How I Lost 60 Pounds and Started Giving A F*ck About My Health

Over the past 5 years, I’ve completely changed my relationship to my health. Prior to that, I was overweight, pre-diabetic, and having chest pains in my mid-30s. I thought maybe eating a salad once a week and going for a run every now then would take care of it. I was wrong. Since then, I’ve lost 60 pounds (~30kg). I now enjoy exercising regularly and I eat healthy and nutritious foods. My daily life is much more physically active and I get way better sleep. I’m happy with my health now—but it took a long time to get here. I’m not going to share a bunch of workout routines or complicated diets. What worked for me might not work for you. But I can share what I went through to get here in the hopes that you, too, might change how you think about your health and take it more seriously. Because at the end of the day, your health is definitely something you should give a f*ck about. CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: The 60-Pound Journey and Why I'm Sharing This 00:02:40 Growing Up on the Standard American Diet 00:04:04 The Metabolism Crash: Gaining 50 Pounds in My Mid-30s 00:05:12 Chest Pains and the Doctor's Warning: You're a Ticking Time Bomb 00:06:55 Phase One: The Classic Approach and the First Plateau 00:08:45 The Delusion Problem: Why I Kept Lying to Myself 00:13:03 Hiring a Coach and the Game-Changing Power of Tracking 00:17:58 The Devastating Rebound: Gaining It All Back 00:20:32 Environment Is Everything: The Move to LA 00:25:53 The Genetic Revelation: You're Metabolically 60 Years Old 00:31:07 Breaking Through Plateaus: The Role of Coaching and Perspective 00:33:40 The Privilege Problem: Let's Talk About Access and Cost 00:34:37 Genetics, Sympathy, and the Addiction Parallel 00:38:47 The Virtuous Cycle: Optimizing for Longevity in My 40s 00:40:40 The Real Takeaway: It's About Habits, Lifestyle, Biology, and Psychology ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁩⁠⁠⁠ ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://bit.ly/4w46FMH⁠⁠⁠ FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  So as you know, Drew, we've gotten a lot of comments over the last year about how skinny I am. We have. That's such a weird way to start an episode. Have you all noticed how skinny I am? Do I look good in these jeans? No, but seriously. So over the past year, dozens and dozens of people have commented and asked about the health journey I've been on. For those of you who have been longtime fans, who've been around for many years, you know that I used to be a little chunky, a little bit of a fat fuck, for being honest. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I did plenty of sugarcoating in prior years. I have lost almost 60 pounds in the last four to five years.

• 0:43Mark Manson?

  That's 30 kilos for non-Americans. I went from over 40% body fat, which is like very, like you're in the red zone in terms of body composition, health-wise, to under 20% body fat. My biomarkers are the best they've ever been in my life. I've been on a very long and intense health journey over the last five years. A lot of readers and viewers and listeners have noticed. A lot of people have asked about it. I want to preface this episode by saying I'm not a fitness guru. I'm not a nutrition expert. I'm just a guy who was horribly unhealthy for most of his adult life. I fought tooth and nail to get my shit together over many, many years. I tried a lot of things. Most of them didn't work.

• 1:28Mark Manson?

  And so I just wanted to take an episode to talk through the psychological process that I went through, as well as the things that I did. There's going to be no, there's no diet here. There's no exercise routine. There's no hot fad, secret process that did anything. Like, this was a long, arduous process. People keep asking me like, "Oh, my God, you look amazing. What did you do?" And my answer is like, "I did 25 different things over four and a half years, and half of them didn't work." So I don't know how to answer that question. So this episode is my attempt to answer that question, to be very open and honest about this side of my life

• 2:11Mark Manson?

  and the things that I've learned, and hopefully give the listeners some psychological tools to approaching their own health and fitness in their own life, and just have more practical success with it. So that's what we're doing here.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Cool. Yeah, I think a really good place to start this, Mark, is if you would kind of give us a background on how you got so unhealthy to begin with. Like, where did that start? How did that happen? What were some of the processes that went into that?

• 2:35Mark Manson?

  Oh, well, first of all, I'd like to apologize my mom and dad for what I'm about to say.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  This whole podcast is one big apology.

• 2:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah, sorry, Mom. I mean, look, I grew up in Texas in the eighties. Like, I think my mom thought fruity pebbles and Cocoa Puffs was healthy. Like, that's what you're supposed to give your kid. And Domino's Pizza was like a normal dinner. You know, they call it the sad diet, standard American diet. I grew up with zero nutritional knowledge, eating tons of processed crap. You know, for pretty much my entire childhood, I was a little bit overweight or out of shape. I was never athletic. And then, once I got into my adolescent years in my twenties, I started drinking a lot, partying a lot, traveling a lot, working a lot. Never took care of my sleep, never paid attention to what I was eating, drank all the time.

• 3:26Mark Manson?

  And just, I basically exercised just enough to like, keep myself thin enough

• 3:34Mark Manson?

  to remain attractive to the girls I was dating. And that was the entirety of it. I had no strategy. I had no long-term goals. I had no fitness regimen or long-term plan. It was just like, oh, I gained a few pounds. Let's go run a bunch. So I can keep drinking and going out.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  And you were able to, that, that worked for you for?

