Never Stop Building
Sam Kaufman, an accomplished entrepreneur and thought leader, brings his wealth of experience and expertise to the forefront in each episode. With a captivating voice and a genuine passion for building, Sam creates a welcoming and dynamic atmosphere that draws in listeners from all walks of life.
In "Never Stop Building," Sam dives deep into the stories and journeys of remarkable individuals who have achieved great success in various industries. From startup founders and CEOs to creative artists and social entrepreneurs, Sam explores their triumphs, failures, and the lessons they learned along the way. Each episode is a captivating blend of personal anecdotes, valuable insights, and practical strategies that listeners can implement in their own lives.
What sets "Never Stop Building" apart is Sam's ability to extract powerful wisdom and actionable advice from his guests. He skillfully guides conversations, asking thought-provoking questions that delve into the mindset, strategies, and core principles behind their achievements. Listeners can expect to gain a deeper understanding of what it truly takes to overcome obstacles, cultivate resilience, and create impactful change.
Beyond interviews, "Never Stop Building" also features solo episodes where Sam shares his own perspectives, reflections, and strategies for personal and professional growth. His relatable storytelling style and ability to distill complex ideas into actionable steps make these episodes highly engaging and accessible.
Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a creative professional, or simply someone seeking inspiration and guidance, "Never Stop Building" offers a wealth of knowledge and inspiration to help you on your own journey. It's a podcast that encourages listeners to embrace their entrepreneurial spirit, embrace continuous learning, and never stop building their dreams.
Never Stop Building
Lessons Learned On My Fitness Journey
Embarking on a fitness journey can feel like navigating through a thick fog—confusing, daunting, and riddled with unexpected turns. Sam Kaufman's story is a testament to the transformative power of perseverance, shedding light on the path from obesity to balance. With brutal honesty, he shares the highs and lows of his personal odyssey, a tale that began in his teenage years with a significant weight loss but spiraled into arrogance, addiction, and a battle to reclaim his health. His narrative is a raw look at how a lack of support and the initial embarrassment in the gym can be overcome, leading to powerful lessons in resilience and self-discovery.
Guided by the expertise of his online fitness coach, Justin, Sam illuminates the intricate dance between effort, technique, and the surprising influence of gut health on overall vitality. This episode is not just about the physical transformation; it's about the mental and emotional growth that accompanies a genuine commitment to well-being. From understanding the importance of rest and recovery to embracing a balanced approach to nutrition, Sam's experience underlines the idea that there's no one-size-fits-all solution. His revelations about the long-term nature of achieving health goals, and finding harmony between fitness and life's other priorities, will inspire you to consider your own journey through a lens of patience and self-compassion.
Thank you for listening! If this podcast brings you value - do the whole community a solid and give it a rate, review or subscribe and send it to someone who would benefit from it.
Check Out Sam Kaufman here:
www.samkaufmanofficial.com
Instagram @samkaufmanofficial
Facebook @samkaufmanofficial
Linkedin @samkaufmanofficial
Welcome to Never Stop Building, where we discuss all things business, growth and leveling up to become the most elite version of yourself. We're here to challenge fear and shatter doubt. Let's dive in. What's up, everybody. Welcome back to Never Stop Building. I'm your host, sam Kaufman, as always always excited to see you here. Look at this piece of clothes on my shirt here. Sorry, I just noticed that if you're watching a content clip, you'll see it too. So, anyway, happy, excited, grateful to be here talking to you again this week.
Speaker 1:This episode was inspired by a question that I got and I sort of reworked and reworded the question a little bit to give it more of a full episode instead of a Q&A answer. And the question really, the way it's going to be answered today as a topic is what have the last 13 months on my fitness journey taught me? And before I get into that, I'm going to give a little bit of backstory about health and fitness for me just in general. So I have a lot of people have noticed the past year's transformation, which makes a ton of sense. The past year of my fitness journey has been the most transformational for me, not just physically from an outward perspective, but internally as well, from how I treat my body, my mind, how I view exercise and food and sleep and recovery and rest and all of those things and really like this has been a journey of harmonizing. And that's what I went into it with at the beginning of 2023 was my goal was. There was no scale goal, there was no body fat. Well, I had a body fat percentage goal, but the main goal was I was going to learn how to dedicate the time, energy and effort necessary to my body without sacrificing everything else in the process, and here's why I'll give you some context and backstory. So when I was 15 was the first time I lost 100 pounds and it was amazing and I didn't even realize I was. That's not the right way to put it. I didn't set out to lose 100 pounds, I was just sick and tired, the feeling sick and tired.
