Starting Point: Who I am and Why I’m Sharing this.

I’m not a fitness expert, life coach, or self-development guru.

I’m just a guy who went from 320 pounds, crippling anxiety, and barely being able to leave my bathroom—to building a life I’m actually excited to live each day.

What follows isn’t advice from the mountain top, but rather field notes from someone who’s fallen, risen, fallen again, and finally found a sustainable way forward.

If you’ve ever felt trapped between who you are and who you want to become—if you’ve tried and failed to transform yourself only to end up worse than before—this blog might offer something more valuable than motivation. It’s a practical framework for creating lasting change in the face of all of life’s challenges.

If you’ve ever thought “I know what to do, I just can’t seem to make myself do it consistently,” this journey is for you.

The Breaking Point

My story starts in September 2020. COVID was just winding down and after being laid off for three months, I got the call to come back to work.

After having spent the summer in lockdown—almost never leaving home and eating fast food for breakfast, lunch and dinner—I had exploded from a chubby 240lbs to an unimaginable 320lbs.

My work pants wouldn’t fit. My t-shirts were too tight. The extra fat on my chest and around my waist made the mirror my worst enemy.

My heart started pounding. I couldn’t breathe. I sat on the side of the bathtub, telling myself to get up and go to work. I’d lost weight before; had gotten through worse.

But my body wouldn’t listen. When I did leave the bathroom it was to crawl back into bed hating myself. No job. No money. Overweight. Clinically depressed and suffering from anxiety.

What could I do?

A lot, it turns out.

The First Transformation

I applied for a dozen jobs over the following days; I had no choice. I lived with my grandparents at the time and while rent wasn’t an issue, I had to pay for my own food, clothing and necessities. Finally, a retail store answered back and within a week I was hired in.

My job was simple: a work phone generated lists of products customers had ordered. I had to find the products, scan them, bag them and put them in a staging area for customers to pick up when they were ready.

The store was big (100,000 square feet), and my job required me to walk all over it, for eight to ten hours at a time. It was the perfect job for me.

All that walking helped me shed the early pounds without too much intensity, and my role barely required me to talk to anyone, which meant my social awkwardness was rarely a problem. Still, I often had to stop and steady myself for a moment when an anxiety attack seized me. But little by little I lost weight and regained some of the confidence I’d lost.

A year later in 2021, I’d lost 60lbs and was promoted to running a department. Around that time I started lifting weights in my basement; mostly to help further boost my confidence, combat my mental health issues speed up my weight loss.

Eventually I started going to a local gym and that’s where my old self crept in. I was consistent in my efforts, but I began to crank up the intensity too far, too fast. Heavier and heavier weightlifting, even if my shoulders and back hurt afterwards. Ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting.

I was getting in shape, but I was failing to build a stable foundation to stay in shape.

By the spring of 2024 and I’d trimmed down to a muscular 220lbs—people stopped me at work and even in public to ask what I did in the gym. I had a girlfriend I loved, something I’d never have thought possible back when I’d started over back in 2020. I had a shiny new car. I had been promoted for the second time at my new job. I had a team of 30 employees under me and would receive a nice bonus twice a year.

Things couldn’t be better, or so I thought.

The Regression

As seemed to be the pattern in my life, regression was only a step away. My new position was as an overnight manager. The work was menial, lifeless. Interacting with my subordinates was stressful. My responsibilities to my family clashed with my ability to sleep during the day.

Bit by bit anxiety seeped back into my life. There were little things at first. Snapping at a fellow manager, throwing a box or screaming myself hoarse in my car after work. I used the gym to manage my stress but it only worked for so long. I got to the point where I couldn’t eat and could barely sleep. My relationship ground to a standstill. Being alone felt unbearable but I couldn’t find a way to be present around other people.

I developed chronic back pain that wouldn’t go away and would later be revealed to be early scoliosis.

I started taking CBD gummies but these often made me feel tired and unfocused—dangerous side effects when my job at the time included driving forklifts and carrying +1,000lb loads. So I stopped. Trips to see my brother and his kids a city over helped lighten the load but I couldn’t hide forever.

