 pounds,
putting him at 470,
where he's been sitting for a couple of months now.
I, on the other hand, have been trying to help Chris
but have often felt unsure about how best to do that.
Until recently, I was focused on making these episodes,
hoping that would push us forward.
But this isn't the story about the recipes we're sharing,
it's a story about Chris and his journey towards health.
And so, Chris and I labored through this recipe
so that we could make a video about it,
all while the story we aimed to tell had stalled.
The point here is sometimes you start doing something,
build up a head of steam and forget why.
We started to document this process
to share what we're doing,
not to do things to document so that we could share it.
And the latter is why Chris spent 30 minutes
degilling five pounds of mushrooms for this recipe
when he didn't have to.
See the cookbook we were using
mentions degilling mushrooms for the previous recipe
and Chris thought it was for this one,
and I'm so sorry, Chris.
But we're sharing this video with you now
in order to do the former
and share what we're doing going forward.
And that is working toward specific goals.
Until recently, Chris had been working toward the big
and rather nebulous goal of getting healthy.
And while that's a noble cause,
it's not a great way to track progress.
And it turns out there's a lot of evidence
that setting specific measurable goals,
along with setting smaller goal posts along the way,
is a great way to increase the likelihood
of achieving them.
So rather than feel embarrassed
that Chris and I hadn't already done this
in over a year of working on his health,
we decided to repress those emotions
and finally sit down to do it now.
- My goal has always just to be heart healthy, you know,
like just to get my heart back into shape.
Of course, being thinner
is also a very good part of that goal.
To say I've had like a dream weight in mind,
I mean like, you know, I'm 470 right now
and like dream goal would be like 230, 250 maybe.
- I mean, I think 230 sounds like an incredible goal.
It's also, it's funny to me
that we haven't talked about this
like super specifically,
like maybe we did at the very beginning,
but we haven't in a long time.
And so, just hearing you say that number
makes me be like, okay, there's a target.
I feel good about that.
And once we had a goal to act as our finish line,
we set two weekly goals to track our progress
in the short term and then typed them all up
to make them physical, or at least digital.
Here is what I have written down.
Lose two pounds a week,
make a meal plan every Sunday together
so that we can go into our weeks
knowing what we're eating.
- And touch my toes.
- Those are some good metrics.
- And then, after that, onward to 5K.
- Sometimes you want something so bad
you feel the desire alone will get you there.
As someone who's better at seeing the big picture
and often forgets the details,
I know how true this is, but it's the details,
those little decisions in the moment,
that carry us toward what we're after in life,
the next meal, the next few words in a script,
or removing the next few gills in a mushroom,
I'm sorry, Chris.
And thoughtful goals can be used as mile markers
to ensure we're making those decisions,
like Chris' of losing two pounds a week,
or our goal for this show to return in 2023.
Because now that you're caught up with where we are,
we need to take a break from making this show
so that we can focus on this process we're documenting,
which, for the record, has been one of the most meaningful
I've had the pleasure of working on.
And with that said, I need to thank some people.
Chris, for allowing me to go on this journey with him,
Andrew, for letting us tell this story here,
the entire Babish team for all of your creative input,
and all of you for your incredible support
of what we're doing.
I can't look at the comments on these videos
without being overwhelmed in the best way.
And it's made me feel like
we've made some kind of positive impact on the world,
however small that is,
and that has always been my biggest goal of all.
(bright music)
We may have started making this mushroom bourguignon
for the wrong reasons,
but it turned out all right
because not only was making it the signal we needed
to realign our efforts,
but it's also, pardon my French, (beep) delicious.
There's a full recipe in the description.
We'll see you guys next year.
- [Andrew] Thanks again to Squarespace
for sponsoring today's episode.
They've been a great partner
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From websites to online stores, to domains and analytics,
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- Okay, lettuce, I got lettuce.
That's...
Order one.
Oh, it needs to be bread first.