• 3:53Mark Manson?

  I mean, in my twenties, yes. So I had enough of metabolism that, that, that worked until it didn't. And

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Common story, yeah.

• 4:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah. So this funny thing happens is you age, and as you age, your body starts telling you, no, you can't do that anymore. So, once I got into my thirties, the metabolism slowed down. The wear and tear that had developed on my hormones, on my organs, on my metabolism, like, it all Started to come to a head, probably over 50 pounds from like 30 to 35 again to over 50 pounds. I was already technically overweight and then you just add another 50 pounds of body weight. Probably all fat on top of that. So by the time I was in my mid 30s, I was by a clinical definition obese and in bad health.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that was due to lifestyle for the most part, you think you, I know you were, you were working a lot. You were traveling a lot. Was it mostly lifestyle stuff at that point? Do you feel like, was there any, any indication that it was something bigger at that point?

• 4:58Mark Manson?

  So that's what triggered all of this. In 2018, I was working on two books at the same time. Don't recommend that. I was probably 235 pounds, something like that. Stressed out of my mind, drinking three, four Red Bulls a day, eating burritos and pizzas for every meal. And I started having chest pains and I have a history, my family has a history of heart disease. And so I freaked out. I went to a doctor, got all the heart scans, chest scans, all the stuff that they do. And everything came back clear, but doctor sat me down and he was like, by any chance, have you been stressed lately? And I was like, oh, oh God. He was like, how's your sleep been? I'm like, oh God.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  I remember that Mark, you were like, your eyes were, yeah, I remember.

• 5:46Mark Manson?

  I used to do interviews and videos back then, like if you go back and look at videos of me in 2018, people used to comment saying like, are you okay? Dude, you need to sleep. Like, like I had these big black circles under my eyes.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  You were going hard.

• 6:00Mark Manson?

  Anyway, the doctor told me pretty bluntly, you know, and we didn't know a whole lot about my genetics and stuff at that point, but like, he told me, he's like, look, you're overweight, you're unhealthy, you're stressed out of your mind, you're not sleeping. And you have a family history of this stuff. He said, you're a ticking time bomb. Like you should probably figure this stuff out. And so that kind of scared me straight a little bit and I'm not going to lie. There was a little bit of vanity to it as well. I finished my book, Everything is Fucked, a book about hope, end of 2018. It was coming out in spring of 2019. The publisher and CAA booked a world speaking tour for me. I was going to go to 20, do 27 speaking events in like seven different countries.

• 6:44Mark Manson?

  So I knew I was going to be on stage in front of thousands of people and I was like, oh, fuck. Like I need to lose some weight. I like, I'm a mess right now. I'm a total mess. So it was a combination of the vanity and like, I don't want to have a heart attack and die at 42 that I started trying to lose some weight. And initially, as we go through this story, it's like this story happens in a series of, there's like a burst of progress and then there's a plateau that goes for like six or eight months and then change a bunch of things, burst of progress, and then another plateau, burst of progress, another plateau. And it's kind of like four different phases. And in each case, the thing that works in the beginning stops working at a certain point, and then you have to like go a level deeper. And so this first level is just like

• 7:27Mark Manson?

  the classic, okay, stop eating desserts, drink a little bit less and go for runs and start exercising again. And that's what I did. And that got like the first 15 or 20 pounds off. And that got me through the speaking tour and it got me, you know, through that whole book launch and everything. But the lifestyle didn't change, the workload didn't change. Ultimately, like my habits didn't really change. And so I hit a plateau, you know, I 15, 20 pounds, and then I was just stuck. And I'm like, still overweight, still feeling like shit, still not sleeping well. That plateau lasted for probably like six or eight months.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  I want to step back just a little bit, though, too. So this was 2018, 2019.

• 8:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Right. So you're 34, 35 at that time, right?

• 8:12Mark Manson?

  35, yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. But you were saying you gained a lot of weight from 30 to 35.

• 8:16Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  The subtle art came out when you were 31 or two, if I remember right?

• 8:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  You're 32. You've mentioned before that there, you know, you've written about these things.

• 8:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  And like, there is this whole thing, we know what we should do, and we still don't do it. Right?

• 8:31Mark Manson?

  Of course.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  What's the connection there with, you know, the book, the success that you had? You've talked about kind of the aimless nature, or the aimless, kind of wandering you did in that period, too. Was there any connection to your physical health with all of that?

• 8:45Mark Manson?

