Hey Everyone,
I’m new to the forum and I have no entrepreneurial experience. I’m in my early forties and living in Canada. I read MJ’s books a while ago and for whatever reason I didn’t do anything about it. That changes now.
I worked in professional sports during my twenties and things didn’t work out. I went back to university and did a masters degree. I joined a company in the Oil & Gas industry, worked my way up the ladder and ran it for a while. I was able to make a lateral move to running another company in the construction industry for a short time. Then, circumstances in the economy put me out of the job and I chose to “be-my-own-boss” as a consultant, picking up work wherever I could find it.
Recent circumstances have provided me with the drive and determination to make changes. Things haven’t worked out as I hoped.
For the introduction, I thought I might take this opportunity to write about a challenging personal experience. I hope that folks get to know a little bit about me and I can contribute to the forum.
The reason I got the idea to share this is because of what MJ wrote in UNSCRIPTED , “Success is simpler than you think: ax the shortcut, honor the process-principle, and do the necessary work. Dump the diet pills, the fat girdle, and the fads; eat properly twenty meals out of twenty-one and get your a$$ to the gym, sprint, play tennis—for the love of God, do freaking something. And wham, you succeed.” Based on my experience, I believe this is 100% accurate.
A little more about me:
I spent the better part of my life weighing over 300lbs. I peaked at 330lbs before I decided, that was enough. I hit 300lbs when I was 14 years old. Looking back, the timing was perfect because I was about to enter high school and join the football team. I took to the game like a fish in water. I excelled and went on to play at a Canadian university.
I had more athletic success at university and I was drafted into the Canadian Football League. After playing for several seasons, I had enough. I was 330lbs, hitting my head for a living and destroying my body.
Overall, my experience in the CFL was great. I got to play a sport for a living, which was amazing, and I won the Grey Cup (the professional National Championship in Canada).
All that said, I wanted more. I wanted to be healthy and I wanted a career that didn’t require a chiropractor to get out of bed in the morning. At the time I retired, my physique would be best described as “20lbs of $hit stuffed into a 10lb bag.” My teammates would say I looked like a bag of milk. To this day, seeing a bag of milk makes me laugh. If you want to know what this physique looks like, take a look at Tyson Fury. I was nowhere near the athletic beast that Tyson Fury is, but we had the same body type when he was at his worst. Check out the Tyson Fury vs Wladimir Klitschko II Press Conference where he goes topless and delivers a spectacular rant.
So, I went to work on my physique. I tried everything, over and over. I tried butter coffee, keto, intermittent fasting, low-carb, high-carb, high-protein, low-protein, vegetarian, vegan, you name it (I’ve left out so many of the strategies on purpose). After several years, probably 4 or 5 years, I read a book about how bodybuilders prepare for a bodybuilding show. It said, they would count their calories, eat a specific amount, then progressively reduce their calories over several weeks heading into a show. I threw myself into the process and I got it: I was shredded.
At this point, having worked through the process for 4 or 5 years, I can say confidently that I didn’t know what was happening. The kick-back was overwhelming and there’s no way to accurately describe it. I lowered my calories to get to my goal and I found a hunger that I had never experienced. It was a nightmare. I put all the weight back on and I considered all that work a complete failure. All the clothes I had bought didn’t fit, and I was reeling out of control with an insatiable hunger. After a few months of bingeing (yes, months), I got up to 250+lbs, got my self together, and started again.
This binge habit lasted years, 4 or 5 years for sure. It’s crazy to think back to how long it lasted. But it’s the truth. By the way, I see it everywhere today. I can look at people at the gym and online and I see the struggle very clearly. It’s so tough to manage because you get the result you want, but at the same time, it isn’t. It’s a short-term strategy that demands a balance. The balance is usually in the form of an uncontrollable desire for high-caloric food as your body recovers from a prolonged caloric deficit. Your body is starving and it needs tasty calorie-dense food, asap.
