Gad Saad on Maintaining His 86 Pound Weight Loss

You look like you've lost a large child from your body. 86 pounds. That's right. That's a large child. I know that you want to take credit for it because... Fat shaming works. Exactly. But I can't give you all the credit. No, you deserve all the credit. I didn't do anything. So because... I just was concerned for your well-being. And so I was just saying, if you really are saying that you want to get healthy and you really are saying that you want to play soccer and do all these things again, like... A friend has to be brutally honest with you. Well, that's a hard one. That's a hard one because nobody wants to hear they're gaining weight or they've gained weight or that they have to make radical changes to their life. I'm actually at the lowest weight since I think 88. That's incredible. I'm size, waist, 33. How much better do you feel? Phenomenal. Outrageous. Isn't it incredible? Unbelievable. Like if they could give you that in a pill, just the feeling, how it feels to be 86 pounds lighter. Exactly. Oh my God. I mean, just to give you a sense so that we could put it into metrics. When I was overweight, our lovemaking session was only an hour and a half of a bigger set. Whereas now, I've doubled it. Congratulations. Thank you. How do you have so much time? It's incredible. My wife is Lebanese. She's spicy. She demands a lot of meat. What did you do other than exercise and like, how did you shift your diet? So two things. Number one, 15 to 20,000 steps a day, no matter what. No matter what. So it's been almost now two and a half years that I haven't done a single day of less than 10,000 steps. Now, the steps could be treadmill. It could be walking outside. It could be running vigorously on the outside, whatever. It could be biking. But I always have with me, there's actually a... Is it one of those pedometers? It's one of those pedometer things. And I'm obsessive about maintaining. So just by having this clear objective that I have to reach makes it that no matter what, I've got to get off the proverbial couch and walk around. It's minus 20 in Montreal. I'm walking outside until I reach that. But I was always quite physically active. Of course, much of your weight loss comes from keeping this guy closed. That's the thing that people need to... It's very, very, very, very difficult to exercise your weight or weight loss. And so what I did... So my wife who's here, you've known her for many years, she's an amazing woman. She turned into the diet Gestapo. She's got this MyFitnessPal, they're getting, I guess, free publicity on the number one show on the world. So through MyFitnessPal, she enters till today every single thing that goes into this gorgeous body. So at the end of the day, she says, don't have any snacks. You're at 1727 and you were supposed to get under 1700. So by having that feedback loop that's always keeping you in check, plus the... So the third thing is I weigh myself once a week so that the auto-corrective mechanism comes in, not when I'm now 227 in terms of weight. But if I've come to Texas and then I go on the scale and I've gained three pounds, well, now I know that I need to correct the following week. So these little changes, I mean, there's nothing magical. Just doing that, I guess if I can add a fourth thing, I removed the all or nothing mindset. In the past, I mean, the highest weight I reached you. You won't offend me. Can you, from knowing me for many years, do you know how heavy I got? I guess you can calculate. Well, if I look at you now, you look like you weigh about 165 pounds in my weight? Yeah, exactly. I'm 170. Very good. I'm good at weight classes. A lot of years are on fights. I guess, exactly. And I would imagine the heaviest you got was probably close to 300 pounds. 256. Yeah. Okay, so that's the 86 pounds. So 256 for a guy. That's the heaviest. That's the heaviest that I... Maybe I could have been more, that I'm aware of, that I've actually seen it on the scale was 256. I had gone from my yearly physical and I got on this scale and I was 256, which is the average weight for a six foot four middle linebacker who's eight inches taller. Right, that's scary. So I removed the all or nothing mindset in that I need to lose all the weight by next Tuesday. My mindset was as long as every day I'm a bit better, eventually, the old baby steps thing. And so I get on, I'm now 10 pounds less, 20 pounds. Hey, let me try to get under 200. I am. And then bit by bit, magically, here I am. For a message, if you have a message to anybody out there that's trying to do it, what would it be? What's the most important thing? It's that there are 1000 different temptations in a day for you to violate your goal and you can almost never fail. You don't have to be so punishing, but 997 out of the 1000 bifurcations in the road, you have to take the right road. And so do that enough days, enough times get 997 out of 1000 and suddenly you'll be 30, 40, 50 pounds later. Just trust the process. Trust the process. And that's what's hard for people to do because they really do want immediate results. And the way I always describe it, there's a gambling term that you have to get better the same way you get sick. It's like if you're gambling, say if you and I were playing pool and I was ahead 100 games and you said double or nothing, I would say, no, no, no, you got to get better the same way you got sick. Because I'm up 100 games, why would I risk losing it all in one shot? No, no, no. And that's how it is with weight loss. You got to get better the same way you got sick, slowly, over time. And it's been now, the usual thing is that you put it back on. I've now had it off for quite a while, so I'd like to think that I'm in my steady state now. Well, you've become aware now of the value of being thin and healthy and you've become aware of how good you feel. I don't think you're a smart man. You're not going to go back. Exactly. Did you ever have any trouble with your weight? I mean, I've been like five pounds overweight before, 10 pounds overweight before. That's it. Yeah. And then I always like, oh, you fat fuck. And I lose the weight. Now, is that because of your gluttony? No, no, no, not putting on. Why didn't you ever put on more weight? It's not an option. I'm not getting fat. Is it literally a vanity issue? No, it's a health issue. I work out. I do martial arts. If I'm fat, I can't work out. If I can, I feel it. It's like I put sludge in my engine. The fattest I ever got, I think I got to like 207 one time. For me, it goes right here. It goes on my sides and in my belly. And it was also eating a lot of pasta, which is just not for me. Whenever I do that, I always feel like shit. I just overeat, but I work out a lot. So it keeps it in check for the most part, but it can get away from me if I'm stupid. Because I still eat like a teenager. I eat as much as I want. I eat large amounts of food. But you do mainly the protein stuff, right? Yes. Mainly I eat meat. But I eat mostly meat and fish and fruit. That's mostly what I eat. So I guess the fifth element of when you asked me what the height of the weight is, I also removed all the carbs, almost all of it. Once in a while I have a bit of something. So what is a daily meal for you, like? So breakfast, I may have one or two boiled eggs. Lunch might be my wife and I go to the Peruvian rotisserie place that we probably go to four times in a week, which I'll get a quarter of a chicken with a bit of coleslaw. Vinaigri coleslaw, not creamy coleslaw. I might have one or two snacks around mid-afternoon, which might be things like 100 grams of frozen raspberries, a little yogurt of 70 calories. And then dinner will be a fantastic salad that if you looked at the volume, you'd think, my God, how are you losing so much weight? But it only has five, six ounces of protein, but it's voluminous so that I feel full. I may have another little snack at eight o'clock, 70, 80 calories, and I've reached my 15, 16, 17, 100 calories.