No Bullshit Welcome

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You're listening to Shut Up and Choose, the no bullshit, no excuses podcast for people who swear they wanna lose weight but keep choosing everything that stops them. And before we continue, if you're gonna bitch and moan and act like a fucking pussy the entire time, skip this one Hosted by Jonathan Ressler. This dude dropped 140 pounds with no shots, no diets, no pills, and not one single fucking membership swipe at the gym. Just real choices that fit real life. If you're tired of gimmicks, tired of the bullshit, and ready for somebody to finally call you out and tell you the truth, you are in the right place. Cravings, stress eating, late night sabotage, travel traps, holiday chaos, this show punches all of that right in its fat face. Stop dieting, start choosing. This is Shut Up and Choose.

You Care, You’re Just Aiming Wrong

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Now, here's Jonathan Hey, welcome back to Shut Up and Choose, the podcast that cuts through the noise, the nonsense, and all the bullshit that you're hearing out there on the internet from those Instagram influencers and TikTok twits, and all those so-called experts who don't know shit about losing weight, who've never lost a pound on their own. They're basically just out there trying to sell you shit. So you know what I think is complete bullshit? The idea that you haven't lost weight because you don't care enough. You care. You care plenty. In fact, some of you care so fucking much about losing weight that you've turned it into a part-time research job. You'll spend three hours comparing diets and watching videos about metabolism, reading about your macros, bunch of shit, researching supplements, figure out which workout burns the most calories, and listen to some, like, 26-year-old little punk ass so-called influencer explain why the blueberries that you've been eating lately are apparently destroying your fucking life. You'll research intermittent fasting, then keto, then carnivore, maybe GLP-1. Then you'll figure out your protein requirements and read about cortisol and how it's fucking you up, and insulin and meal timing. You'll stare at the scale every morning like it's about to reveal the meaning of life. The reason I know that is 'cause I did all that shit. You give a fuck about all of it. Then you walk into the kitchen at nine o'clock at night, see some cookies sitting on the counter, grab a couple of them, eat them while standing without spending five fucking seconds deciding whether you even want them. That's the problem. You don't have a caring problem, you have an aim problem. You give plenty of fucks. You keep aiming at the shit that doesn't change anything. You're obsessed with finding the perfect plan while you ignore the imperfect little decisions that you make 50, maybe 100 times a week. You wanna try to figure out why the carbohydrates are making you fat, but you don't wanna talk about why you ate another 1,000 calories after dinner when you weren't hungry. Or you wanna figure out the perfect eating window, but you still don't even stop for 10 seconds before taking that big second plate. You wanna know whether your metabolism's slow. I, God, I, I know I did. But you'll order an appetizer, dinner, drinks, and dessert because it's Saturday night, and then Monday comes and you decide you need a better plan. No, you need to give a fuck about different things. 'Cause the plan isn't sitting in front of the refrigerator at 10 o'clock at night. You are. That macro calculator isn't ordering dinner at the restaurant. You are. The scale isn't deciding whether you need another slice of pizza. You are And I think we've made weight loss so fucking complicated because complexity gives us somewhere to hide. Hey, if I'm still researching, I don't have to choose anything yet. And if I haven't found the right plan, I can tell myself that's why I haven't started. And if the diet wasn't perfect, I can blame that motherfucker. I can blame that diet. If Monday is my official starting day, I can eat like an asshole all weekend because apparently choices made before Monday don't count. Meanwhile, your life keeps moving and so does your body. You don't need to care more, and you don't need more motivation, and you don't need another plan to get excited about for three weeks. You need to become incredibly selective about what deserves your attention. Stop giving so much of a fuck about the scale or the perfect diet or the perfect workout, the perfect Monday, and what everybody else is doing. Start giving a fuck about the decision sitting right in front of you right now because your body doesn't know how much research you did. It only knows what you repeatedly choose. And I get it. The wrong fucks, they feel important. But here's where it gets dangerous. A lot of the shit you're giving your attention to actually looks important. That's why it's so easy to get sucked into it.

