You should know, right off the bat, that I do not like sharing my innermost thoughts and feelings with strangers, let alone friends. There is nothing wrong with sharing one’s feelings, and I am better today than ever at talking about my vulnerabilities, but it’s still not easy. However, a few years ago — about six months after I had lost 60 lbs. and the scale had joyfully screamed, “200!” I began to consider writing a weight loss book. My weight had held steady at 200 lbs. for months. This dream of telling my story helped motivate me to lose a final 30 lbs.
That was three years ago that I reached my goal. During this time, I have struggled with writing my story. I would plan and start writing and give up. Finally, about a month ago, over a beer with a friend, I was in the middle of recounting my struggle to tell my story (read: whining), I had an epiphany: I have great information to share and I know it is transformational, but its not a simple diet you follow off of a typewritten one pager, or a guide to exercise.
At that moment a tectonic shift took place on Planet Garrett. That shift, what I have called “Flipping the Switch,” sits at the heart of all my success. What I am going to do is prove that to you. And here is where it gets kind of “woo.” I am, as previously stated, an ordinary guy, grateful to have lived an extraordinary life. We all have our circles, our professional silos, those pieces of our lives that we consider foundational to our identities. The paths we have walked, climbed, studied — whatever the route — those paths led us somewhere, maybe to simply another path.
The path from chronically overweight (and metabolically challenged) to living with a sustainable weight is like a magic trick. In this case, the magician’s evident transformation is not an illusion. The facts of how I made Garrett 2.0– the cold facts, the recipe–may disappoint you compared to the reveal in my Before and After photos. The truth, as I see it, is that most people reading this that have 20 – 50 pounds to lose did not gain that weight over a long weekend drinking beer and watching football. That gut has been years in the making. May I bring you up to date? Somewhere in the course of consuming 10,000 corn chips (100 bags at 100 chips per bag), I joined the rest of America in overeating highly processed carbohydrates and leading a sedentary, but entertaining, life.
Maybe this is not you, but you have still 20 – 50 pounds to lose? Or maybe that was you and you already lost a bunch of weight, medically supervised, using a GLP-1 drug, or you were on a desert island and just got back and now you are a slim Jim and want to stay that way?
In these cases, in fact in all cases, I want to be clear. I am not trained in nutrition, medicine, psychology or pharmacology. At this moment, I have no product to sell and I earn no commissions and I don’t get paid to indorse anything. I don’t even have a book to sell (yet). My entire resume as a weight loss “expert” is staked on a couple of facts and one hypothesis. Facts: When I moved to Colorado in July of 2017, I weighed 260 lbs. In April of 2022, after a couple of years of ineffective dieting, I got serious, did a lot of research and lost 90 pounds. Hypothesis: I attribute about 30% of my weight loss to diet mechanics, the “How to,” the “rules.” Those alone will get you your first 10 pounds. After that, you need something else.
This is where my story gets more interesting. It is bigger than weight loss and while my achievement of losing 90 pounds and keeping it off (mostly) is extraordinary, it is only one example of how, as a pretty ordinary guy, I have been able to put my mind to work to get from life the things I really care about. I will explain my process for achieving extraordinary results in occasional blog posts over the next month or so, interspersed with the mechanical components of weight loss: diet and exercise. I hope you find these examples compelling. I will publish the first of these, a story of how a not very athletic high school student became a Green Beret at age 19. “What Serving in the US Army on a Special Forces A Team Taught Me About Achieving Extraordinary Results” will appear here and it my Socials in the next week.