  So I think this actually gets into like, probably the first really salient psychological point of this, which is that I was delusional. And I think most people who are unhealthy are delusional. Like, I knew I wasn't in shape and I knew I was overweight, but I didn't understand the extent of it and how bad it was. And I deluded myself into believing that it wasn't as bad as I thought it was. So when I look back at that whole period, like, yes, the subtle art of not giving a fuck would say is like, look, you need to give a fuck about a few things and care about them very deeply. And, and, and those things should be like very personal and important. They should pay off in the long run. Health is obviously one of those things. It affects everything else in your life. It, your bodies, you get one body, like,

• 9:29Mark Manson?

  if you fuck it up, that's it. I should have been giving a lot more fucks about my health than I was, but I didn't because, because I was essentially just lying to myself and telling myself it wasn't that bad. Now, part of this too, is like, coming from like, how bad of a health background I came from, the fact that I ate a salad, like twice a week. Yeah. I'm like, well, I'm healthier than I was five years ago. You know, like the fact that I actually went to a gym occasionally with some friends. I'm like, well, I'm exercising. Like, I didn't do that 10 years ago. So in my head, I'm actually, I'm being healthy because my bar was so low and my expectations were so low. So part of it is just like a

• 10:10Mark Manson?

  complete ignorance of what a healthy lifestyle actually looks like. And then part of it is delusion. It's just lying to yourself and being like, eh, it's, it's not that bad. I can have another burger.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, I was shocked, like when I was doing some research for this too, and you go on YouTube or whatever, and people are giving their transformation stories, weight loss stories and everything. And, you know, they'll be severely overweight.

• 10:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Pre-diabetic or diabetic, all sorts of health problems. And a lot of them say, you know, it's, I'm not that unhealthy.

• 10:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  It's insane. It's insane to think about, but I get it. Like when you're in that, of course, you're not going to sit there and think about yourself as being somebody who's that unhealthy, right?

• 10:48Mark Manson?

  Well, and, and I mean, we'll get into this more later, but the bar is so low, especially in the United States, that like, I went to doctors later who ran blood panels. And they're like, well, I've seen worse.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:01Mark Manson?

  And it's like, actually, if you look, if you like, look at like, what a healthy person should be at, a healthy person in his 30s should be at, uh, you know, my panels were terrible. They're, they're like atrocious. So, but we'll, we'll get to that in a minute.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  When you first started out, was there anything that you thought this, this is definitely going to work and it didn't, or vice versa too? Like what, early on in those early stages, what, what did you find was the most successful for you?

• 11:30Mark Manson?

  The one thing that is good about me is that I, I'm able to endure a lot of pain. And so some friends of mine got into CrossFit and I joined a CrossFit gym because I was like, well, if I'm going to work out, I might as well do the hardest workout possible. And I still had this kind of naive notion that the, if you work out extra hard, the results are proportional to how, how hard you push yourself, which is not true at all. So I started going to this CrossFit gym and just like murdering myself multiple times a week, just destroying my body. And then of course, going out and, and having like a four course meal and drinking a bottle of wine and going to an after party and drinking

• 12:12Mark Manson?

  cocktails and fucking sleeping until noon, you know? So like undoing all of the positive work that I was doing at the CrossFit gym. So I think that's a very common newbie mistake that people make is, is, is there like, oh, if I want progress faster, I just have to suffer more quickly. And it's, it, no, it's a consistency thing. It's a, it's a compounding thing over a long period of time.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  No. Yeah. Yeah. I've been doing CrossFit too. And definitely like when I'll intentionally like reduce my weight that I do or reduce the intensity of the workout. Cause I, I know I'm like similar about the consistency. Just show up. That's what I've found.

• 12:49Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 12:50Mark Manson?

  For sure. For sure.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. So what was, that was kind of the first phase. What was the second phase? You kind of got into, or what was the next phase that you found?

• 12:58Mark Manson?

  So we get to like into 2019, I've been trying to lose weight for over a year. I lost 15 pounds in like the first four months and then nothing for the eight months after that. And I was stuck for so long and so frustrated that I, finally I, I was like, I finally had the humility to say, I clearly don't know what I'm doing. And the things that worked in my twenties are not working anymore. So I hired a coach and shout out to Dan Go. He's become a big influencer on the on the interwebs. Dan changed my perspective on a lot of things. The first thing was the consistency thing. He was actually the first person who told me, he's like, you shouldn't be sore after workout. Because if you're sore, that means you don't have energy to work out the next day.

• 13:42Mark Manson?

  Like, it's better to have like light workouts consistently than to go fuck and kill yourself and then just be dead for forty eight hours afterwards. But the big thing that Dan did for me is he got me on tracking. It seemed like such a minor obnoxious thing. I was like, okay, I hired this guy. He's gonna make me like, he's gonna make me do all these apps and shit. Like, it's just, I guess he wants to just make sure I'm doing the thing. I had no fucking clue how big of a deal tracking is. It's a complete game changer, and this is why. The first reason is that it actually allows you to spot your own bullshit. So there were so many times in the past that I would like go to a restaurant or something.

• 14:23Mark Manson?

  I'd order a salad and in my head, I'm like, well, it's a salad, so it's healthy. I didn't think about the ingredients. I didn't think about how it was made. I didn't think about what the dressing, what was in the dressing. I was just like, well, it's a salad and it's grilled chicken like it's healthy. When you actually have to sit down and start tracking every ingredient, you start realizing like, oh, well, that dressing has a shitload of sugar in it. And well, yeah, there's about two cup, there's like a cup of bacon thrown on top. There's two ounces of cheese thrown on top. There's like three eggs in it like, oh, my God, that salad is fucking twelve hundred calories. It is pure calories.

• 15:03Mark Manson?