Finally, after surviving my company’s busiest week of the year, I went on leave. The official reason was to allow my back some time to heal and recover. But in truth, I just couldn’t deal with the pressure any more.

My doctor instantly noticed my anxiety and prescribed me medication to help regulate it. It killed the anxiety; I no longer felt like I was the last living character in a horror movie.

But it killed my energy and motivation, too. I ate, slept and laid around for two straight months. The entire time I mentally warned myself that I was gaining the weight back. That if I could just stop binge eating, guzzling soda and laying around all day I would still be able to salvage some of my previous efforts to get in shape in the first place.

It didn’t work. Stepping onto a scale in October of 2024 I was hit with a shocking realization; I’d gained 60lbs in less than four months.

I still couldn’t make myself change. My drive to take action was nonexistent. Paired with my confidence—now at an all time low—I felt like a rock at the bottom of the ocean.

The Turning Point

Finally, after being told that I would likely need a combination of anti-anxiety medication AND anti-depressants to feel normal, I decided enough was enough. I’d seen family members start with one prescribed medication and end up with a dozen different pills to not only fix the initial problem but counteract each other. I would not follow the same path.

I stopped taking the anxiety meds and went back to the gym against my doctor’s wishes. Losing the weight again felt impossible. The weight machines that had moved so easily before now felt heavy even at the lightest settings.

But I refused to stop. I told myself that my life was already f*cked. So why not try? Why not show up, three days a week and see?

That was seven months ago, in October 2024. Now, in April 2025, I haven’t been perfect. A casual glance at my workout records showed that I’d only gone to gym an average of 1.6 times a week in the time since that fateful day when I’d stepped back on the scale. I just couldn’t get myself to the gym consistently.

I’d go once a week, twice. Sometimes I’d make it there three times and feel like a champ. But then the next week I might not make it at all.

It started to feel like my day to day responsibilities were making it impossible for me to achieve my goals. That having to work 45-50 hrs a week, picking up and dropping off my step kids, and helping my grandparents, all meant that I would never have the time to do what I truly wanted to do with my life.

As I struggled to find balance between my obligations and goals, I stumbled across content that would fundamentally change my approach to habit-building and time management.

That’s where Dan Koe and Kortex came in. At this point I should mention that I am not sponsored by or affiliated with with them or any product/author I mention here. Nor do I think Kortex is a magic bullet that will fix all of life’s problems.

What I do believe is that Dan Koe’s advice and the tool he’s created with Kortex can help you make a dramatic perspective shift.

What happened was this: I decided I wanted to learn to code. But I never seemed to have enough time between work and my family duties. This felt crushing. When I was free I was tired and just wanted to lay on the couch scrolling on my phone or watching tv.

But Dan Koe provided two crucial things. The first being the idea that one hour a day is enough to change your life. And the second being an 180 IQ AI advisor prompt. I’ll paste the prompt below for your use. What it essentially does is turn whatever AI you’re using into a no-nonsense advisor that thinks in root causes for problems, systems for solutions, cares about your success, and delivers a hard truth and actionable steps to change.

When I told it my problems, it gave me the reality check I needed—I was using my family and my job as an excuse. Not only did I have time, I had more time than I could ever possibly imagine. Here’s the exact reply it gave me.

Instead of scrolling on my phone or finding ways to kill time, I needed to learn to track and manage my free time with clear goals in mind.

This led me to reexamine my day to day schedule, something I wrote out in detail, taking into account my girlfriend’s off days and the kids weekend routine. I plugged this right back into the AI and it spat out all the various time windows I could make use of.

While this was going on, I realized something important—having the time was only part of the equation. I needed a system to actually make use of that time consistently.

That’s when I found myself diving into James Clear’s ‘Atomic Habits,’ a book I’d been hearing about for years but had never got around to picking up.

Where Dan Koe had shown me I had the time, Clear provided the framework for actually using it effectively. His concept that ‘you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems’ struck a chord with me.

The Sustainable System

I started applying three key principles that completely changed my approach:

Firstly and most importantly, Habit Stacking. Chaining a new habit to a fixed, preexisting one was the micro-shift I needed to change my entire life.

No longer did I agonize over the perfect workout schedule—a battle every busy person knows too well. Should I squeeze in sessions on my precious off days or drag myself there after grueling shifts?

