How Fitness Almost Destroyed My Mental Health

A true story (with a happy ending)

As promised last week, this is my full story about my challenging relationship with fitness.

It feels a bit self-indulgent to write so much about myself, but I need to put it out there. I need to be honest.

It’s cool with me if no one reads it, I had to just get it off my chest.

Articulating it has been beneficial for my own understanding.

If you do read it, I hope you’ll find some valuable lessons and insights.

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Food reward value is a scientific term for how much somebody enjoys eating and is motivated to seek out food.

Many researchers consider it to be a significant cause of obesity.

Food reward is a simple concept:

Some people may think they want ice cream, but can’t be bothered to get up off the couch to get it.

Others would walk 10 miles each way in a blizzard while wearing Crocs to get ice cream if that’s what it took.

I am “others.”

I’ve had a high food reward value since I was a kid.

But for most of my life, I didn’t see it as a problem.

I’ve only ever been chubby — never obese.

As late as my mid-twenties, I’d display eating habits that I find shocking now but didn’t stand out to me as a problem at the time.

I remember having a movie night with my roommates and getting a whole pint of ice cream and a large bag of kettle chips.

I ate all of it (~2200 calories).

I consider this borderline disordered eating now, but at the time, I called it “snacks.”

Even though I didn’t see it as a problem until more recently, I’ve had a strong emotional connection to food for most of my life.

My emotional eating habit goes back to high school.

I put tremendous value on my social life, and I’d be stressed and unhappy if a Friday or Saturday night rolled around and I didn’t have plans.

My self-worth was connected to how much people wanted to hang out with me.

I wouldn’t exactly say I was popular in high school, but I did have a lot of friends. I usually had plans on the weekends.

But if a Friday or Saturday night did come around and I had nothing to do, I’d console myself with eating and watching TV.

This combination became a powerful learned behavior to mediate negative emotions, and it hasn’t gone away.

But despite these destructive eating habits, I never perceived them as a problem.

I was happy enough to exist on the border between chubby and skinny fat while eating anything I wanted.

This changed for the first time in my final year of high school.

My Fitness Journey: The Beginning

I’ve been passionate about fitness and training continuously for about five years now, but I’ve had two previous stints with it.

The first one was late in high school.

I managed to lose over 20 pounds in Grade 12, motivated by a spring break trip to the Dominican Republic (400 high school grads in the same resort — this trip was an absolute gong show).

I stayed reasonably fit for a couple of years after this but regained weight when I went to college for music.

Music consumed my life for two and a half years, and fitness was left behind.

Music school was an amazing experience, but I ended up in my worst physical shape at this time.

My second fitness phase was when I broke up with my girlfriend of 3.5 years, graduated college, and signed up to play guitar on cruise ships for a year.

Nothing like being single to motivate a guy to get in the gym, am I right?

I only worked for a few hours each night on the ships, so I had plenty of time to work out during the day.

I made better progress this time.

In high school, I never figured out that I’d have to eat more to get stronger (duh).

I put this piece of the puzzle together on the ships.

I had unlimited access to food, ate a ton, and got decently jacked.

But my training was still stupid, and a few injuries got in my way.

Since guitar was my main focus, my training took the back seat again while I focused on recovery (mild tendonitis and a shoulder tweak).

For the next few years, I dabbled with exercise enough to not become fat, but I never committed to a program.

Entering my mid-twenties, I wasn’t in great shape.

I was soft, and my eating habits sucked.

I was “skinny fat..”

Phase 2: Yelling at my computer (aka “coding”)

At 26, I made a significant life transition — I switched gears from the full-time musician lifestyle, learned how to code, and started a job as a web developer.

The music lifestyle wasn’t working for me, and starting an online business (or any type of business) wasn’t on my radar then.

Learning how to code honestly seemed like the best viable option.

My career transition was existential.

For the past decade, I was a guitarist.

I entered a phase of self-discovery and personal growth, and with a predictable schedule and consistent income, I had a newfound bandwidth for hobbies.

With my past experience dabbling with fitness, taking my health more seriously was the obvious choice for an extracurricular activity.

I became intrigued by functional fitness: I’d just discovered Aubrey Marcus, Jocko Willink, and Joe Rogan, and was into the idea of swinging kettlebells and flipping tires.

I found a gym in Vancouver that focused on this type of training, and I got hooked.

I signed up for the fitness classes they offered and started dabbling with powerlifting and body-building style training as well.

My previous training experience provided me with a foundation, and I made significant progress this time around.

Overall, this was a profoundly inspiring period.

I was focused on learning and improving; My main goal was to push myself and improve at certain movements — I didn’t focus too much on my physique.

But then that changed, and this is where my problems began.

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

When I was a musician, I was living in a house with seven other roommates.

It was a “music house” — that meant that there was a drum set in the living room and that inviting friends over to jam or rehearse for a gig was perfectly acceptable etiquette.

It also meant that bringing home a girl at 2:00 am on a Tuesday night, blasting Mötley Crue, and having obnoxious sex was also acceptable etiquette.

I knew I had to get out of there when my next-door roommate pulled that exact move.

