Six Months to a New Life
I was one of those kids who always dreamed about growing up to be big and strong. Watching World’s Strongest Man competitions and admiring the jacked up physiques of monstrous professional wrestlers seemed like a totally normal thing. When I was in fifth grade or so, my Sunday school teacher at church asked us all to write something on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. After six weeks of praying on it and talking to God about our written concerns, we were going to open our envelopes and discuss whether or not anything had changed. When it was my turn to open my envelope and read my note out loud, everyone seemed a bit surprised to hear that I had written, “I want to be big and strong.”
Growing up and even through college, I was always super active, playing sports, lifting weights, and doing random physical challenges that sounded like fun. I stayed super skinny through all of this as my metabolism raged and any knowledge of decent nutrition eluded me. In 2011, I finally got on a mission to start pounding food, put on weight, and get big and strong. I was able to get fairly big but was never strong compared to other strong people. It was a fun journey, but by 2017, I was carrying some bad weight and just didn’t look and feel how I wanted. A former student of mine was always posting fitness pictures on social media. The guy was completely jacked and his progress gave me a kick in the ass to get started. As a lifelong fan of bodybuilding, I had come across this guy on the internet named Dave Pulcinella. Look him up if you’re not familiar. Dave’s brother Mike did a series of documentaries called “Raising the Bar” that chronicled a few seminal moments in Dave’s amateur bodybuilding career. I knew that Dave ran his nutrition coaching business out of a gym in Delaware, so I decided to look him up and see if I could become one of his clients. Hiring Dave also seemed fitting because Dave’s cousin Steve, owner of Iron Sport Gym in Glenolden, PA, had coached me at an EliteFTS lifting seminar back in the early 2010s and was one of my inspirations for trying to get as huge as possible in the first place. Things had come full circle.
I drove down to meet with Dave, got my meal plan, and started on my journey. Every few weeks I would visit Dave to check in, get weighed, and have my body fat measured. I stayed ridiculously disciplined on my diet, measuring all my food and never missing a cardio or lifting session. Getting started was the hardest part, but, as with so many other things in life, once I stopped feeling sorry for myself I was able to embrace the struggle of the process. Staying strict and executing the plan became a point of pride for me. Showing up to the office and already having forty-five minutes of cardio done gave me a win before most people were even getting their day started. My progress was rapid and it was like I could see my body changing before my eyes. I had paid Dave up front for six months, and by the end of that term I looked like a completely different person. It felt good to feel good again. I was in shape and knew I could do anything I wanted: lifting, running, hiking, biking. Suddenly it was all accessible to me, and it had only taken six months to completely change my life.
I think that’s one thing most people don’t realize. In six months your life and the way you feel about yourself can be completely different. Yes, it will be hard. You may struggle and fail and be hungry. That’s all okay. Whenever I got to feeling sorry for myself, I would have this voice in my head asking, “Are you going to die? Is this worse than some poor soldier storming the beaches of Normandy or being forced forward on the Bataan Death March? No…okay, well then quit being such a baby and keep fucking pushing.”
In this six months, I learned that discipline is everything. Once I made the decision to lose weight, it was already done. I just needed to have the discipline and patience to let the plan play out over time. Reading and listening to Jocko Willink and taking his “Discipline Equals Freedom” mantra to heart really changed my perspective on tackling challenges in life.
You can do this too. You can change your life in six months.
Get started. Be disciplined. Enjoy the process. Embrace the suck. Change your life.