  And the eye opening way that, you know, between understanding what's in the food and then also understanding situations where, you know, in the past I would lie to myself and be like, you know, I ate light today. I could have a snack or I can go have a dessert or I can go out with some friends and have a couple of drinks. You know, you open that app and you're like, oh, no, I can't. I can't have a snack and I can't go have some drinks.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  That sounds torturous to some people, I imagine.

• 15:32Mark Manson?

  Some people hate it, like, like my wife.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  What is it with the tracking with you that you like so much?

• 15:37Mark Manson?

  I don't like it, but if I were to like list and order the things that had the greatest impact, it was, it was one of the most impactful things for me, just because I am really good at lying to myself. That is something I discovered through this whole process. I am an excellent bullshit artist to myself. Like I can convince myself of fucking anything and, and when that tracker, that tracker doesn't lie, it just stares you back at the face, in the face and is like, nope. Two chocolate brownies are still two chocolate brownies. Like it doesn't matter if they're gluten free, dude, like you're eating a shitload of sugar. It's not, it's one of those things. It's not pleasant, but it is necessary and honest. And it's also, it's a good practice because it, in the process of doing it, it forces you to learn about food.

• 16:22Mark Manson?

  You learn how many calories each type of food has. You learn how much protein is in each, in each cut of meat. You learn which vegetables are super starchy and which ones are not. You start learning like what has sugar in it, what doesn't, which dressings are good, which ones are not. These are all things I know clue, absolutely zero clue, but just through the process of tracking for multiple years, it forced me to. The second thing about tracking is that it, for somebody who's like very competitive or like likes games like me, it helps, it gives you something to try to accomplish or a goal.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  It's gamified kind of, yeah.

• 16:57Mark Manson?

  It's a score you're trying to beat, right?

• 16:59Speaker 01

  So I think you like it. I think, I think that's why you like it. It's a game to you and I think you do actually like it.

• 17:04Mark Manson?

  With the workouts for sure, dude. Like I fucking love, like one of my favorite things is to go into the gym. I did it this morning, go to the gym, look at what I squatted last week and be like, I'm gonna do one more rep than that. It gets me fired up. It really gets me fired up. But again, if you don't track your workouts, you can't really, you can't have that experience. You like, you, you just kind of wander into the gym. You're like, well, I squatted last week. I guess I'll squat this week again too. You know, you don't. There's no framework that you're working within or clear goal that you're you're you're chasing after. So tracking was huge and that had an immediate impact. It unlocked kind of the next, the next jump in progress. I probably lost another fifteen or twenty pounds that year.

• 17:49Mark Manson?

  The pandemic made it easier. It removed a lot of the lifestyle obstacles. But then, you know, jump about six or eight months after that. I kind of got down to a, a, a healthy weight for the first time in probably seven or eight years. And Dan said, okay, this is great. Like, why don't we focus on adding some muscle and not cut, cut the calories so low? Like, you know, eat at maintenance or maybe a slight surplus. And that switch over combined with the pandemic, you know, everything opening up from the pandemic, the lifestyle coming back, the travel coming back, going out, seeing friends, all this stuff. I ended up putting on, putting most of that weight back on.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  And you were living in New York at that time?

• 18:33Mark Manson?

  Yes, I was still in New York. And that weight came back fast, too. Like that, I think I gained like sixteen or seventeen pounds in like three months or something. Like it was.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  That's gotta be just demoralizing.

• 18:46Mark Manson?

  It sucked.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've never had to deal with that. I've been fortunate, I think genetically or whatever. Just never, never had big swings in my weight, but especially after you've worked so hard to put that. And that's a very common thing that people see too.

• 18:58Mark Manson?

  Absolutely. It's like, it's, I, I believe if you look at the data behind the average diet, it's actually negative progress because even people who lose weight, they put more back on afterwards. It was demoralizing. It sucked. It really sucked, but it was, it forced me to confront a couple like really necessary questions. The, the first and biggest one being lifestyle. I had to have some like really hard questions with myself of like, you can't keep going out as much as you're going out. You can't. You can't drink as much as you're drinking. You can't.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Eat whatever the hell you want.

• 19:33Mark Manson?

  Eat whatever the hell you want. Like even if it quote fits your macros, right? Like I started to notice at this point, I've been tracking long enough that I noticed that like sugar fucks me up. Like even if I'm not eating an excess of calories, eating a bunch of sugar, I wake up and I weigh more the next day. Like undoes five days worth of progress. If I go out and eat a bunch of of sugar. Same thing with alcohol, you know, even though my calories are within the right range, I put on weight that week. And so I started to like, just notice some like really basic things about my metabolism, which is that not every calorie is created equal. Like some stuff affects it. There's like, it creates knock on effects or chain reactions within your body.

• 20:17Mark Manson?

  And that you have to, you have to be aware of that stuff. Like you have to pay attention to it. So that coincided with the move to LA and I've talked quite a bit about how having a healthier lifestyle out here is is just so much easier and how much of a game changer that's been. Not going out all the time, not drinking all the time.

• 20:37Mark Manson?

  Had a gym at home, which was amazing. Now I have no excuse to not work out. The lifestyle stuff had to get kind of fixed in that period.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Does having a home gym, is that?