This was no place for someone focused on a new career.

The only friend I had who was looking for a roommate had a temporary situation — his lease was ending at the end of January (I realized I had to move in August).

When I was there, I hatched this cool idea: I could fuck off to Mexico to try the whole “remote work” thing when the lease was up.

The company I worked for at the time was distributed (yeah, I’ve been working from home since before Covid), and my boss was cool with me going to Mexico for a few months.

I pulled the trigger and booked an Air BnB in Puerto Vallarta.

And I decided that I wanted to look good.

Real good.

I was 27, had ended a year-and-a-half-long relationship a few months earlier (is this a pattern?), and honestly, the thought of a somewhat debaucherous lifestyle was appealing to me.

For the first time, I decided to get shredded.

My training IQ was still very low at this point, so I proceeded to follow a very dumb plan:

I “bulked” for a month (not nearly enough time) and then “cut” for a month.

Idiotic.

But because I had been pushing myself hard over the past few months and had my previous experience with training as a foundation, I looked decent as I flew off to Puerto Vallarta.

My image of Puerto Vallarta looked like this:

I’d join the coworking place full of people in their twenties and thirties, become part of a thriving community of digital nomads, and spend evenings and weekends partying, surfing, and exploring the jungle.

My reality of Puerto Vallarta was a bit different:

The coworking space was mostly populated by middle-aged ex-pats who had families.

There were a few people there I hung out with, but my “thriving community” was nowhere to be found.

I had a bit of success on Tinder ( via Google Translate) and dated a couple of women who barely spoke English, but overall, I was lonely.

The habit I created in high school of using food to deal with loneliness resurfaced.

But this time there was a new sinister element: guilt and shame.

Before I had any goal to look a certain way, my emotional eating, although far from ideal, never poisoned my mental health.

But now things were different.

If I went out to the Malecón boardwalk to peruse the dessert options, I felt a feeling of self-betrayal and guilt because I was acting out of alignment with my goals.

I’d feel bad, use food to try to make myself feel better, hate myself for it, and then work out obsessively to try to “burn it off.”

They say you can’t out-train a bad diet.

This isn’t technically true — you actually can.

It is possible to go through cycles of binge eating and then spend hours doing cardio and killing yourself in the gym to try to burn it off.

It can be done — it’s just that it will consume your life and poison your mental health.

My experience in Puerto Vallarta set the stage for a toxic cycle that I’m ashamed to admit would last for the next several years:

I’d cycle between being super on point with everything - diet and training, habits.

And then I’d have a bad day that could be triggered by anything, and I’d use food to deal with it. I’d eat way too much, hate myself, and then punish myself by doing sprints, cardio, and excessive workouts.

I ended up coming back from Mexico a bit earlier than I had planned, and I continued pursuing my passion for fitness.

Progress with lifting got interrupted by a few Covid gym closures, but I did learn a lot and grow over the next couple of years.

I explored running, and bodyweight training, and I picked up some certifications from the ISSA because I loved the idea of starting to coach people.

I learned how to track my macros and could better calculate my weight loss.

But the toxic eating habit created in Mexico persisted.

And even with tracking what I ate, the same sort of bullshit would come up.

I wanted to get some good photos for the fitness brand and business I wanted to start, but I got stuck always wanting to be “just a little bit leaner.”

This meant I would put off “starting” perpetually until I felt lean enough to get photos.

But my bad habits caused me to keep sabotaging my progress with cheat days (that turned into cheat weeks), so I constantly pushed the dates back. It was a pathetic cycle.

Finally, I called myself out on my bullshit. I saw this for the neverending cycle it was turning into, so I booked the damn shoot for four months ahead when I had about 20 ish pounds I wanted to lose.

First Fitness Photoshoot

I did my first and only (to date) fitness photo shoot on July 16th, 2022.

On the surface, you could call it a success.

I did get to the leanest I’d ever been, and I got a handful of shots that I’ve been able to use for fitness content.

But it was my first time getting incredibly lean, and I made a couple of key mistakes:

#1. I shouldn’t have doubled down

About 4-5 weeks out from the shoot, I was in a fantastic spot.

Progress photo from that time (no pump) - never really intended on sharing. Smile is genuine!

Lean and with great definition, plus I was still strong and feeling good.

I had a choice to make at this point:

Do I maintain or even increase my calories slightly and go for a full, stronger look?

Or do I find another level and go for the even more shredded look?

In hindsight, the former would have been the smarter choice.

But I went for the latter.

Since I’m not a huge guy, I figured my best shot at a decent product would be to maximize my ab definition and go for the “fitness model” look.

So I found another level for the diet, and my rate of loss was too rapid that final month.

I was doing an insane amount of cardio, and I felt miserable and depleted.

There were days when I could barely summon the energy to walk to the gym.

#2. Not enough fat

The other big mistake I made was that my dietary fat was too low.

Testosterone will always take a hit during a diet, but it's worse if you deprive yourself of fat.

I was eating too many protein pancakes and not getting nearly enough dietary fat.

Between these two mistakes, when the photo shoot came around, I was a shell of a human being who could think of nothing other than what I would eat when it was over.