Speaker 1:As a 15 year old kid, I had been big my entire life, and by big I mean fat, overweight, obese. I was a chubby kid. I turned into, I was overweight, I was obese as a teenager and it sucked like it honestly sucked. I hated the way I was treated. I hated the attention I got for it. I hated being like, teased and like I wouldn't say I was like downright bullied Because like I was a big kid and I used that to my advantage and people really didn't like bully me per se, but like man I hated it. I hated the comments from friends and I hated being the fat kid. Everywhere I went Like that's like I really was and I was 15.
Speaker 1:And you know, I was dating a girl at the time and she was very nice and very supportive and I just wanted so badly to lose this weight and I started and I joined my parents, joined the YMCA for me and I started exercising at home, like going on walks and then jogs, and there was no system, there was no plan, there was no coaching, there was no professionals. My mom had this book called fat flush and it was all about like cleansing Internal organs and stuff and like I read that book and I implemented that diet and I lost some weight and I Was just messing around for a few months but I started seeing some progress, started losing some weight, I started doing some things and then I think it was either like I think it was my birthday that year Maybe, or Christmas, but like my, my mom got me a book called the encyclopedia of bodybuilding by Arnold Schwarzenegger and I think they came out in like the 80s or 90s or whatever. And I used that book and I built my own programming cardio training, food and basically at this time, like I was just like Super low carb, like I only ate carbs the first two meals of the day. I ate no carbs after 5 pm. There was no macro counting, there was no carb. I didn't know anything about macros or there was no macro calculators. I just had time limits and I had protein with every meal and I did the best I could to follow this and by the time I came into my next school year I had lost 100 pounds. I dropped a ton of weight that summer because I went running outdoors every day and I lifted every day and again, I had no idea what I was doing, but I lost 100 pounds and I Loved it.
Speaker 1:I loved the process of it. I always played sports as a kid. I actually loved to exercise. Like I've heard people be like oh, I go, you know you have to go exercise in the morning because if you don't you're never gonna go. Like. That's not me. I'm gonna go exercise every day regardless. I go in the morning in the season of my life, because it's most, most conducive to my career, my family time, like I don't have to go in the morning to go train. I love to train, I've always loved to train, I love to break a sweat, I love to get exercise like I really do love the process and I have forever.
Speaker 1:Now, in that time I lost that weight and I came back to school and I loved the attention I got for it more than I started loving the process and it created An arrogance. I had never been lean. I looked good. I had never been lean. I had never, ever had attention for that. It was always the polar opposite and man like I, like I, just I let it ruin the process for me. I ruined that relationship with that girl. I was like super into the attention from other people and you know, shortly thereafter I got into Drugs and alcohol and partying and that's like my drug addiction took off. I put on all the weight again. It was like I felt horrible about myself and you know it's crazy is like I'm like I'm the only, I'm the only junkie I knew who could be 70 pounds overweight and like not eating and so and I was like I was overweight and out of shape. You know it's a using addict, like.
Speaker 1:So when I got clean, I was out of shape, I was really unhealthy and it sucked. And so I got back in the gym right away when I got clean, because I love going to the gym, I loved the whole time. I was an active addiction. I missed working out. I missed liking my body. I missed the training and the cardio. I missed it. I just can't do it like. You're not gonna do that. You're not gonna. You can't even prioritize time to like eat or have relationships. You're not gonna go to the gym in active addiction. And so when I got clean in my early 20s, I Got back into lifting, but again I had no plan. No, I just love to lift. I was eating. My body was responding pretty well just because it was like so unhealthy for so long, like it was just so happy to be doing something healthy.
Speaker 1:But about a year after I got sober, man, I had a life. I started building a life. I had a wonderful relationship with my now wife and we have two kids and I started kind of like finding a career path and you know like I tried to continue exercising on and off. I tried to continue, you know, training on and off. I hired like a fitness trainer guy and I worked with him for like a couple weeks and then I just fell off and like I was in the trade work man, I was blue collar guy, I was doing Carpentry cabinet labor every single day. So it's like leave the house 5 30, get home at 8 o'clock at night Like I use that as an excuse and, honestly, like that's also Physically exhausting and I didn't know how to manage that.
