1148-Lessons Learned From Dozens of Unsuccessful Attempts to Get Lean and Healthy

**Joshua Sheats** (0:01)
Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, my name is Joshua. Years ago, I heard some intelligent person make this pithy statement. You know, it's good to talk to winners about why they have won and all the things that were necessary in their victory. But we shouldn't only talk to winners, we should talk to losers also, and see if we can figure out why they lost, why they failed. We shouldn't only ask a wealthy person how they got rich, we should go and talk to some bankrupt people and say, how did you go bankrupt? Tell us so that we can avoid those mistakes. At the time, that seemed like a really good idea to me. I thought, that's a good one. I'm going to take that philosophy and file that away. If I ever talk to a bankrupt person, then I'm going to learn all about bankruptcy. By the way, I actually do think this is a pretty good idea. I think this is a good idea because we often will get more valuable and more useful information by talking with people who have failed at things and by talking about those who are successful. I think this is because when you look at people who are at the very top of a success ladder in some field, it can be hard to identify one specific causal factor that have created that success.
You'll be talking with a movie star who is talking about how he got so buff for this latest action figure role that he's playing. He says, well, it was just all the chicken and the rice. Well, it was the chicken and the rice and it was also the trend, right? It was also the drugs. Or you'll talk to somebody who is incredibly athletic, a sports superstar, and you say, how is it that you are so athletic and so capable? And they'll say, man, it's just discipline and hard work. Well, it absolutely is discipline and hard work. It's also having world-class genetics. Or somebody who's extremely wealthy, and you say, how did you get so wealthy? And they say, man, I scrimped and I saved and I was really careful and I watched every dollar. Well, that's true. But it's also true that you hit a lucky part in the market, or a rising market that helped you with a lot of the mistakes, and you hit a technology curve. Now, that doesn't take anything away from the successes of that person. I don't think it's any less impressive that the person was able to achieve great success just because there are multiple factors more than the person was able to identify. But what is hard to know what to do is, how do I apply that person's success to my own life? After all, how do I recreate that market condition that led to that success? And it's really true that studying from failure in many cases is more productive. Because I think that while not all of us can be number one in any particular field, most of us can be pretty good in a field, right? Middle of the road or higher, if we could simply avoid the big mistakes, avoid the failures. And so we do know that while we can't determine whether you for sure have elite genetics or not, we do know that if you quit and you don't practice stick-to-it-iveness and practice grit and keep on going at something, well, then you're certainly not going to win. So we can file that away and know that that's true, right? We can't know exactly what drug dosage you should take to help improve your muscles, but we can know that if you don't stick to your diet, then it's not going to be as successful and you're probably not going to be ready for the big screen. So I actually do believe that this theory is a useful theory and a useful idea, because for most of us, all we really need to do is just avoid the long-term failures.
Now, it's easy to say that when you're the one interviewing people about their failures. It's harder to want to say that when you're the one who has failed. And yet, I believe that it's my responsibility to, if I'm going to ask people about their failures, to also talk about some of the lessons that I have learned. And so I'll share with you in today's podcast, I want to share with you some important lesson to learn from dozens of my own unsuccessful attempts to become lean and healthy. Recently, I had the good fortune of hitting my college weight, which was a weight that I really had not been at in quite a long time. Unfortunately, my college weight was 335 pounds. And unfortunately, I recently stepped on a scale after a while of not being around a scale, and it came in at 335 pounds. And what that means is over the last six years, I have gained 100 pounds of excess fat and excess body weight. I don't say that proudly. It snuck up on me just like it always does. I remember the time about six years ago, I remember the podcast that I recorded, where I talked about the carnivore diet, I shared with you how I had lost a lot of weight on the carnivore diet. And I was enjoying a new low body weight. I went and checked my records. It was 234 pounds. That was my low body weight. And I remember even as I was recording that podcast, I thought, you know what? I think I'm doing something good here, but I thought, am I jinxing myself? What's going on? I don't believe in jinxing myself in that context, but you kind of have that voice at the back of your head that says, if I talk about this, is that going to lower my resolve to continue? And I remember after doing that podcast, I remember I was consistent with the carnivore diet for a little while longer, then there was a holiday that followed up, and I had determined that, okay, on this date, I'm going to go ahead and engage in the holiday food. And I just couldn't quite go back to the carnivore diet. And of course, when you diet, well, when you eat a certain way and you get fat, then you go on a diet and you lose the fat, and then you stop eating the way that helped you to lose the fat, and you go back to eating the way that made you fat in the first place, guess what? You're going to get fat. And so over the last six years, I have gotten fat again. And lots of reasons for it, but the fundamental reason is just excess eating, overeating. I went and did the math on this, which by the way, what I really, if you are lean and healthy, you're not going to need anything I have to share with you because there's no, there's going to be no surprises. But the truth is that half of us are obese. And so I have had many, many unsuccessful attempts at losing weight and keeping it off. And I am in the beginning stage of another successful attempt. And I hope, I hope optimistically that this attempt will be the one that is successful for the long term. I've lost over the last month and a half, I've lost good solid 20 pounds of body fat down two inches on my stomach, which is really important because as I'll share in a moment, the problem is this time around, in the past, I've always just been fat. This time around, I've had health symptoms, which have been no fun. And that's what has really woken me up to the work that I have to do. And I'll share with you on that in a moment. But I've learned a lot from these unsuccessful attempts. And so I don't know how many it is, a dozen, well, I'll just say, right? I don't know how many times I have made an attempt to get lean and healthy.