I was fat - My struggle with fitness | #grindreel

all right look I know it's another one of these videos where I'm just sitting here talking but I'm working on my storytelling and I'm working on just getting better being in front of the camera I had one comment in the last video about the divorce that said now you should tell us about your fitness journey and I was like no no one really wants to hear about that but then I started to think about it it might be kind of interesting it might not look like it now I've been fat I've been really skinny I've been fat again I've been kind of big and strong I just never really put I guess fitness as a priority until I got older and whenever I did get fit or go from fat to fit it was never for the right reasons or and it was never with like the right mindset and so you'd always bounce back like immediately all those people that win that the Biggest Loser competition like immediately balloon back up right after because they did it for the wrong reasons it was kind of like for me but one thing I've kind of realized over the past few years is that you either deal with your health now while you're young and smaller increments like going to the gym you know a few times a week and eating right or you end up dealing with your health later usually with one big incident and it's pretty much too late then of course there's always exceptions to this none of us actually get out of this whole thing alive you know I get that right because bad things happen to healthy people and people that can run marathons have heart attacks and stuff I understand that too as a kid growing up I didn't have a diet my parents had no care for a diet and only go shopping they just put whatever they wanted in the cart and we would put whatever we wanted in the cart I was active but no amount of playing hide-and-seek in the neighborhood is going to neutralize six bowls of goldfish chicken nuggets and a large fry with a big coat I don't think health was really regard for my parents at all growing up both my parents smoked growing up even in the house growing up that was the worst because then I would go to school like in middle school kids would come up to me a lot and they'd be like hey Josh you got a light you go to cigarette because my clothes would smell like it because they smoked inside the house or like if I wanted to bring people over if I wanted to bring friends over there to hang out for the weekend I know it'd be really awkward for their parents when they go back because my friends would go back to their houses and they'd end up smelling like smoke which would make their parents think I was like a bad influence on them but anyways I digress on that front the point is that my parents I don't think they're the best role models for health really my parents did try to get me to join some sports leagues and do some like team activities growing up but I was just never really interested like imagine being from the south and not being interested in football yeah I know right you're basically just gonna get you're gonna get crucified for that growing up I think my diet was more just like a seafood diet you know I I see it I eat it if it tastes good I'm gonna eat it and when Wow came out I was like 14 or 15 years old and my physical activity dropped even more I remember one summer I ate french bread pizza every single day pepperoni french bread pizza I D the whole box which comes with two for an entire school summer playing Wow it was it was terrible so from geordie of my childhood I'm just basically I'm just fat and none of the girls want to go out with me in middle school or any of that and I don't really care about being fat all I care about is being the best world PvP mage on the server towards the end of high school I got into like weight training class cuz my dad was like I did weight training in high school and I didn't really have a relationship with my dad at the time so I thought if I did weight training class we would have a better relationship and he would like be proud of me and a weight training class don't talk about diet they just show you how to lift weights just your basic weights so at the end of high school I'm like super fat and super strong even though I'm not really that strong I just thought I was compared to lifting a spoon to my face now I'm lifting like a couple pounds so I graduate high school I'm going to college I see a few girls on the college campus there's literally just a few girls because it's engineering school and it's just basically sausage party I look in the mirror one day and I and I realize the girls don't particularly want to date another planet or an exhibition at Sea World I decided I needed to slim up I needed to have some ABS because that's what all the girls say they want is right there oh my gosh the V cot with the ABS and I'm like that's what I need to happily I wanted to be athletic I want it to be kind of thin and I want it to be strong I want it to be well-rounded but the idea of becoming well-rounded to me meant just eating a lot of food and becoming well-rounded you know like it wasn't in the fitness sense I thought that cardio was the only way to really achieve that so that's what I did I just ran and I swim and I biked every single day because that's what's gonna get you shredded that's what's gonna get you cut and I became a stick I could run like Forrest Gump but I couldn't do a pull-up and I couldn't do a push-up so Here I am like 19 years old super skinny I guess I would look like I was in shape but asked me to do ten push-ups and I was done I got married I moved to Finland if you can go watch my last video about that and then when I got married I put on the comfort weight you guys know what the comfort weight is like I'm in a relationship now and she accepts me for who I am no matter what like young and dumb right like live and learn young and dumb and I've actually you see this happen to a lot of couples that kind of get together they kind of get that dad bod going on they kind of get that comfort weight like they accept me you know I've no real reason and then on top of that when I was married things started going downhill to put it lightly so I started that that comfort food eating the the eating to relieve my feelings because when you eat you know if you need certain foods it raises your blood sugar you get this dopamine rush and it makes you feel better so you end up eating a bunch of garbage and you pile on more weight there was a question that I got on my last video that said Josh you said that you want a few days on the weekends without eating but how did you like blow up to be so fat well you can eat empty calories it'd be like eating a whole bunch of candy you'd still feel relatively hungry if not a little sick but that would be like three days worth of calories and that's what I did I would eat a bunch of empty calories and you can be fat and hungry trust me you could be fat and hungry and it's not fun I mean it's not gonna hurt you to not eat but you could be fat and hungry and it's still not fun this was the biggest