• 20:49Mark Manson?

  Bro.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  You really like that? Really? Cause I've tried that before too. And I've just.

• 20:53Mark Manson?

  Really?

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Like I needed to leave for some reason to work out for some reason. I don't know why.

• 20:57Mark Manson?

  Oh my God, it's a game changer. Cause you, A, you have no excuse. You have zero excuse. Like.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  It's like staring, those weights are staring at you.

• 21:04Mark Manson?

  You know, like it's a busy day. You're sitting around. It's like 7:00 PM after dinner. You're like, ah, I didn't work out today, but I don't want to get in the car and drive down there and all this stuff. Like you can kind of talk yourself out of it. When you have a home gym, you, there's no excuse.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:18Mark Manson?

  It's like, dude, it's right there. Like get your shit together.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  I do notice that if I don't get my workout in like by midday, it's a, it's a real struggle.

• 21:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's like, go pick up the weight.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:28Mark Manson?

  You know, I also like it too, because it's, sometimes I'll just like walk by and I'm like, I wonder how many pull ups I can do.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Just do, just pump out a couple of quick curls. Yeah.

• 21:36Mark Manson?

  Totally. I totally do that. I totally do that. I don't know. Like I would just like, I'll literally be walking through my house and I'm like.

• 21:44Mark Manson?

  Let's, let's do some goblet squats. Let's just see how many, let's see if I can do 15.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Okay. So, so environmental setup, that's like a really big one. Dude, that's a big one for everybody.

• 21:53Mark Manson?

  Environment matters so fucking much. And this, like, we talk about this a lot, you know, in the pod and the books and everything. Like, we like to think that it's about willpower, it's about discipline, it's about staying fucking hard. Dude, environment, it's such a huge factor.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:12Mark Manson?

  The place you put yourself in, the things that are in your house, the people you surround yourself with, it has as big of an effect as, as anything else you do.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:23Mark Manson?

  Honestly, getting out of New York was like, just, I think it was crucial for me because so much of my personality is just, I want to do the things, right? And when you put me in an environment where the things to do or involves consuming stuff, I'm going to go consume the stuff, right? Whereas like, here, I'm in an environment where the, the things to do are all very physical and healthy and outdoorsy and, you know, the people you're hanging out with are super healthy and it's, um, the, the peer pressure is, is positive.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Does the environment change the motivation too? Now, you, you said when you started out, the motivation was really kind of your vanity. I want to lose weight, I want to look better, that kind of thing. How has your motivation changed, um, over those periods? Does the environment influence that a lot too, do you think? Have you found less superficial motivation, I guess?

• 23:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  And does that, how much does that matter for you?

• 23:15Mark Manson?

  I think the environment has made it more fun. I, I tend to associate exercise today more with just being enjoyable.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:23Mark Manson?

  And I, I think part of that is just doing it long enough to, to like see benefits and get the satisfaction and know how good my body feels when I do it. But part of it is like, I'm in an environment where like, dude, like half, half my friends out here, the thing we do for fun is hike, surf, or go to the gym. Go for a run. Like, those are like the things you do with your friends here.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Saunas and all that, yeah.

• 23:44Mark Manson?

  Saunas, cold plunges, all that shit. And it's, um, so yeah, I mean, it's the old fire together, wire together. Like, you start associating.

• 23:53Mark Manson?

  Physically strenuous activities with fun, like socially rewarding, entertaining, enjoyable things. At this stage, it was just very much like physically, I am starting to feel better than I felt in a long, long time. You know, I was still overweight. I was still technically kind of weak and out of shape, but like at least I wasn't obese. I wasn't just like this, this exhausted fat kid that I, that I had been for the previous few years. And so, yeah, the lifestyle stuff was, was a game changer. But it's funny because that really, you know, that undid some of the weight gain. But at this point, you know, we're probably what, early 2022. I've been working with Dan for like two years. You just moved to LA.

• 24:35Mark Manson?

  Moved to LA like six months. I mean, and I, at this point, I've been doing everything. I've cut way back on alcohol. I hadn't quit entirely yet, but cut way back on alcohol. I'm eating right. I'm tracking everything. I'm exercising like four or five times a week. I'm sleeping really well. I'm not working like a crazy person anymore. And technically, I'm still kind of in the same spot I was a year, year and a half before. And it just, it started to feel like it just, it felt like I constantly had a headwind. And by this point too, I had had other friends who lost a bunch of weight or tried to get in shape. And you watch it, them doing, they do it in like six months. Right. And you're like, well, what the fuck? Like, why is it so easy for him? Like, how did that,

• 25:20Mark Manson?

  you know, Dan starts posting other clients of his, like, oh, so and so lost 40 pounds in eight months and like so proud of it. I'm like, well, fuck that person. Like, what am I doing? I'm doing everything. I'm literally doing everything. And it was at that point that he was like, hey, man, you should go, you should go get like real blood work done. Like, not this bullshit, you know, basic labs at a, at a doctor. They'll just look at it and be like, well, you're not diabetic and you're not dying. So you're fine. Like, go find somebody really good. And so at that point, I went and found a functional medicine doctor. And for the people who don't know, functional medicine is like, it's more, it's more integrative, it's more holistic. They, and they, they look at the body more as like a system, and it's more about optimization of

• 26:03Mark Manson?

  health rather than just like, well, you're not going to die. So, you know, it's, normal medicine is preventative. It's like,

• 26:12Mark Manson?