The Scale, Monday, And Noise

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Take the scale. People will let that fucking number dictate the entire emotional temperature of their day. You wake up feeling pretty good, step on the scale, and you're up a pound and a half. Suddenly, you're fucking pissed off. Yesterday might not have worked. Maybe you ate too much. Maybe you need to cut something out. Maybe you need to go tighten things up. Meanwhile, you've absolutely no idea why the scale moves. It could be water, it could be sodium, it could be digestion. Who knows? But now you've handed a bathroom appliance the authority to dictate whether yesterday was successful. That's fucking nuts. That's insane. The scale can give you information, fine. But people turn information into judgment, and then they start making decisions based on that judgment. Same kind of thing happens with Monday. I fucking hate when Monday's become a weight loss. Monday is apparently this magical portal where human beings suddenly become disciplined. You can eat like a lunatic Saturday night, keep it rolling through Sunday because, hey, the weekend's already shot, And then wake up Monday morning as a completely different person. Why? What exactly happens at midnight on Sunday? Nothing. Your body doesn't know it's Monday. It doesn't give a shit that you bought groceries and threw away the Oreos. Tuesday afternoon is coming, and Tuesday afternoon doesn't give a shit how motivated you felt Monday morning. And then there's the endless obsession with what everybody else is doing. Your friend lost thirty pounds on keto, so maybe you should do keto, or someone at work is taking a GLP-1, and suddenly you're wondering, "Hey, maybe that's my answer." Some guy online eats nothing but meat and butter, and it looks fantastic, so now carbohydrates are on trial. Who gives a shit? Seriously. What does somebody else's breakfast have to do with the way you live? I've watched people completely abandon common sense because a stranger with visible abs told them bananas have too much sugar, and meanwhile, these same people already know where most of their problems are. You know when you're eating because you're bored or when your portion's ridiculous or when you're full, but you keep going because the food tastes good. You know the difference between having dessert 'cause you really want it and just eating dessert because everybody else ordered it. Most of us aren't walking around completely confused about every bite of food we put in our mouths. We just keep assigning enormous importance to things that deserve very little of our attention while treating everyday decisions like background noise. A- and I get it. I understand why. The big shit, that feels official. A diet has a name and rules, and a scale gives you a number, and an influencer gives you instructions, and Monday gives you a starting line. A random Wednesday night when you're standing in your kitchen deciding whether you actually want something doesn't feel important enough to change your life. But your body doesn't rank decisions by how impressive they look. That boring Wednesday, it counts, and so does Friday night, and so does the food you eat in your car that you barely remember eating. Start noticing how much mental energy you're spending on things that have almost no control over what you actually do, because you only have so many fucks to give. You might wanna stop wasting them.

