Today, I'm sharing my exact system I've used to lose 43 pounds in 9 months with no fancy supplements, no extreme dieting, no long workouts in the gym, just practical strategies that you could start using today if you wanted to. Now before I share that, I do wanna share that this is obviously a departure from what I normally talk about. But when I was thinking of topics that I wanted to cover, it felt like I would be doing a disservice if I didn't share my recipe for success in this area of my life because it's connected to other things. If you were on one of the last couple live calls we had in the Creator Club, I had shared about little bit about my weight loss journey and how it's just given me more energy, more zest for life. And 43 pounds is no joke. I didn't even know I had 43 pounds to lose, honestly. And it wasn't until this morning when I looked back in my health data that I think it was around high school that I was around this age. So I'm back in my high school weight, And that was 18 years ago, I guess, supposedly. So if you're struggling with, I would say, sustainable weight loss, I want to kind of document what I've been doing to share with you and make it simple. Simple is good. So what was my turning point? What happened on May 1, 2024 that made me wanna lose weight? No big event. There was no like doctor visit. He said, don't need to lose a bunch of weight. Nothing like that. I think I had just kind of hit a point mentally where I was like, I'm done. I just need to lose weight. Like, something is not feeling good. Like, if I woke up in the middle of the night, I had this, like, anxiety kind of looming over my head. And I've never really struggled with weight, but it was definitely the heaviest I had been, leading up to May 1st. And I had an idea because I had lost weight before for when I got married a few years ago. I wanted to cut down, and so I had used an app called Carbon Diet Planner. And it's kinda like MyFitnessPal. You just put in what you eat, tracks your calories, your macros, and then it gives you a calorie target to hit. Now I'm good. If I have, like, a specific goal I need to hit as far as, like, calories, I can make that work. And so I thought, well, let me just use, like, the Carbon Diet App Planner for a month, which, you know, was not it. It was not just using the app. It was actually a few other things, and that's what I'm gonna share with you. I was like, what other tools are available to me now that weren't previously available? And that tool being AI. Kinda hit me that, like, information is crucial to hitting goals. Right? The more of the relevant information you can get, the easier it is for us to wrap our heads around why, how, when we're gonna hit those goals. So for me, I was like, okay. If I wanted to get to 170, how long is that gonna take me? And I was asking Claude. I was asking ChatGPT, comparing what they told me, and it was basically like, oh, that's 6 months. Boom. Okay. I'm kind of guessing here if it was, like, 6 months. Maybe you said, like, 4 4 or 6 months or something. I'm like, okay. That helps me wrap my head around it because I think I could do this for 4 to 6 months. Like, that's not that long. And I know what I need to do. I need to use the carbon diet app and just check-in, hit the scale once a week, and then log what I eat. And that's it. Except, you know, in my brain, I'm like getting impatient. And then so I'm asking ChatGPT regularly, like, you know, am I losing it too slow or am I losing too fast? Things that I kinda knew. Like, I I know that on average, you wanna lose about, you know, 1.2 pounds per week, but I'm still asking ChatGPT things I almost already know just to be reassured that I'm on the right path. And I'm having ChatGPT do some analysis, and it's not so much more like analysis that I needed to be successful. It was more like pleasing my brain that I'm gonna be okay, if that makes sense, because I'm, like, eating at a slight deficit. I don't know. Like, doing something new. I'm not seeing results super fast. I don't know if the results are too fast or too slow. Again, in the back of my mind, I kinda know, but I'm using ChatGPT more so as, like, motivation, I guess you could say. And so in the beginning, all I did was use the Carbon Diet app planner. I think it's just called Carbon. I'll just call it Carbon. Use Carbon, log what I ate, and then it has you jump on the scale once a week. And, again, like, it makes your calories go up or down for the following week, and then it adjusts each week. And I just found myself, like, well, I can't eat out too much just because it's harder to track and have an accurate idea of, like, what I'm inputting into carbon. So I found myself wanting to cook a little bit more at home. I am not a cook by any means. I never have been. I just never liked cooking. I probably shared it on this podcast, but, you know, who's a great cook or could teach me how to cook? ChatGPT. So I was telling Chatche Bitti, hey, I don't like cooking, but I do wanna cook some meals. I really like more satiating meals. I like cheesy meals. I like your quesadillas. I love your burritos. I love your pizzas. You know, I love things like that. So I was telling ChatGPT, here's what I would like to eat. And I know that realistically, like, I can't eat this every day. And this is how many calories I'm eating, per week. I typically like more dinners. Like, I don't really need a big breakfast. I'm not one of those people. Like, I've never really been a morning eater, and I don't really need, like, a huge lunch, maybe a light lunch. So ChatGPT gave me a bunch of ideas, and I went in my Notion, account, and then I created some pages of, like, these are the things I would like to eat. And then I had an idea of, like, oh, okay. When I'm hungry or if I'm planning for the week for meals, I could just go to my Notion and look at, like, what do I like to eat? Because of my ADHD brain and whatever, I don't really open the fridge much. I don't really go in the cupboards. I'll, like, order something without looking to see if we already have it. So now I've kind of trained my brain to go to Notion instead of ordering food or looking what to eat. Like, I go to Notion first. I go, oh, yeah. There's all these things that I like to eat