I define high-caloric food to be the anything that is manufactured with refined: sugar, flour, fat, sodium. I learned about the power of these ingredients in a book written by Michael Moss, Sugar Salt Fat, where he describes a concept called “mouth feel.” Purchase and read the book if you are interested in this sort of thing, but my big takeaway was that the tasty products we consume, say for example an oreo cookie, isn’t an oreo cookie. It’s the perfect product that has been tested on tens of thousands of humans in every category imaginable with the goal of achieving the perfect “mouth feel.” I can’t help but think that it’s a lose-lose no matter what you try to eat these days. The same goes for every processed food you can imagine. It stopped being about food a long time ago.
So, going back to the story, I had clothes that would fit at 210lbs, muscular and shredded, and 250+lbs, like a bag of milk. I was exhausted. The discipline and energy required to get the shredded physique was just as exhausting as the energy that went into gaining all the weight back.
There came a point when I clarified my goal after all this trial and error. I looked long and hard at what I truly wanted to achieve, and set out to do that. My goal was to be healthy with a fit physique. That vision became crystal clear after all the failures. I was right there, I just had to make a couple adjustments.
Having been through it all for 9 or 10 years, I could see the patterns of failure. I could also see that a restrictive eating plan wouldn’t work. So, I found a way to eat as much as I wanted and maintain the physique I had always dreamed of. It worked. Simply put, I made a plan to eat a tremendous amount of natural whole foods. I found a few recipe books that focused on ingredients that you buy in the produce section and I went to work on making all the recipes, searching for the ones I liked a lot. The recipes and meal choices are endless.
I was blessed with an appetite that could rival any competitive eater (see Joey Chestnut). That’s how I got to 300lbs at 14 years old. So, committing to the process of consuming natural whole foods changed how my body signalled it was full. It was like flipping a light switch. Large amounts of natural food recipes shut off the insatiable hunger.
Conclusion:
So that’s all I wanted to say today. Thanks for taking the time to read all of this if you made it this far. As I mentioned before, I don’t have any entrepreneurial experience to share but based on what MJ wrote, maybe there’s something I can use from my other experiences to help me on the way to Fastlane success.
I’m looking forward to working through my plans while communicating as much as possible in the forum. I’ve never used a forum as a tool for this sort of thing so I’m excited to learn as much as I can.
Last thing: @MJ DeMarco, I really enjoyed your work, thanks for everything man.
Wishing you all the very best,
Argento Scatto
I’m new to the forum and I have no entrepreneurial experience. I’m in my early forties and living in Canada. I read MJ’s books a while ago and for whatever reason I didn’t do anything about it. That changes now.
I worked in professional sports during my twenties and things didn’t work out. I went back to university and did a masters degree. I joined a company in the Oil & Gas industry, worked my way up the ladder and ran it for a while. I was able to make a lateral move to running another company in the construction industry for a short time. Then, circumstances in the economy put me out of the job and I chose to “be-my-own-boss” as a consultant, picking up work wherever I could find it.
Recent circumstances have provided me with the drive and determination to make changes. Things haven’t worked out as I hoped.
For the introduction, I thought I might take this opportunity to write about a challenging personal experience. I hope that folks get to know a little bit about me and I can contribute to the forum.
The reason I got the idea to share this is because of what MJ wrote in UNSCRIPTED , “Success is simpler than you think: ax the shortcut, honor the process-principle, and do the necessary work. Dump the diet pills, the fat girdle, and the fads; eat properly twenty meals out of twenty-one and get your a$$ to the gym, sprint, play tennis—for the love of God, do freaking something. And wham, you succeed.” Based on my experience, I believe this is 100% accurate.
A little more about me:
I spent the better part of my life weighing over 300lbs. I peaked at 330lbs before I decided, that was enough. I hit 300lbs when I was 14 years old. Looking back, the timing was perfect because I was about to enter high school and join the football team. I took to the game like a fish in water. I excelled and went on to play at a Canadian university.
I had more athletic success at university and I was drafted into the Canadian Football League. After playing for several seasons, I had enough. I was 330lbs, hitting my head for a living and destroying my body.
Overall, my experience in the CFL was great. I got to play a sport for a living, which was amazing, and I won the Grey Cup (the professional National Championship in Canada).