Thinking Feels Safe, Choices Don’t

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There's another reason people get trapped in all this shit, and I don't think we talk about it enough. Thinking feels responsible. You can spend an enormous amount of time thinking about losing weight and genuinely feel like you're doing something about losing weight. You can worry about it all day or feel guilty about what you ate yesterday or promise yourself you're gonna get serious. You can lie in bed at night thinking about how different your life would be 20, 40, 80 pounds lighter. There, there's a lot of emotion involved in that. There just isn't necessarily any change, and that distinction matters because thinking gives you something choosing doesn't, distance from consequences. A choice is immediate. Once you make it, it belongs to you. That can be uncomfortable as hell. It's much easier to debate whether you should have Chinese or Italian for dinner than to admit you already know what you're gonna order once you open the menu. It's easier to blame a stressful week than acknowledge that the stress has become your standing permission slip Those moments, they require something of you. Thinking about changing doesn't, and after enough years of doing this, something else happens. People get tired, really fucking tired. They've started over so many times that they don't even wanna get excited anymore. Believe me, I get that. I understand that in my soul. Lost 25 pounds and gained 30 back. They bought a program, made the promise, cleaned out the kitchen, and had all the conversations with themselves. I've been there. I've done every diet under the sun. I've lost all the weight, and I've put it all back on. I've done that 100 times. But eventually you're gonna hear this, "Whatever. I tried everything. I'm just gonna enjoy my life." I understand how somebody gets there, believe me, I do. Repeated failure wears you down. Eventually, disappointment starts feeling worse than staying where you are. But be careful when you start calling that acceptance. Sometimes the I don't care anymore is just frustration that's been sitting around long enough to change its name, and there's a huge difference between making peace with yourself and giving up on yourself. You can love yourself exactly where you are and still decide something needs to change. You can enjoy food and still decide you've had enough. You can have a shitty week without turning it into a six-month surrender. That requires you to stay involved in your own decisions, especially when you're tired of the whole fucking subject, and maybe that's where you are right now. Maybe you don't need another burst of enthusiasm. Maybe hearing someone tell you that this time is gonna be different makes you wanna punch 'em in their fucking face. Good. Forget the enthusiasm. You don't have to believe you're about to completely transform your life. You only have to stop checking out when the decision becomes uncomfortable, because checking out is still a decision. Saying fuck it, that's still a decision. Deciding you'll deal with it later, still a decision, and those decisions count just as much as the ones you make when you're fired up and convinced you're finally gonna change. You don't need to spend more time thinking about what you want. You probably already know. I'm guessing you do. I know I knew what I wanted. The harder question is, how often are you willing to stay present enough to choose it? What you really need to do is give a fuck about the next choice. So you're saying, "Where should I give a fuck?" Right here, about whatever choice is sitting in front of you. That sounds almost insultingly simple, especially if you spent years believing weight loss requires some massive overhaul of your life. But I think that's exactly why people overlook it. We've been trained to believe something as difficult as losing 50 or 100 pounds must require an equally massive solution.

Losing 140 Pounds One Meal

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Hey, I, I believed that shit for years. For 59 years I belie-- I weighed over 400 pounds. You don't get to 411 pounds without having plenty of time to think about losing weight. I thought about it constantly. I knew I needed to lose the weight. I wanted to lose the weight. There were times I desperately wanted to lose the weight. And then, like millions of other people, I kept looking at the size of the problem. It, it was overwhelming. When you need to lose 140 pounds, and I didn't know that's what I ultimately needed to lose, but when you need to lose over 100 pounds, thinking about losing it is fucking exhausting. It feels impossible before you even begin. Your brain immediately starts calculating what this is going to require. How long is this gonna take? What am I gonna have to give up? What am I gonna eat? Am I ever gonna be able to have pizza again, or donuts? What happens when I go out to dinner? What about vacation? What about holidays? You're trying to solve situations that haven't even happened yet. I finally realized I didn't need to know how I was gonna lose 140 pounds. I just needed to figure out dinner. That changed everything for me, 'cause dinner was something I could actually do something about. If I ordered a burger, I could decide whether I wanted the fries or not. If I wanted fries, I could fucking eat the fries. Maybe I didn't eat all of them. Maybe tonight I absolutely wanted to eat all of them. Either way, now I was making a decision instead of blindly following a set of rules. That distinction became incredibly important. I wasn't trying to become the guy who never ate pizza again. I love pizza. I love donuts. I love the shit that people say is bad for you. I wasn't interested in building some new identity where suddenly I thought grilled chicken and broccoli were more exciting than a fucking hamburger. That guy doesn't exist. What I changed was how I handled the moment. If

