If I would do something extreme
the weight would very rapidly come back.
My name is Ethan Suplee.
You may know me from Boy Meets World,
My Name is Earl or movies like
Remember the Titans, American History X or Blow.
At my heaviest I was over 536 pounds
with an 80 plus inch waist.
Now I'm 250 pounds with a 36 inch waist.
My real weight loss journey started in 2002.
I was seeing a girl who I'm now married to
and we have four kids
and she had a lot of interests
in hiking and spending days at the beach and going
to museums and doing a lot of really active things.
Taking an honest look at how a future
with her would look, I realized I was going to
have to make her big change.
When you have massive amounts of weight to lose
and you go into it
or this is how I experienced it.
And I would go into it with this anxiety
of needing to get rid of it as fast as possible.
There was the idea often that the diet would cure me.
And once I hit the magical number on the scale,
I would be fixed
and I would never again go up to this very high number.
That's just not the case.
That hasn't been my experience at all.
So if I would do something extreme
the weight would very rapidly come back.
Weight loss is real tricky because there's
there's really three major things that you can lose.
You can lose fat, you can also lose lean tissue
and muscle and you can lose water.
So I'm, hyper-focused on maintaining muscle mass
and losing fat, depending on my work schedule
I can spend anywhere
from one to two hours in the gym every day.
I'm an actor,
so I have lots of free time.
Typically I go into the gym first thing in the morning
and the only thing I consumed
before that is whey protein and water.
And then I have four meals of
protein, carbohydrate, and a vegetable.
And then before bed, I have casein protein and water.
That's what I eat.
And that's how I work out.
Strangely, when I was doing really, really extreme diets,
I cooked a lot.
I did a liquid diet for two months
and I just obsessively watched Food TV.
I'm making my Brooklyn barbecue chili sliders.
I used to watch Food Network and Rachael all the time.
I just wanted to have some connection with food that I
wasn't getting because I was just drinking a couple
of protein shakes a day.
My wife made a joke once that every time
I got serious about dieting,
her and the kids all gained weight
because I was cooking them these elaborate meals.
Last year, my goal was to have a six pack
and I had a six pack at the end of the year,
which was insanely awesome.
Now I want have revealed oblique muscles,
which is another insanely difficult goal
but I have all the confidence
in the world that I'll get there.
Ethan, you make me smile just side to side.
And so I, I, I find you such an inspiration
and in every way.
What, you know, what I love about this most
is it's kind of a love story.
You found love for yourself because you fell
in love with your life partner with, with, with this
with this really cool woman.
So give us some, some of those magic thoughts and
and inspirations that got you into this to begin with.
I didn't care about myself.
In fact, I, I just was overwhelmed by shame.
Prior to having somebody look
at me in a way that was not judgmental at all.
And suddenly as an almost mirror
I was like, Oh, I'm lovable.
It's possible to feel this way.
And since the person I care most about feels this way
about me, there must be something in there that's
that's worthy of love and affection.
And that was almost able
I was able to kind of feel that about myself through her.
I, I want to say it's all just do it for yourself and
and be tough and take personal responsibility.
And, and today I can get a sense of that.
Today it is kind of up to me whether I succeed or fail,
but I, I couldn't have gotten there
without this glimpse of self-worth.
And then you have to make the dedication to yourself.
Then you have to say, now I'm going to be in this game.
So tell me.
That's the work, yeah.
Yes, then you have to do the work.
Of course.