  You come in when you are about to have a heart attack and then that's when they treat you whereas like functional medicine, it's more like, let's do the things that will make sure you never have a heart attack in the first place. So I went to a functional medicine doctor, did this massive set of blood work, results come back and the doctor, I remember I sat down in front of her at her desk and she like held up the results and she, it had my birthday in like the top right corner and I remember she covered the birthday and she was like, she was like, how old are you? And I said, I'm 37 and she said, if these results did not have your birthday on it, I would guess that you were 60. Shit.

• 26:54Mark Manson?

  No subtlety there, huh? No, and I was like, okay. And she was like, you, your hormone profile is that of like a 60 year old man, like a healthy 60 year old man, but you're 37, so this is not healthy. Right. Um, my testosterone was like 290, the free testosterone was like five, five and a half. What should the range has been for you at that point? The bottom, so like an elderly man should be around three to 400. Okay. And you were below that. I was below that. Yeah. Like a man in his 30s should be like five, 600 probably, like double what I was. I was technically prediabetic, my A1C was like just over the line. She was like, technically you're prediabetic. And this is after I'd lost like 20, 30 pounds, right? And I was exercising and I was eating well.

• 27:39Mark Manson?

  So I was just like, Jesus Christ, man. What, like, what did I do? What did I do? Come to find out, I mean, I've, I've since found out, there's, there's, there's two contributors to this. One is just the lifetime of eating garbage, horrible lifestyle. The second one is that I, I'm, I have a couple genetic, I, I just have shit genetics. Like, so I have a thing called hemochromatosis, which means that my, my blood accumulates a ton of iron. That runs in my family too, actually. Yeah, it's a Scottish Irish thing. Yeah. Um, and if it goes unchecked, like it can cause significant cardiovascular problems, it can cause metabolic problems.

• 28:23Mark Manson?

  So like my iron levels were like two and a half times the upper limit of what you're supposed to have, which you basically just think about it, it just makes your blood super thick and uh, Causes a bunch of issues. Really shouldn't drink with that either, too.

• 28:39Mark Manson?

  Oops.

• 28:41Mark Manson?

  And the other thing I have is it's a thing called the the double E four gene, which I didn't even know about this. I read Peter Attia's book. Maybe one day he'll come on the pod. Apparently Chris Hemsworth has it, but it was really funny. I was reading Peter Attia's book and he was talking about, he was like, you know, there's an E four gene and it it increases the likelihood of Alzheimer's by like 400%. And also leads to insulin resistance and you're more likely to be diabetic and prediabetic and accumulate fat and have trouble losing it. And then he was like, and then there's like a very rare subset of people who have a double E four gene, which means both their parents have an E four gene and you just got fucked in the genetic lottery. And he was like, oh, these people like 600 times more likely to get Alzheimer's and your metabolism's super. Anyway,

• 29:27Mark Manson?

  long story short, I have the double E four gene and Attia says in his book, he's like, if you have this, you really need to start intervening in your early 40s. Yeah. Like this is a all hands on deck type of situation. So I'm discovering this stuff at like 37, 38. So I've got this, I've got this blood condition, this genetic blood condition that like is working against me. I've got this fucked up gene that's working, working against me and I've had an entire lifetime of awful habits. And I have heart disease that runs in the family. So like, I'm sitting there and I'm realizing that if I had just kind of continued at my previous trajectory, I'd probably be dead at like 50, 55, like that. That was probably

• 30:10Mark Manson?

  if I had just not changed course at all. So it was first realization. That scared the shit out of me. Second realization was that this is non-negotiable now. Like I'm late 30s, about to hit 40. I've got all these genetics working against me. I've got an entire lifetime of bad lifestyle choices working against me. Like this is not, there are no options. Like there's the margin for error. I have a much smaller margin for error than most people do. And so.

• 30:38Mark Manson?

  I I decided to kind of go all in on the health thing.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  You know, you keep hitting these plateaus and it seems like each one is a little bit rougher.

• 30:45Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Than the previous one. And I think that's really hard for people to get through. I think people, they'll give up at one of those or whatever it is. You seem to have pushed through in a number of cases. You also have access, you know, like functional medicine and stuff like that, although that's becoming more accessible for people to online. You get these online panels done, uh, send, you know, they send you a tube, you put some blood in it, send it off. But that is, again, it's just demoralizing. I think when you hit those plateaus, and especially in this case where it's like you're working out four or five times a week, you're eating right. You're still not getting that off. What? Go into that. That's how do you, how do you?

• 31:21Mark Manson?

  Dude.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  How do you address that?

• 31:22Mark Manson?

