Ethan Suplee's Amazing Weight Loss Journey

If I didn't know who you were and I ran in you, I would have no idea that you're the same guy. It's crazy. You're a fucking completely different human. Yeah. You went from this guy that looked like you were really in bad shape to a guy who looks like a guy I would avoid in jujitsu. I'd be like, fuck that guy, let me get away from him, he's too big. You look fucking great. That's awesome. This is the greatest compliment I've ever gotten. Thank you very much. All I want is to look like a big dude who's not just gigantic and fat. That's all I want. Dude, you look like a gorilla. You look like a dangerous human being. How did you do it? Well, over the past 20 years, I've gone back and forth with dieting. I've lost a shitload of weight. I've gained a shitload of weight back. How did I do it? I think that the thing that I've done that has been sustainable is undoing kind of ... Look, a lot of diets come in and say, just do this and you'll lose weight. But we're not focused at all on how we got to whatever point we were at that we consider non-optimal that we want to change. So undoing the bad habits that I had that I would associate with allowing myself to get up to 550 pounds is really more important than anything that I could say, this is what I did to lose weight. Does that make sense? Yes. Yes. So when did the process start? So you kind of went back and forth, but you've obviously been on a very steady course. For how long now? 20 years. 20? 19 years. 2002 was the first time I thought I really want to change my life and I started then. And how much weight have you lost instead? 2002 I went from 550. I did a liquid diet for two months and lost 80 pounds. That 80 pounds I've never dipped back into. But so I was 450 and I went down to close to just under 300, then went back up to 400, then went down to 200, then back up to 350. And for the past five years, I've been around the weight I'm at now. So I've really gotten that under control. What do you have right now? 270. That is incredible. That is so incredible. So you've lost more than 200 pounds. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, I've lost 200 pounds a couple of times. But you've also put on muscle. Like you're different, you're different, like you're unrecognizable. Yeah. I think, listen, the other strange thing about weight loss is when you're building fat and you're storing fat, your body is naturally building lean tissue too, just to support that fat. Under every obese person, there's a person with more than average muscle. So because they have to carry around all their weight. Yeah. You're naturally building muscle just by like raising your heavier arm. I used to always say that to Ralphie May. Yeah. Ralphie May was so heavy and I was like, look at your legs, dude. I go, you'd be able to kick someone through a fucking wall if you just lost weight. Yeah. Like is that just to be able to carry around. I have gnarly calves. I bet you do. Yeah. That's one of the few things that I train sometimes with bodybuilders now and my coach is a professional bodybuilder, Jared Feather, shout out to him. And he has a lot of calf emphasis and I'm like, I don't really need to do that, bro. My calves are good. Yeah, you carried around 500 pounds for years. Let's go to, can you show me a photo of Ethan when he was at his heaviest? Has this affected your work because you were getting roles for so long as an actor when you were large? Yeah. I think so. Yeah, it has. There was a time, if we go back to like 2015 and I had been really thin and when I say really thin, I mean 200 pounds, but for me that was extraordinarily thin. That's what I weigh. It was just crazy. You're a lot bigger than me. It's crazy to see. I thought I looked gaunt. God. Look at those two fucking pictures. Like if a girl broke up with you when you were on the left and then ran into you at the fucking airport when you were on the right, I mean that is bonkers, man. Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah. I mean truly, truly incredible. That's my favorite picture and that's not even down lighting. I was an idiot and I'm not super thrilled with my hair and my head and I wouldn't shave my head because I thought the hat looked better with a little bit of hair poking out and then it got in the way of down lighting. So that's not even as good a picture as it could have been. Downed lighting. That's what everybody wants for abs. They want down lighting. Let's see the guns. So your training regimen must be like pretty strict. Look at that fucking picture. That is so bananas, dude. What movies ever? Remember the Titans. Wow. Yeah, that wasn't even the heaviest. That's not the heaviest? I mean I was probably close to 500 there but no, that's not even the heaviest. I don't know what to point to. This picture down here is I believe after Remember the Titans and I'm certainly a little bit heavier. Yeah. Wow. When you look at that and you know how far you've come, I mean it has to be incredibly satisfying. It's incredibly satisfying but look, the reality is that I don't... I have mental illness and I don't look at myself and think like, God, I look great. I see nothing but negative stuff every day and I try to convince myself. I try to find something that I'm happy with. Usually it's my traps. I can look at my traps because it's lean. There's not a bunch of loose skin hanging there. They're not all scarred up from surgeries. And I look at my trap and I go like, okay, that looks good. And based on that, I can then start to feel okay about myself. Looking at those pictures, that's also a long time ago and I just don't... I cannot relate to how I lived then. Wow. It's very bizarre. Now, when you say you have mental illness, meaning that you're aware of this, right? So you're aware you have a distorted perception of yourself. Yeah. Very much so. What do you think is... What's fueling that distorted perception? When I go back to my childhood, I was put on a diet when I was five. And prior to that, I had no sense of self. I existed and clearly I had fun and I played, but I was not aware of my body as a thing kind of, if it is external to me, as a separate component to me or just as a thing itself, it just was. And at five, I was put on this diet and all these parts of me were pointed out as being super negative. And so I just... At five years old. Yeah. And by the way, in fairness, if you look at the average five-year-old today, I wasn't obese at five, I was a chubby five-year-old, but I was super active and I wasn't eating junk food all day long. And you're growing into your body too. Yeah. That's the thing about five-year-olds, it's like I've seen kids that look kind of chubby and then you run into them a few years later, like, look at you, you're a beanstalk. Yeah. Yes. You grew. I have four kids myself and you watch them, they kind of go in different directions, wide and then tall. And yeah, there isn't a sad thing, but I spent most of my life feeling wrong, like literally that I was wrong or bad or there was some just super negative about myself. And so I still have to fight through that today. Catch new episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips, easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.