Ask If It’s Worth It

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I was eating pizza, I started paying attention to when the pizza stopped being worth it. Maybe the first slice was fucking fantastic, and the second was pretty damn good, too. The third was good, and then there was slice four. And slice four is interesting because sometimes the slice four is exactly what I wanted, but sometimes slice four is just there. That became the question. Is this actually worth it to me? Not, not am I allowed to eat this. I hate that fucking question. Who's allowing you? I, I'm an adult. I don't need someone else's permission to eat something. Eat whatever the fuck I want. The better question is whether what you're about to do is worth what comes with it. That puts you back in charge. I started doing that everywhere. Not perfectly, certainly, and not every meal. I didn't suddenly become some Zen fucking master of food. I just started catching more of the moments. There were meals definitely where I ate too much, and there were days where I made shitty choices that didn't help me at all. There were plenty of times when I knew exactly what the smarter choice was, and I chose the other thing anyway. But something important changed. I stopped believing every decision needed to be perfect for the process to work. I only needed enough of them to be better. That's how I lost 140 pounds. There was no magical morning where I woke up and finally discovered the perfect plan I didn't uncover some secret combination of foods that everyone else missed, and I sure as shit didn't develop superhuman discipline. I stopped waiting for the answer and started dealing with the fucking choice in front of me, and then I did it again and again. Over time, something I could have never accomplished in one giant decision happened because of thousands of ordinary ones. That's the part I want you to understand. You're probably looking at your goal right now as an enormous problem. I know I was. I did. Maybe you need to lose thirty pounds. Maybe it's seventy-five. Maybe it's a hundred and fifty. Whatever the number is, you can't lose any of those amounts today. So why are you trying to mentally carry all of it today? You can handle tonight or the next restaurant. You can handle what happens when someone puts a basket of bread on the table. And handling it doesn't automatically mean saying no. May- maybe you want that bread. Well, have the fucking bread. Just be there when the decision happens. That's the freedom people miss when they hear me talk about choices. They assume I'm secretly describing a restriction with nicer language. I'm not. Restriction says you can't have it. Choice says you can have anything, but you don't need everything. That's a massive difference. Once I understood that, food stopped having the same power over me because there was nothing to rebel against. Nobody was telling me I couldn't eat a cheeseburger. Nobody was telling me dessert was forbidden. There wasn't a diet for me to cheat on. There was simply a decision and whatever came with it. That's where I want you putting your energy. Care less about constructing the perfect year. Give a fuck about dinner. Give a fuck when you're deciding whether you actually want seconds. And give a fuck when the next slice of pizza stops tasting nearly as good as the first one did. Give a fuck when you realize you're eating something simply because it's sitting there. Those moments look way too small to produce a hundred and forty-pound transformation. I know. I used to think so too. Turns out I was looking for something bigger when the answer was sitting right in front of me the entire fucking time And by the way, this isn't just a weight loss problem, and we do this shit everywhere.

The Same Trap In Life

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Look at money. Someone will spend six months researching the perfect investment. They're comparing funds, watching videos, studying interest rates, and worrying about whether the market is about to crash. Meanwhile, they're spending $1,500 more than they make every month. Maybe Vanguard versus Fidelity isn't the fucking emergency. Same thing happens with careers. People stay in jobs they hate for five years, waiting for the perfect opportunity to appear. They talk about changing careers. They update their resume. They think about starting a business. They imagine what their life would look like if they finally did something different, and then another year disappears. And relationships, shit, th- that, that might be the clearest example of all. People will analyze a relationship to death. They replay conversations in their head. They'll complain to their friends, spend months trying to figure out what the other person meant by something they said on a Tuesday six weeks ago. But they don't sit across from that person and have one uncomfortable fucking conversation they already know needs to happen. That's the pattern. We're fascinated by giant solutions because giant solutions usually live somewhere in the future. The uncomfortable little decision lives right now, and right now is where you can actually be held accountable. You dream about starting a business forever. Sending the first proposal can get rejected. You think about fixing your relationship forever. Starting the conversation might lead to somewhere you don't wanna go. You can think about losing weight forever. Leaving half the fries on your plate requires you to make a decision while fries are still sitting there. Same fuck, different problem. We keep directing our attention toward the enormous outcome while ignoring the ordinary decisions that actually create it. And that's why I wanna bring this right back to your weight because I'm not asking you to fix your finances, quit your job, repair your relationship and lose 50 pounds by next Thursday. I'm asking you to recognize a pattern. The next time you catch yourself obsessing about how much weight you have to lose, how long it's gonna take, or whether you finally found the thing that's gonna work, come back to where you actually have some power. What are you choosing right now? That's where the whole fucking thing lives. That's where it happens, so stop giving a fuck about the plan. Here's what I wanna leave you. You probably give way more attention to your weight than you admit. You think about it when you get dressed and when someone else takes a picture of you, when you see someone else who lost weight, or when you walk past a mirror at the wrong angle. You think about it when your clothes get tight or you're getting winded doing something that really shouldn't wind you, Or when you tell yourself for the hundredth time that you really need to do something about this. So I'm not gonna tell you to care more. You already fucking care. I want you to get much more selective about where that energy goes, because you can spend the next year being incredibly concerned about your weight without changing a goddamn thing. You can worry about 50 pounds while eating dinner tonight exactly the way you always do. You can hate the number on the scale tomorrow morning and still make the same choices tomorrow afternoon. You can promise yourself this time you're serious and find yourself six months from now wondering where the fuck the time went. I know that cycle because I lived it. At over 400 pounds, there was no shortage of reasons for me to change. I had plenty of moments where I looked at myself and thought, "What the fuck are you doing?" But none of those moments changed me. What changed me most was eventually understanding that 140 pounds was never going to come off because I cared about losing 140 pounds. It was gonna come off because of what I did when the next choice showed up. That's the entire idea I want stuck in your head after this episode. Stop giving a fuck about things you can't act on right now. You can't lose 50 pounds tonight. You can decide what dinner looks like, and you can't guarantee what you'll weigh six months from now, but you can decide whether you actually want what you're about to eat. You can't promise that every choice you make from this point forward will be brilliant. That, that's insanity, and thank God for that because what a miserable fucking way to live. You're gonna eat too much sometimes. You're gonna have a dessert. You're gonna order the fries. You're gonna make decisions that move you in the wrong direction 'cause sometimes the experience is worth it to you. Own it. Then keep going. That is so much more powerful than spending your life bouncing between restriction and regret.