  I mean, there was a lot of periods of like anger, so much frustration. And it gets weird too. You like start getting gaslit by, by your own body, right? Because it's like, you know, Dan would have me do DEXA scans every six months and then we would set goals, right? It's like, okay, hey, your next DEXA scan, we're going, we're going to try to lose like, you know, six or seven pounds of fat and maybe put on a pound of muscle or something like that. And, uh, and I'd go and it's like, I would make progress, but it'd be barely any progress. And I, and I was just like, what am I fucking up? And then to come back to lying to yourself thing, am I bullshitting myself? Like, I think I'm doing everything right.

• 32:05Mark Manson?

  Like, am I just fucking, am I still lying? Like, three years into this?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  You did it once.

• 32:10Mark Manson?

  Am I still lying to myself about all this stuff? Like, how? How is this not working? How, how is this not progressing? And I think a lot of people, they hit that plateau, they hit that point. And it gets hard, it gets tiring, they feel defeated. And I imagine, I think at that moment, it's really important, like what story you tell yourself. And I really think this is, this is where the value of the coach comes in, right? Because if I had been alone, I'd probably be like, well.

• 32:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I tried. It just didn't work. That that didn't work. Maybe I go do another, try another thing another, you know, a year from now. The coach has the perspective to say like, wait a second, you're doing a lot of the right things. Like, let's look at something else. Like, don't give up yet. Right? It things, it's more complicated than this. I was very fortunate in that fact. I mean, kind of an unspoken thing through all of this, you mentioned it is access, right? Like, none of this stuff is cheap. None of you, a gym membership is not cheap, much less buying healthy food is not cheap. There's all sorts of data on like how healthy food costs like three times as much as junk food. Healthy food's not cheap. A trainer or

• 33:22Mark Manson?

  a coach is not cheap. Getting lab work done is not cheap, especially if your insurance blows, like everybody in the US does. A functional medicine doctor is definitely not cheap. You know, and then even once you figure that shit out and you you work with that doctor, like, the stuff that that doctor prescribes is not going to be covered by your insurance. So you're paying out of pocket. So that's not cheap. I mean, it's like, I'm not gonna lie, I probably spent north of definitely tens of thousands. Yeah, easily tens of thousands over the last five years on this. And that's not available to everybody. And that's fucked up. It should be. Right? Right? So I, I don't know what to say about that. But I do want

• 34:06Mark Manson?

  to be transparent about that. That this is like, definitely, a big part of this process is privileged.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Well, and there's such a, there's also a, we wage moral judgments against people a lot, you know, for their weight or whatever it is. And I think the more I learn about this, and I think you would agree with this, too, the more I learn about it, the more I realize how much genetics plays a role, and how much we just can't, there's a floor and a ceiling to all of this. How do you think about that now? How do you think about approaching something that's, you know, genetically based now?

• 34:37Mark Manson?

  It's definitely given me a lot more sympathy for people. Right? Because it's, you realize not, not everybody's starting at the same starting line. Definitely. Like, there and it's also, it works the other way. Right? Like, I remember reading stories that Like there was a story about Allen Iverson, who like, when he went to the NBA, they put him through a physical. This dude didn't practice, never trained. Notoriously, yeah. And then like they put him in this, in the physical and part of that was like a VO2 max test. They put him on a treadmill with an incline. They speed the treadmill up, see how, see how long he can go. They said that he went for so long that they didn't actually like, they ran out of measurements. Like he, he literally broke the test because he just ran on the treadmill for so long.

• 35:19Mark Manson?

  And then he came off and like the doctors like asked him, they're like, are you, you know, do you run marathons or something? And he's like, marathon? He's like, fuck that shit. You know, like, literally like just went back to the club, started drinking again, you know? So it's like some guys, you know, the same way some people win the talent lottery, some people win the intelligence lottery, some people very physically attractive, some people, some people are born with a great metabolism. Very athletic, a lot of natural strength. Other people get completely hosed in, in terms of like, you know, biological functioning and everything. So it's definitely changed my view on that. I mean, the other thing it's given me sympathy for is that there is like a little bit of a feedback process, right? Like,

• 36:05Mark Manson?

  one of the things I learned is that when you become extremely overweight, like there's a feedback loop that starts, like as you put on body fat, you, you gain something called visceral adipose tissue. That squeezes your internal organs. It makes them function less efficiently. That has, creates like a hormonal cascade. So your hormones get worse. Your organs are less efficient, which then causes you to feel less energetic, causes you to feel hungry more often. So you eat even more food, which causes you to gain more body weight, which causes your, your metabolism and your, your different organ functions to function even worse after that. And you get caught in this cycle and like working against that cycle is extremely difficult.

• 36:50Mark Manson?

  So like, I discovered that I had something called insulin resistance, which is like, my body doesn't produce.

• 36:58Mark Manson?

  Insulin in the the capacity that it needs to. Like if I eat a bunch of sugar or something like that sugar spike will last in my body much longer than it'll last in somebody else's and it's just because I've eaten so much garbage over so many decades that it I like broke that part of my my metabolism. And it is unfortunate that we have a tendency to judge skinny or fat people purely based on like it being a a flaw of discipline or a flaw of willpower. I would compare it more to an addiction like it's.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 37:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's um, it's it's akin to, I don't know if I want to call it akin to alcoholism. But yeah, it's more of an addiction. And I've noticed myself like I am, I have a lot of compulsive eating habits that again, I was not aware of until I actually tried to like stop to attract everything and tried to stop. I was like, it's like, yeah, I only had, I only had six chocolates, right? And I like start counting. I'm like, oh, fuck, I had 14. Oh, God, how did that happen? Like, how the fuck? I literally don't remember eating the other eight chocolates.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  You put sugar in front of me.