Speaker 1:I didn't know how to work around that. I didn't know how to plan for that or eat for that or sleep for that or, and so I just didn't. And and so, like I put on more weight after I got clean, more weight and I started my business of more weight and you know, and then I lost some weight. Like right before my wife and I got married, we went on this like kick. We really wanted to look good at our wedding and I lost like 40 or 50 pounds and I felt good on our honeymoon and Came back, went back to work, growing the business, growing the construction company and man, by 2019, january 2019, I was just about 300 pounds, 290 something. The day that I weighed, where I was like horrified and I had probably at least 300. The day that I decided to actually Like stop. I still have the pictures.
Speaker 1:I took pictures of myself that day, january 2019, and also like what had happened up to that point was like I was smoking cigarettes and vaping and drinking energy drinks, eating garbage and, like my dad, has had a heart condition For decades, had a heart attack when I was 11. It was horrifying. Like my, you know, when he had that heart attack, my mom drove me to the hospital in the middle of the night to say goodbye to him. Like the doctor's called and said you have to bring his son. He's not gonna make it like it was. It was a lot, it really was. And so, like now I have kids and I'm smoking cigarettes every day, just like my dad did, and I'm eating garbage, just like my dad didn't. Like my dad was never overweight. He was lean his whole life, no matter what he ate or did or anything. I was overweight. Like I had all the signs that it was gonna happen to me too. He didn't even have the signs. He looked great, had a heart attack anyway in his 40s or at 50 or whatever it was.
Speaker 1:And so, leading up to this January 2019, in December, I had had some moments. I had a night where I woke up In like a panic sweat. I had had a nightmare about being dead and my kids graduating high school and me not being there and I couldn't shake it like I couldn't. I couldn't shake it through December, you know, I went through the holidays I ate garbage. I kept feeling, I kept thinking about it, thinking about it, thinking about it. And January 2019, man, I had had enough, enough, enough.
Speaker 1:And at this point my business was really like running with team leaders and I had an operations manager in place and she was doing a lot of the administration. Like I didn't have to be anywhere most days. I, I like, had my little office, I had my workspace, I had my, you know, I I could dedicate the time to exercise every day. I no longer had the excuse of all home on site all the time. It wasn't on site all the time anymore, you know, maybe once or twice a week walking projects. I was rarely doing installs. I was sometimes, but like rarely. And you know, january 2019, I had enough. I saw myself in the mirror, shirtless, and I was just disgusted and I took pictures of myself from the front and the side and I made those pictures right on the background of my home screen so I'd see them every day.
Speaker 1:I put the vape down, I threw the cigarettes out. I haven't vaped or had a cigarette since right, it's been over five years. I used nicotine, the Nicorette gum, to quit. I swapped about a month later from the Nicorette gum to some sugar-free gum and I just like to get the oral fixation thing because I was really addicted to the process of all of it the food and the nicotine and the vaping. It's all oral fixation addiction. It's process addiction and I have an addictive personality. Like I obviously have 10 and a half years in recovery. I can get addicted to anything and so I quit smoking, I quit vaping and I downloaded.
Speaker 1:There was this guy who I don't even remember his name but I remember his program was it was like fit to fat or fat to fit. It was a keto guy and like I paid like 200 bucks and I downloaded his workout routine and his meal plan. It was like a 60 or 90 day meal plan and I stuck to that thing. It adhered perfectly for that 60 or 90 days, man, and I lost like I lost like shit 30 or 40 pounds. I got down like 260 in like 90 days and I was so proud of myself I was doing.
Speaker 1:I was exercising at home because I was too embarrassed to go back into the gym. I had been, it had been a long time and when I did go into the gym I wore this giant Green Bay Packers hoodie. It was like a three XL. Now it's giant. It actually wasn't even giant on me then. It was just the only hoodie that fit comfortably. I was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie. I was too embarrassed to be there in a t-shirt. I was so embarrassed to be there at all. I hated going into the gym and I never felt that way. I loved going into the gym so I would do a lot of working out at home, running up and down the stairs for cardio. I bought an exercise ball to do like ab workouts.
