Name: Ethan Suplee's Amazing Weight Loss Journey
Uploaded: 2021-05-04T17:36:53.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Ethan Suplee's Amazing Weight Loss Journey' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-04. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Ethan Suplee's Amazing Weight Loss Journey' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-04. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- If I didn't know who you were, and I ran into 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 jiu-jitsu.
I'd be like, fuck that guy, let me get away from him,
he's too big.
You look fucking great, man.
- That's awesome.
This is the greatest compliment I've ever gotten.
Thank you very much.
By the way, 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.
And 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 since then?
- 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.
- And what are you at right now?
- 270.
- That is incredible.
- That is so incredible.
So you've lost more than 200 pounds.
- Oh yeah, yeah.
- Solid.
- I've lost 200 pounds a couple of times.
- But you've also put on muscle.
Like you're a 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.
So under every obese person,
there's a person with more than average muscle.
- Mm.
- So.
- 'Cause they have to carry around all their weight.
- Yeah.
You're naturally building muscle just by raising your heavier arm.
- I used to always say that to Ralphie Mae.
- Yeah.
- 'Cause Ralphie Mae 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.
- "Just to be able to carry around."
- I have gnarly calves.
- I bet you do, dude.
- 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.
- Yeah.
- Let's go to, can you show me a photo of Ethan when he was at his heaviest?
So find me.
So has this affected your work because, you know, 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, um, 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.
And you're a lot bigger than me.
It's crazy to see.
- I looked, I thought I looked, um, gaunt.
- God.
That's insane.
Look at those two fucking pictures.
Like, like if a girl broke up with you when you were on the left and then ran
into you,
you know, at the fucking airport when you were on the right, I mean, that is
bonkers,
man.
- Yeah.
- It's incredible.
- Yeah.
- That's incredible.
- That's my favorite picture and that's not even downlighting.
I, 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 downlighting.
- Oh, that's fine.
- So that's not even as good a picture as it could have been.
- Downlighting.
That's what everybody wants for abs.
- Yeah.
- They want downlighting.
- You see the guns.
Um, so your, your training regimen must be like pretty strict though.
Look at that fucking picture.
That is so bananas, dude.
- Yeah.
- What, what movie is that from?
- Remember the Titans.
- Wow.
- Yeah.
That, that, that wasn't even the heaviest.
- That, that's not the heaviest?
- I mean, I was probably close to 500 there, but no, that's, that's not even
the heaviest.
I don't know what to point to.
Like 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 you know, look, the reality is that, um, I
don't, I, I
have mental illness and I can't, 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 cause 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, you know, that's also a long time ago.
And I just don't, I cannot relate to how I lived then.
- Wow.
- It, it, it, it's, it's, 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.
- And it, what it, what do you think is, what's fueling that distorted
perception?
- I, when I go back to like my childhood, I was put on a diet when I was five.
And prior to that, I had no sense of self there, I existed and clearly I, 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, or just as a thing itself, it just was.
And then at five, I was put on this diet and all these, uh, parts of me were
pointed out
as being super negative.
And so I just-
- At five years old.
And I really, and by the way, in fairness, if you look at the average five-year-old
today,
I wasn't like, 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.
- 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.
Um, but I, I spent most of my life feeling wrong, like literally that I was
wrong or bad,
or there was some, some just super negative about myself.
And so I still have to fight through that today.
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