Drop Weight Like a Stoic

Come with me to a tough place.

You’ve carefully crafted a plan for success at something. Maybe you planned the perfect date with your sweetheart. The picnic basket is packed. The car is waxed. The drinks are chilled and you have your favorite book of poetry or your favorite Ginuwine record cued up (the only two sources of entertainment appropriate to a romantic picnic). You pick him or her up and she looks perfect. You’re wearing your favorite cologne and you even remembered deodorant. The only thing fresher than your clothes is your breath thanks to 15 minutes of tooth brushing and mouth washing. This date will be perfect.

You get in the car and it starts to rain. All your plans are for naught. The date, the evening and even Ginuwine’s Pony can’t make the torrential downpour get better.

You’ve failed. We’ve all been there.

When it comes to our weight loss, we almost always begin with the best of intentions and the brightest of goals. And we’re on point. Until we fail.

Can I be brutally honest?

I didn’t even last 24 hours when I started “dieting”.

I had had my epiphany moment. I was so hot with motivation that I was leaving burn marks in the carpet as I walked. I couldn’t have been tempted even if Christina Hendricks offered to feed me Doritos at Sunset in Tahiti.

I went to dinner with a good friend and told him that I was going to do this. We were at Dave & Busters where Health Food, similar to my vision of Doritos and Christina Hendricks is not really a possibility. I was still “good”. I played cards all night and didn’t snack. I just knew I was going to drop my 200 plus pounds of fat in three weeks if I kept at it like this.

That night I was driving home and the siren’s call of Spicy Chicken Burritos called to me. And like the sailors of old, I headed straight for the voices singing sweet songs of Del Scorcho Hot Sauce and Nachos.

I failed. And chances are at some point, you will be imperfect and be tempted to also call this failure.

I realize saying that failure may occur somewhere along your journey is not the stuff of motivational speaking, but it’s honest. Some may call this pessimistic. Others may say it’s setting us up for failure. But by looking at all the things that could cause failure in advance of their occurrence is becoming an increasingly popular practice. In business, they refer to this as a pre-mortem. A CEO or other person of authority will set up a meeting and inform their group that the project has already failed. The group will then list all the reasons this could happen. Looking at all of these reasons for potential failure allows the group to strengthen the project against them and perhaps avoid them or at least to be prepared for them if they occur.

This preparation for adversity is also one of the core tenets of the philosophy of Stoicism.

Get Stoic

For the next four weeks, I am going to talk to you about Stoicism and a Stoic Approach to weight loss.

What is Stoicism? Stoicism is a philosophy that believes that we need to align our hearts and minds with nature and avoid fighting that which we cannot control, which seems self-evident and good but a lot of people take for granted. Stoics believe in overcoming destructive emotions like anger, desperation and frustration. They have one of the healthiest and most logical approaches to failure that one can have. Notable Stoics include Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and many could be considered modern-day Stoics like Lincoln, Churchill and others.

I regard Stoicism as a perfect companion in your weight loss journey and if you’re anything like me, it could be the kind of catalyst to change your life.

Disclaimer: Stoicism is only an amazing philosophy for two kinds of people:

• Imperfect People
• People who interact with Imperfect People.

If you have a perfect life and are surrounded by perfect people, this won’t help you. But if that doesn’t describe you, I hope you’ll come with me on this journey.

Let’s get back to the failure talk.

Prepare for Failure.

The Stoics were big advocates of emotionally, spiritually and logically preparing yourself for the adversity that comes with life. We like to look at our diet plan and promise it that nothing will ever affect it like Marlin from Finding Nemo:

If you consider your own life, you will probably recognize that in your lowest moments, you grew the most. The Greeks believed that wisdom only comes from suffering and adversity. The Christian believes too that suffering is divine insomuch that whom God Loves, He Chastens. I recently heard James Altucher comment that the seeds of success are sown in the valley of failure. Your grandmother probably had a pillow that looked something like this:

One of the greatest and most prominent Stoics was Lucius Seneca. If you ever decide to read his book with a highlighter, bring multiple as you will run out of ink. Almost every sentence could be superimposed onto an image of a guy doing a barbell curl and placed on Instagram. It’s just that potent.

Seneca, an investment banker, political advisor and incredible philosopher was a believer in negative visualization, what Tim Ferriss refers to as practical pessimism. Seneca encouraged the following about preparing for failure and adversity:

First, Define Your Fears Instead of Your Goals

So you’ve got your weight loss plan. And you’ve probably started off with your goal of losing so many pounds or fitting into a pair of jeans or a dress.

Next Seneca take a piece of paper (or a stone tablet in his days) and create three columns.

• In the first column, list all the negative things that could occur if you attempt this.
• In a second column, list the things you can do to minimize those things from happening.
• Then in a third column, list all the things you could do to get back to where you were before you started your journey.

Ultimately, the goal here is to compare how many irreversible changes you could have versus how big of a life impact this journey would have on you.

I think the first two columns are much easier than the third when thinking about a health change. You’re probably afraid of failure or embarrassment of what people might think about you. The second column may also be self-evident. To overcome the potential embarrassment, maybe you just don’t tell everyone what you’re doing or you only talk to people you can really trust or that really love you. The third column may be challenging to envision from a weight loss perspective. Maybe your fears of irreversible things include the following:

• You’d lose out on some experiences of eating unhealthy stuff for a while, maybe deteriorating some social experiences.
• You’d sacrifice time for exercise and food prep.
• Loose skin.

The idea is to have a practical method to look at the risk of loss versus the reward. After you’ve listed all your fears, ask yourself two questions:

On a scale of 1–10, how great would the reward be for the successful realization of your goal be?

On a scale of 1–10, how detrimental would the worst case scenario be?

In my experience, if this change is important to you, you’re probably looking at a 10 vs a 2 or a 3.

The Next Step is Envisioning the Absolute Worst Case

When I first started exercising in excess of 400 pounds, I remember my trainer suggesting

swimming as a form of low impact exercise that would be a good idea for me at my stage. My first thought was complete terror: I didn’t have a pool at my house. Could she really expect me to go to a public place and take off my shirt? Is this real life?

In my head, I had seen a million terrifying outcomes, all of which surrounded pointing, laughing and in some cases, vomiting. But even in the worst case scenario, I realized that I would live and I would benefit from a swim. So after getting to the low weight of 383 pounds, I decided to face my fears. I even publicly announced the feat after on Reddit.. Guess what happened? Absolutely nothing. But it very well could have and by envisioning the worst case, I realized that it wasn’t in reality that bad.

Seneca encouraged this practice:

“Set aside a number of days each month where you are satisfied with the cheapest and scantiest of [food], the roughest of dress, all the while asking yourself: Is this the condition I feared?”

By facing the absolute worst case scenario, you live to see that you can in fact live with it. There is nothing to be afraid of.

And now you’re ready to take that first leap into the pool. Don’t worry, the water’s just fine.