My wife (girlfriend at the time) was brought to tears at one point.

I was not myself.

I should have managed the post-shoot phase a lot better.

My training IQ was significantly higher at this point — I knew all about reverse dieting: slowly adding calories after a cut.

I knew exactly how dangerous it was to let the post-diet eating get out of control.

But despite my knowledge, it happened.

If you’ve never gone to an extreme point with a diet, all I can say is that it is impossible to appreciate how strong the emotional pull to eat will be.

It’s also easy to underestimate just how quickly you’ll gain weight back.

The first few days after the shoot were fine — in fact, they were euphoric.

The evening after the shoot, I had some beer, homemade peanut butter cups (we’d been saving them) and then went for all-you-can-eat sushi with my partner and my brother.

I literally felt high the next day.

I was in a state of full-body euphoria that I hadn’t ever felt before (or since).

But then the 3-day window I’d given myself to eat liberally became 5 days…

And then, there was a work trip to Montreal, and there were so many tempting Montreal delicacies like bagels, crepes, and poutine (a Canadian dish of fries, cheese, and gravy).

And then, a week after that, my wife and I had an all-inclusive trip planned for Mexico, aka all-you-can-eat desserts and all-you-can-drink Dos Equis…

And the next thing I knew, I felt fat again.

It happened so fast.

But there was no way I could do another diet — I didn’t have it in me.

I couldn’t even entertain the thought of dieting.

And then the same thoughts started creeping back again:

“I can’t start talking about health & fitness until I’m leaner…”

But I said fuck it.

I recognized that for what it was, a cycle of toxic self-sabotage that would never subside.

So despite carrying significantly more fat than in my photos, I started my personal brand online, mainly focused on X and Medium.com (I’ve since paused on Medium).

I returned from Mexico and started my first content creation cohort (which marked the real start of my online journey) just over a year ago.

In many ways, this last year has been awesome.

I’ve coached 12 men now, and some have already reached fantastic results.

I’ve grown to over 6000 followers on X.

I have big plans for this coming year to grow this newsletter, and my coaching business, and expand into video content.

But the past year has also been hard.

I can’t shake the feeling that I’m lying since I’ve mostly not been as lean as my photos.

I’ve also had a few false starts to another diet; I still just didn’t feel emotionally ready for it.

That may just be a weakness and a lack of discipline, but it is what it is.

It’s the truth.

I’ve also had several instances of the same disordered eating behavior over the past year, despite being on X, giving advice on how to improve eating habits and stay lean.

It’s made me feel like a fraud.

My biggest issue over the past year has been trying to piece together what my forever diet will look like.

Considering my tendency to overeat, I’ve seriously considered whether I have to cut out some foods cold turkey.

But this has been the whole problem.

When something is “off limits,” it has power over you.

Whenever I’d consider that this will be the “last time” I have ice cream, sugar, or something bad, it would get in my head and trigger a binge.

I’ve realized how stupid that behavior is.

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If you’ve read this far, I appreciate your attention. And I don’t want this to be just a self-satisfying venting session, so I’ll sum it up with my biggest takeaway from reflecting on my experience.

All the problems I’ve faced in my fitness journey have come from one central issue:

Short-term thinking.

Short-term thinking has caused me to focus too much on unsustainable habits geared toward short-term goals rather than the long-term habits required to play the infinite game of fitness.

Short-term thinking has caused me to keep trying unsustainable dieting tactics.

Short-term thinking caused me to discount small decisions and try to out-train a bad diet.

Short-term thinking has caused me to define physique success according to a temporary standard that is not sustainable instead of what is realistically maintainable for the long term.

It’s caused me to focus on getting there to the detriment of staying there.

Reflecting on my experience has shed a lot of light on what my angle in health & fitness will be.

I’ve gone too much between restriction and rebounding, and it’s no way to live.

My mission is to lead by example for how you can approach a sustainable fitness lifestyle:

Maintaining a body fat percentage that works for your life, training to build yourself up (not training for punishment or fat loss), and finding balance with the pleasurable moments of life that aren’t meaningless: family dinners, barbeques, and the occasional Korean fried chicken.

And above all:

Focusing on a long-term perspective.

Fitness isn’t about 12-week diets, boot camps, or photo shoots.

Fitness is an infinite game.

You win when you get to keep playing.

And playing means living life in a meat vehicle that you love the look of and the feel of and allows you to experience the amazing things life has to offer (food being a big part of this)

The good news is that I’m currently in the best place mentally I’ve been over the past few years.

The photoshoot last year gave me a better perspective on what my ideal, long-term, maintainable body composition is.

And now, I’m going to focus on something I should have done a long time ago: building.

The goal is to get bigger, stronger, and more skilled over the next few years.

Minimal time will be spent dieting.

If there is one lesson to take from my experience, it’s the danger of short-term thinking for your health.

I’m focusing my brand, business, and messaging around helping people avoid the short-term thinking trap that is so easy to fall for so they can build sustainable habits and thrive.

I’ll be digging into some more lessons from my journey over the next few Mondays.

Thank you for reading, I’m grateful for your attention.