Was 3AM the magic hour when the gym would be empty enough to actually use the machines I wanted, or should I force myself out of bed earlier every morning?

Instead, I embraced a dead-simple rule: gym right after work. Every. Single. Shift. No decisions required. That time between leaving work and taking the kids to school is sacred. Me, my headphones, water and the gym.

I made that change two weeks ago (in early-April 2025) and have scarcely missed a day—my workouts jumped from 1.6 to 4.5 per week without me feeling any more tired or strapped for time.

Secondly, don’t chase a goal, construct a new identity. Goals are flimsy. They’re the shiny thing you see in the distance. Chasing after them can be fun, but often enough they just taunt you with how far away they are.

Additionally, if there’s anything my story of weight loss and weight gain can teach you, it’s that achieving your transformational goals and maintaining them are two vastly different things. By actively working to develop a new identity: i.e. I’m becoming the kind of person who goes to the gym and makes healthy choices—instead of I want to lose thirty pounds by the end of the summer—you put yourself in position to not only achieve the goals you set but sustain them in a new lifestyle.

And lastly: make it appealing. The habits I have built into my routine are few in number (preventing me from becoming overwhelmed) and lean into things I like doing. My current habits involve writing and weightlifting.

If, say, I changed my morning habit to “after work I will run three miles” I would likely fall off of the wagon inside a week. Raw steady state cardio just doesn’t appeal to me the way that hitting the gym does.

Same goes for writing; if I told myself I’d spend an hour every morning before bed studying calculus instead, I might never open my laptop again. But because these habits resonate with my, I feel genuine pleasure in repeating these habits day after day.

The scale now shows I’ve lost 2.8 pounds in just two weeks, but the number that matters more is this: 4.5 workouts per week, up from 1.6—without feeling more exhausted or time-starved.

That’s not the result of finding more willpower; it’s the result of finally understanding how lasting change actually works.

We’re all fighting similar battles—trying to improve ourselves while juggling work, family, and personal challenges. The path forward isn’t perfect discipline or dramatic gestures. It’s building simple systems that make showing up inevitable, focusing on who you’re becoming rather than what you’re achieving, and finding genuine enjoyment in the habits that shape your life.

I’ve shared my story not because it’s extraordinary, but because it isn’t. My struggles and setbacks are probably familiar to you.

That means my solutions might work for you too. We’re all capable of transformation—not the Instagram highlight reel kind, but the quiet, sustainable kind that withstands life’s challenges.

If you’re ready to begin that transformation for yourself, here’s how:

1. Identify one keystone habit that would create the most positive cascading effects in your life. For me, it was the gym. For you, it might be writing, meditation, or meal prep.
2. Find your anchor—an existing, non-negotiable part of your day to attach this habit to. Whether it’s picking up the kids from school or getting out of the shower before work, what happens reliably every day that could trigger your new behavior?
3. Start ridiculously small. Can’t imagine doing 30 minutes of your new habit? Start with 5. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s getting in the necessary reps to make your habit second nature.

Remember, real growth isn’t about heroic efforts or dramatic changes. It’s about tiny systems that work with your life instead of against it. The person you want to become is already there, waiting patiently behind the consistent actions you haven’t yet taken.

What’s Next: Your Journey Continues

This is just the beginning. As I continue making progress with this system, I’ll be sharing regular updates on both the wins and the inevitable setbacks along the way. You’ll get an unfiltered look at what sustainable transformation actually looks like—not just the highlight reel, but the messy middle where real growth happens.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be diving deeper into:

• Practical Tools: Reviews and breakdowns of the apps, books, and frameworks that have made the biggest difference in my consistency
• System Refinements: How I’m adjusting my approach as I encounter new challenges
• Weekly Progress Reports: Transparent updates on my habits, measurements, and the lessons I’m learning along the way
• Quick-Implementation Guides: Step-by-step instructions for building your own consistency systems
• Reader Spotlights: Stories from others who are applying these principles to their own transformation journeys

If you found value in this story, consider subscribing to get these updates directly in your inbox. And if there’s a specific aspect of sustainable change you’d like me to explore in future posts, drop a comment below or reach out directly