How I Set Out To Lose 20 Pounds in Two Months and Did Not Get Even Close

Three easy steps to watching the wheels fly off spectacularly

***Just a reminder: Jesse Singal of Blocked and Reported and I will be doing shows at The Village Underground in New York City and The DC Improv in Washington DC on March 22 and 23. Hope to see you there!

Fitness advice is a staple of Substack newsletters. People love reading about how the author got ripped abs, a shredded back, and an ass that could crack walnuts (but won’t, for sanitary reasons). These inspirational stories all carry the same message: You can do it.

But I detect an enormous amount of survivorship bias in these stories. We only hear about the plans that worked — nobody spins a yarn about how they created an ambitious plan to turn their life around and then didn’t do jack shit. That is: They didn’t until today. This article is counter-programming to the plethora of fitness success stories on Substack. My tale is a stand-in for the countless untold stories of people shooting for the stars and ending up lying on the couch eating Cheez-Its and watching Zoolander. My fitness program is described below, and I invite you to replicate it, though it’s likely that you already have in some form.

Step 1: Create an exercise plan while hopped up on caffeine that will seem laughably ambitious soon afterwards.

Caffeine should be a Schedule 1 drug; it turns me into a hideous freak brimming with self-confidence and optimism, two traits that Normal Me does not possess. I was in that altered state when I opened an Excel sheet one morning and assembled a color-coded, bazillion step workout plan, and let me tell you: In hindsight, that thing is the work of a deranged mind. There are manifestos by serial killers scrawled in blood that are more sensible than my workout plan. The fact that just making the Excel sheet left me slightly winded should have been an indication that typing “300 burpees” is far-and-away the funniest joke I’ve ever written.

If you want to quickly and permanently blow off a workout plan, I highly recommend circuit training, which involves several low-weight-high-rep exercises done with no breaks in between. The genius of this method is that it only takes one lady using the kettlebell that you need for you to go “Aw, cripes — I’m all thrown off!” And then, you can rationalize ditching the whole workout. Remember: The key to blowing off a workout plan is finding little reasons why you couldn’t work out, and convincing yourself that it wasn’t your fault, and in fact, maybe you deserve some ice cream as a treat because that mean kettlebell lady thwarted your plans.

For that reason, you’ll also want to schedule some “max lift” days to quickly injure yourself and justify several weeks of sloth. One set of bench press at 30% beyond what you can actually lift should be enough to strain your entire upper half and send your colon shooting out of your anus like a ribbon eel emerging from coral. Pro tip: Have several attractive women around when you do this so that you’ll press on even as your body self-Chernobyls.

Step 2: Adopt a gimmicky diet plan invented by sociopaths

I saw a tweet that said that the key to weight loss is to eat half a watermelon every day at breakfast. I didn’t research the science behind the tweet, because developing a diet plan is already boring enough, I didn’t want to go into Boredom Overtime becoming a diet expert. Let’s face it: I lack the educational background and attention span needed to understand the science of health, so I’m obviously going to get suckered by some “one simple trick” scam — it might as well be the first one I see. Plus, clicking on the watermelon tweet signed me up for a really legit-looking online Russian casino, so they probably know their stuff.

My first watermelon breakfast was somewhat refreshing. The second one was fine. The third one was…unwelcome. By day ten, I would rather have eaten an elephant’s snatch than a watermelon. Eating half a watermelon is also massively inconvenient — you can’t exactly take it with you in the car on the way to work. You also have to either constantly buy fresh watermelons or have one room in your house filled up with watermelons like a fraternity prank.

Every diet boils down to “eat less”. There’s nothing magic about watermelon; the key to that plan is limiting your breakfast options to something that you will soon not want to eat. It’s like Atkins: Carbs aren’t poison, but they’re in everything, so Atkins can work because it amounts to “don’t eat the thing that is in basically all food”. Losing weight ultimately involves eating less than your body wants, which means feeling hungry, and pretty much every diet is a roundabout way of delivering that bad news.

Step 3: Develop ways to lie to yourself about your lack of progress

Muscle weighs more than fat. And that’s why — even as my fitness plan lost power in both engines and began a steep descent towards a mountain — I could convince myself that everything was going fine. Maybe I was just putting on A LOT of muscle, especially in my midsection. Yep, that was probably it: I was becoming Gut Hercules, amassing layer upon layer of mighty, flabby belly muscle.

This is important, though: Lying to yourself should only be part of the first month of your plan. In month two, you should transition to a strict regimen of admitting that your plan has gone disastrously off the rails, and that sticking with it now would be pointless. I find this dichotomy to be one of the big challenges of a fitness plan: Believing “it’s going great” and “it’s gone so wrong that it can’t be salvaged” in close proximity isn’t easy. Though, once you’ve been through this cycle several times — as I have — you get a lot better at making the shift.

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Okay, end of bit, but only sort of: Everything that I just described is more-or-less true. I have had successful fitness plans in my life, and I have had unsuccessful ones, and the unsuccessful ones basically follow the pattern above. My hot take on improving one’s physical fitness is that it’s possible, but hard. The “diets don’t work” people are wrong, you can change your body, I’ve done it, but it’s fucking hard. You really have to be in the right mental space and life situation for a sustained period of time in order to make it happen. The times when I’ve embarked on a plan without being fully committed are when I’ve achieved the results described above.

I roll my eyes at the breezy “I did it and so can you!” tone of many fitness posts. Maybe those stories are real, maybe someone’s fitness journey was a life-affirming jaunt through a field of daisies, but here’s my truth: My body loves Twizzlers and ice cream and wants me to be a lazy fat fuck. When I’ve succeeded at altering my body’s natural state, I’ve done it by suppressing my natural urges like a gay Mormon at swim camp. And when I didn’t succeed, I’ve thought “hey, we all make choices” and accepted the choice that I made. And now, a record of the latter type of experience exists on Substack at least once.

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