Speaker 1:I was trying to do like pushups and sit ups and, man, I was like the most out of shape I'd ever been and but I stuck to it because I got sick and tired of being sick and tired. I got sick and tired of the thought that I wouldn't be around for my kids. I got sick and tired of hating my body. I got sick and tired of hating my mindset. I got sick and tired of being as fat as I am. It was crazy. I sent somebody a YouTube video. Galati all don't even like never saw any of this. I've been doing this making content thing since like 2018. I have a YouTube video out for me of my company from 2018 and unrecognizable, so overweight. So I have a goatee. Oh my God, it's like horrific. I tell my wife all the time you have me forever. The fact that you loved me through that, whatever that was, I'm yours forever.
Speaker 1:And I started doing it on my own man and in that process, like really, really, really had very little support, friends were teasing me. I would go out to eat and I would like I was like sneaking in pork rinds to the Mexican restaurant because I wasn't eating the chips so I could have some kind of crunchy snack and not feel like craving and just like be a part of and like people were like teasing me about it and why don't you just get this? And blah, blah, blah and like, dude, it sucked, it absolutely sucked. And like it's hard. When like it's also hard, like with the spouse, like spouses don't always immediately support either because, like you radically change the routine that's been routine in your house and like not everybody loves that and like it's unreasonable to expect everybody to love that or jump all over that and that's fair and fine as well. And so, man, it was like it wasn't easy and it was super lonely. It was just me. It was me and me. Nobody was working out with me, nobody was cooking for me, nobody was like I don't say my wife has always been supportive, but like nobody was supporting me and I wanted and had to do it for me.
Speaker 1:I got down to about 260 and at that time I was doing business with somebody who knew somebody who was an online fitness coach. His name was Luis Luis Estrada. I still love that dude. We don't talk nearly as much as we used to, but he was an amazing human being. He was young at the time, he was fitness, he was doing online fitness coaching and personal training and working full time in the medical field, and the dude hustles like not like many people, and we had an introduction. I'd never hired somebody like this before and I hired him. I hired him because I was at 260 and I was like stuck there and I didn't know what else to do. And the keto thing was like working for me. But like I felt terrible in training and I didn't know Like I didn't know at the time you needed carbs to fuel your training. I didn't know. That's why I was feeling dizzy. I didn't know why I wasn't getting stronger.
Speaker 1:I brought on an online coach and over the course of the following year, we went from 260 to like 185 and it was great, like I leaned down. I still have pictures of that too. It's crazy, like how much muscle mass I didn't have at 185. It's wild, like it's absolutely insane. And we got down to 185. And so from like that, from the 2019 to the end of 2020, I stayed with that guy. It's like two years, basically like two full years, and actually, no, it was the end of 2021. I was with him from 2019 to 2021, two years and we did like. We did like a bulk together, we did another cut together, we did the whole kind of like. We did it twice and he was great. He coached me through my first round of 75 hard, like it was amazing. And then, at the end of 2021, I had dieted down and I needed a break.
Speaker 1:So in this time, all of my dieting and all of my exercising came at the expense of everything else. I didn't care about kids If I was like dieting, I was dieting, I was rigid about it, I was emotional about it. I would snap at my wife if she even offered me a bite of something. I would get frustrated with my kids. They asked me to like have a piece of cake with them.
Speaker 1:Like I was not emotionally mature through this process in those first two years and I wouldn't say like I was a monster, but I definitely like expected everybody to like maneuver around my emotional immaturity and it was gross. Like I didn't think of it at the time. I didn't realize how entitled I was behaving. I didn't realize how nasty I was behaving. I didn't realize how ridiculous it was to like not be able to handle being around food. Like I couldn't like dude, I would like I would be like we can't go out to eat on date nights and blah, blah. Because like I wasn't mature enough to make decisions for myself. I wasn't mature enough to eat a clean meal out at a restaurant. I wasn't mature enough to take my wife for ice cream, either not get any or get a small, or like I wasn't mature yet and at the end of 2021, 2020 and 2021, business wise, we're just like incredibly hard, and I've talked about this a million times, I'm not going to go into it here, but going into 22, I was going to blow the company up big time. We were going to grow.