that are either already existing in the fridge, and I could make it in, like, 10 minutes, or I could go grab the ingredients real quick and make it in 30 or something. And so having that menu to choose from was really nice because there are foods that were personalized to what I like, and I knew where to look for them. I didn't have to hold them in my brain. I wasn't like, what are all the things I like? I make too many decisions throughout the day to possibly need to, like, figure out all the preferences. I don't wanna be the best at picking out what I want to eat. Like, I don't know. Like, I'm just like, I just eat it, you know, if it's in front of me kind of thing. And Notion made that way easier with the help of AI. And I found the same thing for, like, breakfast foods, snacks, lunches, and things like that. I was like, let me just build a personal menu or and recipes sometimes of what I like to eat, and I could just have it stored there. And I started to do a similar thing with my workouts. So going to the gym, I was like, alright. I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to the gym, especially at that point. Going Monday, Wednesday, Friday, like, that's my goal. I don't wanna go for longer than 45 minutes or an hour. Here's kind of the idea I'm thinking, telling AI this. You know, I wanna do like a push workout, you know, my shoulders, chest on Monday, do a pull workout, my back, you know, bicep type stuff on Wednesdays, and then legs on Fridays. I don't really wanna do, you know, super heavy. I don't really want to do, super high reps either. Like, here's my weight. Here's my height. Things like that. Give me some workouts to do. Now I will tell you, this has been absolutely amazing. Up until about a week or 2 ago. I tried that again after I had been kind of running a modified version of what ChatChapiti had given me. Whatever ChatGPT gave me last time for legs, when I had put in my information, it was like, it killed me. It was so heavy. It was too much. So use at your own risk, all of this stuff. But definitely, just because ChatGPT says, hey, you could do this, I don't believe it. It was telling me, like, these front squats to do. I'm like, what? This is like 2.5 times my weight, and I have been reducing my calories over the last, like 8, 9 months. There's no way I'm gonna do peak lifting right at this time. Right? Maybe when I have hit my goal and then I start including more calories in my weekly consumption, but now is not the time for that. ChatGPT, even though I'd given it that information, didn't seem to care. So I just say that because, you gotta really use your own discretion when it's giving you, ideas about how much weight you could be lifting. And yeah. So looking back at, like, the last 9 months, using a combination of Carbon, ChatGPT to help me with nutrition and exercise and then knowing where to look. So when I'm hungry, I know that I need to look usually at Carbon first. Like, alright. How many calories do I have here? Also, am I really hungry? Just pausing for a second, going a little bit slower. Like, am I hungry, or am I just thirsty? How have I drink enough water today? Oh, maybe I'm just thirsty, or maybe I could just wait about another hour because I'll have a big meal with my wife or something. Having those boundaries, to me, it's like a budget that I have for money. I have the budget for calories. Having those, like, containers for me is extremely helpful because I just go to the limit. Right? If I have a limit of eating 2,000 calories per day, I'm gonna eat 2,000 calories per day. I'm not going to go for 1600 calories. I'm not gonna go for 3,000 calories. I'm just gonna hit it right at 2,000. I want it to be accurate. So sometimes that was like, oh, I'll eat a spoonful of cookie butter from Trader Joe's because that would hit me at, 2,000 calories. I'm not trying to be, like, under it. I'm trying to hit right at it. Same with the budget too. If I'm like, you know, I have $2,000 to spend this month on whatever. For the most part, I try to set the budget a reason behind the budget. Right? The budget is there to help me get better at something. Say, for example, I was gonna budget$2,000 to spend on, exploring AI tools. Well, then, like, I'm gonna spend that. I'm not gonna be like, well, I'm not gonna spend it because I don't wanna spend money on AI tools. No. Like, that's why I set $2,000 there to do that. And I think that's important because sometimes when people will set calorie, I'll say restrictions or calorie budgets, whatever, is that they try to eat under that or something. And it's, like, no. Eat up and to it. Like, I have not been hungry in the last 9 months. There's been a couple times where I'm, like, oh, I thought it was hungry, and I just had, like, a glass of water or something. I'm totally fine. But I have not struggled at all through losing 43lbs, whatsoever. If anything, it's been far easier because I've had to think about food far less, and I'm getting the best shape of my life. So I also share this stuff just because it is kind of an interesting use case of AI tools, and it's a blend of, like, the nuances of your own personal biochemistry mixed with these AI tools that, like, you know, aren't complete replacements for humans yet and using your own discretion to make it work for you so that you hit, like, real life goals. And it's worth noting to probably should have said this at the beginning, but the past 9 months have also been some of the busiest for me, personally, whether my wife breaking her leg, whether raising a toddler, taking care of, you know, the household, the fires, earthquakes, the neighbor's house exploded. There's just been a lot of stuff going on over here that would make it really easy to just say, you know what? Let me just grab dinner from somewhere and just, like, fall off whatever the wagon of my goals. But because I've been able to run this system, it's made it incredibly adaptable to the chaos, not super chaotic, but, you know, like, the the ups and downs of life. I'm like, well, if I can do it during this period of my life, there's really no excuses because it works. And that's why I wanted to share it with you today. So I hope this was helpful. If it was, let me know, and I'll catch you in the next one.