Find Your Three And Next Steps

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And if you're listening to this thing, "Okay, but where the fuck do I start?" I, I made something specifically for that. It's called Find Your Three. It's a completely free worksheet designed to help you identify three choices in your own life that you can start changing right now. Not 30, three. Because I don't want you leaving this episode with a notebook full of shit you're supposedly gonna change. I want you to find a few decisions that happen regularly enough that changing them can actually matter. Maybe yours happens at night. Maybe it's what you order when you eat out. Maybe it's portion. Maybe, maybe it's something completely different. I'm telling you, find your three. That gives you somewhere real to begin, and it's free. So go grab the Find Your Three worksheet and actually fucking use it. Don't download it and let it die in your inbox with the 47 other things you were definitely gonna read someday. You can get that on my website, jonathanressler.com. Then if you wanna understand the entire philosophy behind what I'm talking about, grab my book, Shut Up and Choose. It's on Amazon. The book explains how I went from over 400 pounds to losing 140 pounds without building my life around a diet. It's about learning how to live in the real world with restaurants, and weekends, and vacations, and pizza, and shitty days, and all the other things that tend to blow up traditional weight loss plans. And if you wanna go even deeper and figure out exactly where your choices are screwing you, book a 60-minute choice reset with me at jonathanressler.com. That's you and me for an hour. We're gonna look at how you actually live. We're going to find the decisions that keep repeating, the places where you keep getting stuck, and the choices that are costing you the most. I'm not gonna give you some generic meal plan or tell you how to eat six ounces of chicken at 4:37 in the afternoon. I wanna find a few things you can actually move the needle in your life and make them simple enough that you'll be doing them after the excitement wears off, because you've probably spent enough of your life giving a fuck about losing weight. Give a fuck about something smaller. Give a fuck about something you control. Give a fuck about the choice sitting in front of you, then make it. And when that next choice shows up, you know what to do. Shut up and choose Thanks for listening to Shut Up and Choose. If today's episode slapped you with some truth, good. That means it worked, and you've dropped the pussy attitude. Make sure to like, rate, and review, and connect with Jonathan on Instagram @jonathanresslerfatloss, on YouTube at Jonathan Ressler, and online at jonathanressler.com. No diets, no gimmicks, no excuses, no bullshit. Just smarter choices, starting the second you hit stop on this episode. Shut up and choose. Now, go make a better fucking choice.