Speaker 1:I was just finishing up building a showroom, just finishing up putting together marketing plans for full interior renovation, full scale renovation, and like going into 22, I felt so tired. I felt so tired of eating meal plan, I felt so tired of doing weekly check-ins, I felt so tired of bulking and cutting and I didn't really know there was like a healthy or mental way to do this. So at the time I told my coach hey, I need to take a break, I'm done, I'm not doing this anymore. And like he understood and you know what I know now that I didn't know then was like a good coach, which he was will adjust and pivot and help your plan for the season of life that you're in. It's just like I didn't see that, I couldn't see. I thought it was either like do it the way I was doing it or I had to just stop for a while. What I know now is that a good coach will a good coach will pivot with you because life, season changes, man Stressors go up and down and things change and environments change and, like, good coaches will shift with you. And I'm so glad I know that now because that's what I do now with my current coach.
Speaker 1:So in 22, I hired another coach and it was just a very different kind of like planning. It was more like cross-fitting, just like get exercise in every day, track your macros instead of having meal plans, and I did that for the year 22,. But, like, I put like 40 pounds on and I was unhappy. And so like what I learned in that process and what's crazy is the reason that I, the reason I hired that coach at the time he's become one of my closest friends now. But the reason I hired the coach as a coach at the time was because I saw some people in business who were successful having him as a coach and I thought, well, I guess that's the kind of workouts I'm supposed to do if I'm gonna be successful. Blah, blah, blah. I was still in this comparison thing and feeling less than people and I was new to coaching in the development space and masterminds and I fell into the trends left and right and I'm glad I hired this guy because he taught me so much about the mindset of like really understanding that fitness and health is just a lifelong journey and I love the way that he incorporated like communication and being honest with yourself and, like you know, I just I appreciate the coaching. Though physically it didn't work for me, mentally it was very healthy.
Speaker 1:So 2022 was a huge successful business year. Externally, company grew by millions in revenue, I became a coach, I launched the podcast. All this really good stuff was happening. And yet again, just like what happened leading up to 2019, I put on, you know, 50 pounds. I was 205 in October of 21. I was 245 December of 2020. I was 25 December of 2022. Put on 40 pounds again and my body looked like shit and I felt like shit again and so going into 23,.
Speaker 1:The reason I share all that with you when people ask me like, oh, like this year, it's not a year. It hasn't been a year. It's not a year. Transformation, it's a five year. Transformation it's a learning about myself. Transformation it's a I've done everything Keto and Paleo and Liquid and Herbalife and Carnivore, and then I've done it all Like this isn't. I didn't just like wake up at the end of 22 and go like, oh, I'm gonna look great at the end of 23. Like that's not what happened. I wasn't new to working out, I wasn't a beginner lifter. I like in my coaching with that coach Louise, like he taught me how to lift, like now my new coach taught me how to lift better, like for my body and my like.
Speaker 1:And so, going into 23, when I hired the coach I have now, I actually had him on my podcast. He's on an episode like 50 episodes ago. Justin Mahaley and I had been following him since like 2019, when I first really got into like newer bodybuilding, and I always listened to his podcast. He's got a podcast called Grow or Die. It is not just bodybuilding, so if you're interested, go check it out. But I always wanted to hire him to coach me and I had him on my podcast. I sent him a DM in like Q4, 22, just shooting my shot. Hey, man, been following you for a while. We actually met in Charleston at a show an MPC show in 2020. And he was a great dude and I invited him on the podcast and he graciously accepted and came on the podcast and we had an incredible conversation about stacking habits and growth and pivoting and change and all this stuff. And the minute the podcast ended I was like all right, that's it, I'm gonna hire this guy for next year. And so I reached out, filled out the application, got the process started, going to kick off in January of 23. And, man, justin, what happened in 23? That really shifted the reason why, like I now, the reason you see the transformation that you see now compared to what happened before.
Speaker 1:There's some really really, really key things that Justin taught me in this process. Justin and I are still working together and for the foreseeable future, I see that happening for quite some time, cause I have a lot of goals. Physically, I guess I'll take some time to hit them, but a couple of the key things that I've learned being coached by Justin one of the biggest as far as body transformation goes is training effort. There is so much to be said about training hard as hell, properly, not just going in and training as a trying to sweat as much as possible, but training with good technique and really high effort. That is. I don't want to say everything because there's a lot of components, but that has been a the biggest game changer for me from a training perspective has been training properly with incredibly high effort, and what we do is I send one to three training videos every single week and I get critique, and I've done that, maybe barring a couple of weeks like on vacation or like, but I've done that for a year. Plus three videos a week, that's like 150 critique videos that I've sent. If you do the math that I've gotten critique on every week, there's something to improve by 1% in some movement somewhere. And so constantly improving training and never just like it's not like.
