A Lesson from Ethan Suplee: The Core Pillar of a Body Transformation
Happy Monday!
Today at a glance:
A powerful insight about making permanent change inspired by one of the most successful body transformations.
Losing 20 pounds is cool.
It takes effort, and it can make you look like a completely different person.
But it’s not a real body transformation on the scale of people who lose 100 pounds.
And then there are the outliers who lose over 200 pounds AND manage to keep it off.
This is incredibly rare — especially the “keeping it off” part.
Permanent fat loss is difficult (for reasons discussed in this issue), and the rebound rate is high.
There’s a lot to be learned from someone who pulls off one of these epic transformations and sustains the results.
So let’s look at a case study of exactly that.
You probably recognize Ethan Suplee from movies dating back to the early 2000s — notably “Remembering The Titans (I recently watched this — great film)” and “The Butterfly Effect.”
What stands out most about Ethan from these periods is that he’s massive. He got up to 500 pounds at his heaviest.
And here’s Ethan now.
The cool thing about Ethan’s transformation is that the core of it doesn’t lie in cardio routines, diets, or even weight training programs.
The core of his transformation, and why it seems to be an authentic, permanent transformation, is that he made an identity transformation.
Ethan frequently posts that he “killed his clone today.”
There are a bunch of interesting insights to derive from Ethan’s story.
The best podcast I’ve heard about it is this one — it’s worth a listen if you’re interested in long-term health strategies.
But the insight I want to focus on is the mindset behind killing his clone, because I believe this is where the gold is.
Becoming a New Person
The podcast I linked is Ethan’s appearance on Beauty and the Geek, a podcast created by Layne Norton and his wife Holly Baxter.
Layne Norton is one of the most reasonable and reliable voices in health and fitness despite his combative nature on the internet.
Layne has a PhD in nutrition along with being an accomplished powerlifter, bodybuilder, and coach. He’s coached hundreds of people.
During the conversation, Layne describes one thing in common he’s seen in virtually every successful client transformation (successful = sustained).
These people had to create a new identity.
They didn’t simply “get in shape.”
They became fit people.
There is a subtle and crucial difference between those 2 concepts.
The first implies that somebody stays mostly the same and just “gets in shape.”
The second one is deeper — it means that these people had to completely rebuild their values, habits, environments, behaviors, and mindsets.
They changed their identities, and the body transformation is just a repercussion of this foundational change.
The only way to create a permanent transformation is to transform at the level of identity.
Temporary changes in habits and the ability to endure a diet don’t last. If you want to become fit for life, you need to create an identity around someone who consistently does the things that result in staying fit for life.
This is a harder and more nuanced issue to approach than “how to lose 10 pounds” or “get a 6-pack for summer. “
It can take years, even decades (Ethan’s transformation journey took ~20 years in all).
But here’s a good place to start:
Start by killing your clone.
This is effective because it taps into a fundamental aspect of reality:
It’s easier to define the negative than the positive.
This concept is relevant for many purposes:
You increase productivity by focusing on what not to do.
You increase your authenticity by avoiding things that feel inauthentic and dishonest.
You become happier by cutting out the things that make you unhappy.
And you’ll become fit by identifying the suite of habits and behaviors that prevent you from being fit, bundling them up into a coherent identity, and destroying that identity.
Via Negativa
When faced with the difficulty of describing God with the limited tool of language, The 5th-century Greek author Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite came up with the term “Via-Negativa” - the idea that God is better described through the negative than through affirmations.
Or as the 12th-century Philosopher Priest Thomas Aquinas put it in his “Summae Theologiae”:
We cannot know what God is, only what he is not.
I was introduced to Via Negativa in Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
He brought it up to demonstrate the universal principle that dissaffirmations are more robust than affirmations.
Take Science as an example.
You can have hundreds of studies that seem to successfully support a hypothesis.
You could use these to say the hypothesis is “true.”
But it only takes one study, assuming it’s well-designed and devoid of error, to undisputedly disprove the hypothesis and declare it insufficient.
You can have thousands of experiments that passed — but you only need one good experiment to fail to disprove the theory.
This asymmetry is at the heart of the claim that “negative knowledge is more robust than positive knowledge.”
We will always be more sure about what we know doesn’t work.
What isn’t ideal.
Just as ancient theologians struggled to define God, we might struggle to define the ideal version of ourselves.
What would it look like to live at the peak of your potential?
To be the healthiest, most engaged, productive, and focused version of you?
There’s infinite possibility there which makes it hard to articulate.
So we turn to the anti-vision and exploit the asymmetric convenience of articulating the negative.
What does behaving like a piece of shit look like?
Much easier.
You know this one.
The first step in genuine self-improvement and building a new identity is to articulate the aspects of your current identity that are not serving you.
You have to know your clone before you can kill your clone.
Start here:
Write down 3 things you’re currently doing that your best self wouldn’t do. 3 bad habits.
Do you drink too much?
Order in crap food?
Skip your workouts?
Are you mailing in your performance at work or in your family?
Are you watching more than 8 hours of TV per week?
I’m sure you can find a few.
You begin to define the best version of yourself by picking the things that the best version of yourself doesn’t do.
From there, you can move on to positive things:
Pick 3 habits you’re currently not doing that the ideal version of yourself would do.
Get up without hitting the snooze
Do something creative for 1 hour per day
Exercise 5x per week
Grand Rising
When you think of a Phoenix, you may think Fawkes, Dumbledore’s Phoenix from Harry Potter who comes in clutch by bringing Harry the sorting hat when he’s fighting the Basilisk in The Chamber of Secrets.
But J.K. Rowling did not invent the Phoenix.
It’s an ancient Greek legend of a mythical bird that rises from the ashes.
Embedded in the legend of the Phoenix is a fundamental truth humans have been aware of for millennia:
You can’t just change.
You rebuild from the ashes.
You need to destroy that which is holding you back.
You need to kill your clone.
First, you need to know your clone.
This is easier than personifying your ideal due to the asymmetry of the negative.
Identify some key defining habits and actions that do not serve you.
Then you need to kill your clone: stop doing these habits.
Start small, just pick one or two things to stop doing if you have to.
From here, you can work on replacing these actions that have been holding you back with actions that build you up.
And a new identity will rise from the ashes.
This is what permanent change looks like.
You need to destroy your clone.
I have two 1-1 coaching spots open for January.
If you’re tired of repeating the same habits and false starts, reply to this email with subject “Transform” and we can chat about an ideal strategy for you.
See you next time,
Colin