point I ever was in my life was towards the end of the relationship when I was married I was 240 pounds I took a picture of myself it's on bodybuilding.com I'll show it I understand that you're scarred for life for looking at this picture now I was a big boy and I don't wear the weight well it was all up here up above my waist in my face so I looked pretty round in shirt and then as I said in my last video I looked in the mirror and I saw myself and I said to myself again Josh girls don't want to date this if you're gonna be on the market soon you're gonna be divorced girls don't want to date this sorry but that's how it is so you better figure it out still almost had no idea of what I was doing when it came to working out I just went to bodybuilding.com and followed some workout regimen and I would obsess I would become obsessed with my weight because that's what matters right weight loss how to get those last five pounds off you know but what I didn't realize is that weight fluctuates eat a bunch of salty stuff you're gonna hold water weight the next day and you're gonna wonder well gee I worked out really hard this past week and I'm not I'm not losing any weight and so I just became obsessed with the weight but I didn't understand the behind-the-scenes of how it all worked I made some decent progress while I was in Finland and then I moved to the United States which is where I am now here in Utah I kept my fitness regimen going but I became kind of burnt out of going to the gym so much for so long that I kind of like took a step back a little bit I didn't really know what I was doing I just knew like wake up gym for two hours go to work because this ketchup gonna make me fat can I eat this broccoli in meat I would look on Instagram and I would be like why can't I have that v-cut and everyone will tell you that it's something different this guy on Instagram says do my fitness regimen this guy over here says do this fitness regimen I never really understood that abs specifically because that was the thing I was obsessing over my whole fitness journey was that I wanted to have abs never had abs would just do leg lifts and crunches and whatever all the different AB moves like none of that matters it's all just body fat percentage yes you can like tone up your abs a little bit and build muscle on your abs and have bigger to have muscles I guess but when they're covered up in a layer of body fat it won't matter what I also didn't understand was that you can't really target fat loss for the most part you can do 400 side crunches or oblique moves and that won't burn the fat in that area it's just your genetics decide where your fat gets put and where it goes away first for men it's usually your face for me it was my face and then the rest of my body and then your stomach and your love handles are the last to go and I'd like to take a shout-out here to my grandma for giving me these I think I have bigger hips than some of you like women out there like I wear them loud and proud so thank you grandma for the for the hips and the love handles I appreciate you I would get like super upset and sad and demotivated that I didn't want to work out anymore because I would look at these people on Instagram and I look at these people that are on the bodybuilding pages and I would and I would you can get pretty far like as a natural but no proprietary probably white labeled pre-workout blend is gonna get you what these people have yes you can go really far natural and most people never reach their natural peak just realizing that was kind of like a downer like Maddie or not I don't really care what you do but I remember there was a point where I just stopped working out like a couple years ago because I was like I can never I can never be that because I don't have access to the certain things that these people have access to nor do I really have a desire to try them you see all these people on social media pushing their supplements that are like if you take my alpha-male shredded xu2 can be as big and shredded as I am but what you're forgetting is maybe talking about your trend baloney sandwich the whole fitness industry has a whole kind of like put me off to that and so I stopped kind of looking to that as like a definition of what's healthy and what's good for you kind of like a giant balancing act for me these days can I do the athletic activities that I want to do can I climb can I run can I go hiking without hating my life the benefits of working out go past just the strength gains or the looks in the mirror any of that it's it's more about using the time at the gym for like mental progress to be honest there's really no amount of money you can pay for good health you can only pay to try and reverse your bad health you can't pay for a healthy heart you can't really pay for abs unless they're doing plastic surgery and like implanting abs into you things worth having take a while to get and there's really no skipping there's no cheat codes for this being able to carry that mental learning lesson over into other aspects of my life has been huge also the uncomfortableness of going to the gym and lifting weights and struggling in the pain of like lifting weights over your head if I can do that at the gym then I can do that mentally with other things in life and just keep going forward I don't always stay motivated to go to the gym sometimes I have to make this little ritual to go to the gym right now it's riding my motorcycle to the gym that's like my favorite part of the day I really want to lift weights I'm not feeling like it hey but you get to ride a motorcycle Josh all right I'm in let's go so overall I just try to be grateful for the health that I do have and I'm struggling not to eat too much food and there's someone else in the world that's just trying to find some food to eat maybe because I'm older I've just become less about the aesthetics and the status of it all and more about just like I got to keep this stuff together because if I don't I'm gonna suffer a lot harder later anyways that's kind of my experience with fitness and health and it's important to me and it's probably not this life-changing story that you wanted of like I got picked on and bullied for being fat and you know blah blah blah it's more of like I was obsessed with looks and fitness and bodybuilding and I just did it for the girls and the status and all that stuff that you see on social media and instead change to being like look that you just have to do it for for health reasons the stuff these side effects of looking good and feeling good come along with it but you just need to be mindful of your health and so that's kind of where I'm at I hope you enjoyed the story if there's any questions I'm happy to answer them and I hope you guys have a good Monday [Music]

Channel: Joshua Fluke

Views: 206,179

Rating: 4.941546 out of 5

Keywords: joshua fluke, code bootcamp, javascript, how to code, web development, brand, developer interview, developer jobs

Id: -ne5nAoyEFg

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 16 2019