Speaker 1:Justin's whole philosophy that's really been important to me that I've applied in other areas is we want to get the most out of the least weight possible. Why go for the heaviest load just to say it's heavy, just to risk injury, just to put plates and plates and plates on the bar? What we want to do is we want to get the highest output, the highest result out of the least risk, least load that we can possibly get by completely, completely isolating and contracting the muscle. And so I love that. That's translatable into everything business and lie all of it, all of it. The other thing that's been huge over the last 13 months that I never did before was healing my gut, my gut health, and I didn't know I had bad gut health until we came on and I started taking supplements and eating in a way that was most conducive for gut health, and it took like six or seven months to really like, really show its true, like healing properties in my life. But fixing my gut health has repaired sleep, digestion, nutrient intake, my mental health, like it's crazy the impact that a healthy gut versus an unhealthy gut has, and so that has been wildly important and impactful.
Speaker 1:One of the other really really key things over the last 13 months that's been massively transformative for me is understanding that. It's understanding that we have to be autonomous, in a sense, about our rest and our recovery and our output. And I say that because there's a reason. I say that because in the past, almost like in the past, it was always like I never treated rest and recovery as an initiative. It was always just like what you did when with what was left.
Speaker 1:And over the last 13 months we've tailored everything around the ability to rest and recover. We only train as many days of the week or as much intensity as we can recover from Cause. Once we train above our recovery capability, we literally have declining results. Right, the law of diminishing returns. Now we have diminishing returns on training effort. Now we're training for no reason some days we can't recover from it, we can't rest from it, we can't grow from it. That's been huge. So I've been able to pull back, rest more, recover more, train four days a week, three days a week or five days a week, based on what my can do from a recovery standpoint, and see more progress. And so, like the key there has been able to be patient, understanding that the progress is coming either way and I don't need like that. And so, like I'll roll into the next thing, which is getting your dream body is not a 12 week transformation. It's not. It could take six months a year, two years, three years, like as great as we ended up last year.
Speaker 1:We had to take a break from dieting right around November because stressors in my life shot up, and so, once stressors shot up, we pulled back the stress of dieting and, like this is amazing to me Like the dieting goal did not supersede the take care of my life goal. This is huge. This is huge. In the past, I would have dieted through anything and ruined a lot of things along the way. We pulled back and went into a maintenance mode for four months. That gave me the ability to handle, to prioritize and handle the stressors that were coming in every other area of my life, which is amazing. Now we're on the other side of a lot of those stressors and so now we can now talk about going back into a diet phase. So, like I didn't even get to, like I didn't hit my dream body last year, I hit amazing progress, even better than I thought I was gonna hit.
Speaker 1:But I'm okay with the reality that this is going to take time and that my wife and my kids and my career they're all more important than my body, how it looks, not how it feels, not being healthy, not rest and recovery, but like all those things are more important than like six pack abs. Now I'm going for that goal, shredded six packs on my post and on my mirror. I'm going for that goal, but I don't care how long it takes, because I'm not going to sacrifice the other things that are more important than that. That's a totally self-serving, self vanity goal. That's not for anybody else. Like my wife doesn't care, she loves me. My kids don't care. They think my son thinks I'm the strongest dude he's ever met. Like it's not for anybody else, meaning it cannot be. I can't sacrifice other people and the more important priorities to get it. Okay. That's huge for me. Huge for me. You know I've also learned that like and this before like there's no bad foods, there's no bad foods.
Speaker 1:I eat on a meal plan 85% of the time and you know I've learned how to substitute some macros. I went to Italy for two weeks last year and I came back healthier than I left and I trained like five times over two weeks. I did no structured cardio, where typically I do cardio four or five times a week. I ate in Italy and Greece. I ate, I ate and had gelato. I came back like 10, 12 pounds of water weight heavier. It was gone in two weeks and my life was better because of it. You know how much stress I would have had two years ago if I had tried to do that. I would have tried to, like, hit my meal. I would have fucking panicked. I didn't do that last year. I just enjoyed my life in moderation, eating good food as clean as I could, but enjoying myself, stopping when I'm full, like these are the huge key components to doing this for life.