• 38:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's like.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  What were you triggered for that? That was like boredom. I know boredom is one for a lot of people.

• 38:14Mark Manson?

  For sure.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:15Mark Manson?

  Boredom and anxiety were the big ones.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:18Mark Manson?

  I ate when I was bored and I ate when I was uncomfortable. It was like something that kind of passed time. I also drank when I was uncomfortable, bored or uncomfortable.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, okay, what are you doing now? What are some of your health goals now? How are you approaching that? How do you see this whole process at this point?

• 38:34Mark Manson?

  I'm optimizing for longevity. So right now I'm actually trying to add some strength and muscle. I'm in, I'm officially in my 40s. So I think that's probably going to be the the biggest long term payoff.

• 38:48Mark Manson?

  But it's also just, you know, so it at this point, it's it's adding a certain amount of muscle while maintaining a healthy body composition. I have no aspirations. I don't want to like, I don't need to have abs. I don't need to be fucking jacked, you know, not like trying to win a bodybuilding competition or anything. It's just like, I just want to be healthy and active and fit. And set up my body in a place that it it feels relatively optimal to for the long haul.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you talked about the kind of the vicious cycle of the other way. Do you feel like you've kind of entered into a virtuous cycle now where, you know, you skip a workout and you feel it and you're like, oh, I really need to get back out there. Yeah.

• 39:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah, for sure. You get hooked on the on the good feelings. It's a different good feeling, but the same way you get hooked on the good feelings of like, I don't know, having a drink or eating, you know, a really good meal, a big meal. You get you get hooked on the feelings of of exercise, being outside, eating super clean. You know, it's like now, now if I go out and have like a burger and fries, I'll enjoy it. But like an hour or two later, I'm like, oh, man, I need I need some vegetables. Yeah, my body like my can feel my body like craving the the nutritional value. So there is another spiral on the other side, but it's hard. Like, the compulsive thing, like, you know, I still I still run into it. I still like, like, we went to a Brazilian Steak

• 40:12Mark Manson?

  House last night. Man, I crushed so much fucking steak, so fried bananas. Oh, man, I was like, I was going crazy. I was like, man, I I need to chill. Like, I finally hit a point. I'm like, cut me off. Like, just don't let me go anymore. It requires vigilance still, but it's, I don't know. I I personally, I look back on this period, and I just think it's it's interesting having gone through this process and then like turning around and looking at all the same health and fitness stuff that I saw in the beginning. Like, in the beginning, I guess if I were to like summarize how my perspective has changed, it's not about a diet. It's not about a fitness regimen. It's not. There's no workout on online that's gonna.

• 40:56Mark Manson?

  Solve this shit. It's about habits, lifestyle, environment and biology. And it's a lot of, a lot of it is understanding your own biology and adapting to your own biology. It's also psychology, understanding your own psychology, understanding that like, yeah, when I get angry, I soothe myself with ice cream, you know, it's like, break that link, like sever that tie that you have in your brain. We all, I think most people have some sort of link in their brain between an unhealthy consumption habit and an emotion that they're trying to avoid in some way.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  And that's, I think that's one, a good reason why you don't give a whole lot of specific advice around this because it's different for everybody, right? And, and what you do isn't going to work for everybody. And I've found that with myself too.

• 41:39Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Like I have very specific things I need to do that probably wouldn't work for anyone else.

• 41:43Mark Manson?

  Absolutely. And honestly, like, I mean, the actual workouts themselves, like almost don't even.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 41:49Mark Manson?

  You know, it's showing up. Just do something.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:52Mark Manson?

  Just fucking be active.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:53Mark Manson?

  Like, that's really the, the 20 to drives 80% of it, even if it's just going for walks, like walking was a huge part of.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, getting your steps in.

• 42:01Mark Manson?

  No, yeah, like steps was a huge part of it as well. But, um, you know, on the food side, yeah, it's about learning yourself. It's about learning your tendencies and habits, what keeps you sane, what sort of patterns your body falls into, how you respond to certain foods. And you really don't learn that unless you're like tracking, keeping some sort of food journal, setting goals and metrics and like tracking them over time. And, you know, measuring yourself.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, Mark, you're looking good. You've got tons of energy.

• 42:31Mark Manson?

  Thanks, buddy.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's been, it's been really, really fun to watch you go through this.

• 42:36Mark Manson?

  And yeah.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Even when it wasn't fun for you, maybe, I don't know. Yeah.

• 42:39Mark Manson?

  I'm glad you liked it. Uh, yeah, it's been wild, man. It's been a wild ride, so.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Well, that's all I got.

• 42:47Mark Manson?

  Yep, there it is. Drew Burney in the flesh, in the studio. Obviously be sure to like and subscribe to the show. Uh, we are going to be back next week with a new podcast guest, so stick around.