All that said, I wanted more. I wanted to be healthy and I wanted a career that didn’t require a chiropractor to get out of bed in the morning. At the time I retired, my physique would be best described as “20lbs of $hit stuffed into a 10lb bag.” My teammates would say I looked like a bag of milk. To this day, seeing a bag of milk makes me laugh. If you want to know what this physique looks like, take a look at Tyson Fury. I was nowhere near the athletic beast that Tyson Fury is, but we had the same body type when he was at his worst. Check out the Tyson Fury vs Wladimir Klitschko II Press Conference where he goes topless and delivers a spectacular rant.
So, I went to work on my physique. I tried everything, over and over. I tried butter coffee, keto, intermittent fasting, low-carb, high-carb, high-protein, low-protein, vegetarian, vegan, you name it (I’ve left out so many of the strategies on purpose). After several years, probably 4 or 5 years, I read a book about how bodybuilders prepare for a bodybuilding show. It said, they would count their calories, eat a specific amount, then progressively reduce their calories over several weeks heading into a show. I threw myself into the process and I got it: I was shredded.
At this point, having worked through the process for 4 or 5 years, I can say confidently that I didn’t know what was happening. The kick-back was overwhelming and there’s no way to accurately describe it. I lowered my calories to get to my goal and I found a hunger that I had never experienced. It was a nightmare. I put all the weight back on and I considered all that work a complete failure. All the clothes I had bought didn’t fit, and I was reeling out of control with an insatiable hunger. After a few months of bingeing (yes, months), I got up to 250+lbs, got my self together, and started again.
This binge habit lasted years, 4 or 5 years for sure. It’s crazy to think back to how long it lasted. But it’s the truth. By the way, I see it everywhere today. I can look at people at the gym and online and I see the struggle very clearly. It’s so tough to manage because you get the result you want, but at the same time, it isn’t. It’s a short-term strategy that demands a balance. The balance is usually in the form of an uncontrollable desire for high-caloric food as your body recovers from a prolonged caloric deficit. Your body is starving and it needs tasty calorie-dense food, asap.
I define high-caloric food to be the anything that is manufactured with refined: sugar, flour, fat, sodium. I learned about the power of these ingredients in a book written by Michael Moss, Sugar Salt Fat, where he describes a concept called “mouth feel.” Purchase and read the book if you are interested in this sort of thing, but my big takeaway was that the tasty products we consume, say for example an oreo cookie, isn’t an oreo cookie. It’s the perfect product that has been tested on tens of thousands of humans in every category imaginable with the goal of achieving the perfect “mouth feel.” I can’t help but think that it’s a lose-lose no matter what you try to eat these days. The same goes for every processed food you can imagine. It stopped being about food a long time ago.
So, going back to the story, I had clothes that would fit at 210lbs, muscular and shredded, and 250+lbs, like a bag of milk. I was exhausted. The discipline and energy required to get the shredded physique was just as exhausting as the energy that went into gaining all the weight back.
There came a point when I clarified my goal after all this trial and error. I looked long and hard at what I truly wanted to achieve, and set out to do that. My goal was to be healthy with a fit physique. That vision became crystal clear after all the failures. I was right there, I just had to make a couple adjustments.
Having been through it all for 9 or 10 years, I could see the patterns of failure. I could also see that a restrictive eating plan wouldn’t work. So, I found a way to eat as much as I wanted and maintain the physique I had always dreamed of. It worked. Simply put, I made a plan to eat a tremendous amount of natural whole foods. I found a few recipe books that focused on ingredients that you buy in the produce section and I went to work on making all the recipes, searching for the ones I liked a lot. The recipes and meal choices are endless.
I was blessed with an appetite that could rival any competitive eater (see Joey Chestnut). That’s how I got to 300lbs at 14 years old. So, committing to the process of consuming natural whole foods changed how my body signalled it was full. It was like flipping a light switch. Large amounts of natural food recipes shut off the insatiable hunger.
Conclusion:
So that’s all I wanted to say today. Thanks for taking the time to read all of this if you made it this far. As I mentioned before, I don’t have any entrepreneurial experience to share but based on what MJ wrote, maybe there’s something I can use from my other experiences to help me on the way to Fastlane success.
I’m looking forward to working through my plans while communicating as much as possible in the forum. I’ve never used a forum as a tool for this sort of thing so I’m excited to learn as much as I can.
Last thing: @MJ DeMarco, I really enjoyed your work, thanks for everything man.
Wishing you all the very best,
Argento Scatto
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