Speaker 1:Like, consistency is key. And consistency is a roller coaster of really really good fall off. A little bit really good fall off Like it's okay. I don't mean fall off as in quit, it's just like not every day is a perfect day. Consistency doesn't say every day is a perfect day. Consistency says every day I'm going to show up. That's the key. I never had that before. Everything I did was in bursts and sprints.
Speaker 1:Man, I used to live for cheat meals. My old coach used to was to prescribe a cheat meal once a week and I lived for that. I literally would send my check-in. I'd sit there anxiously staring at my phone for hours waiting for how big of a cheat meal I got that day. Justin doesn't do cheat meals. He does. Man like, make it work. But like, stick to the plan. But like, if you're going to go out on a date with your wife, like, one of my meals is 93, seven beef and sweet potatoes. If I'm going out to dinner with my wife on a date, get a filet mignon and a baked potato. It's the same freaking meal and it's delicious. I don't need to go out and have a super-sized McDonald. I don't need that, I don't live for that anymore and that's huge for me. Even this week, for instance, I'll share, like right now.
Speaker 1:Like my birthday was this past Wednesday, my wife's birthday on Monday, I sent my, I sent Justin a voice note. I said, hey, man, I'm going to enjoy my birthday. I'm just going to eat kind of what I want. I'm going to enjoy my wife's birthday, eat kind of what I want, what she wants. And he was like cool man, check in Wednesday instead of Monday. Let's get two days in between. We'll get some accurate readings. We'll get right back on it. Like that's important to me. You have no idea how many birthday meals I skipped.
Speaker 1:And I'm not like. I'm not like opposed to that either. There's a time and place for, hey, I have my meal prep. There's a time and place for ham not eating that right now. There's a time and place for all of it. The thing is, I was unable to judge the time and place. I was just all in or all out. Man.
Speaker 1:I, on those cheat meal days, I used to eat myself sick once a week and then spend all week dealing with the Inflammation and the gut issues and this feeling disgusting, just a hope. I lost another pat. Like I'm never gonna live like that again. Like I don't like that. And so one of the most, one of the coolest things about healing the gut for me has been that now, like I Am able to judge full versus hungry way better than I used to be. Like I get full. Like if I want to have dessert with my family, I get full eating some dessert. Dude, I used to just be able to stuff and never feel full until I was sick, and so, like, this been a huge transformation over the last 13 months. But it hasn't just been what you've seen From a shape of my body perspective, but the shape of my body is also directly correlated to the rest of recovery the gut health, the mental health and the ability to stick with it consistently instead of having 12 week bursts, and so like, yeah, I wanted to.
Speaker 1:I want to take this time and dive into a little bit more detail and Share a little bit more of like what the journey has been like, why it's been important, what the 13 months, this past 13 months, has been like in comparison to the five years I've actually been on the journey. It's not new. I didn't just start this and like I appreciate that there's people have known me for three of those five years didn't even know. Like I appreciate that not everybody knew. But like I'm deep into this journey, learning about myself. And so when I hear people like Starting now and talking about, like, what did you do last year? Well, last year I did a lot of different than I did the four years prior.
Speaker 1:So like, just stick with it, stick with it, try some things, see what works for you know, bodybuilding is not gonna work for everybody. That's my favorite style of training in cardio and coaching. And like it's not gonna work for everybody. So people love CrossFit, love Peloton rides, love Orange theory. It doesn't matter what you do. Whatever it is that you have to enjoy and that's what I. Like I love bodybuilding style Training, cardio, eating, coaching. So like that's what I'm gonna do and there's a better way, healthier way to do it and I'm glad I have a coach that helps me do that. But yeah, that's the. That's the kind of the, the longer story, if you have any other questions about it what I do, what I take like supplements I take, or foods that I eat or refuse to eat, or what causes infel m-like. Just hit me up in the DM, send me a message or shoot me an email info at Sam Kauffman official comm and I'll answer whatever questions you have. So All right guys, thanks for listening. Love y'all. I'll talk to you next week you.
