I had a client one time named Amulus. He was in his 30s, overweight — not grossly overweight — but just overweight. But he didn’t feel that way at all. He swore he had man boobs. I mean he had every excuse in the book.

First day that I worked with him I looked at him and I saw him walk around and he tells me god damn it, I really am so excited to be working with you because really all this information that you’ve given me today I’ll be able to use in seven months.

And I looked at him and I said seven months?! How did you come up with seven months from now? He said, “That’s when I’m going to be my ideal weight.” So I looked at him, I said “Have you ever been your ideal weight?” He goes never. I said that’s great. I said so in seven months you’re going to finally be your ideal weight: What’s going to happen between now and the next seven months? He says “I’m going to try every diet under the rainbow, one of them sure will be my ideal diet. I picked out seven and each of them is going to take one month to complete, so I’ll know at the end of the month which diet is working, and I’ll stay with it.”

I looked at him and I said you’re mad. I said that’s ridiculous. I said maybe you’re at your ideal weight right now. Maybe you’re supposed to be this way. And he looks at me and he goes “No, no, no I’ve got to be fit, I’ve got to be trim. I’ve got to meet women this way. Women don’t want my body like that.” I said really, there’s tons of women that look like you and tons of women that feel like you.

The Dating Diet

I asked him if he ever thought about going to a gym. He didn’t have time for the gym.

It’s funny how many people will go around and look for the ideal diet but never exercise. Exercise is your ideal diet. I can write up any diet right now for any of you, and I can come up with a wonderful diet that’s really healthy and as long as you work out — I guarantee if you did it every single day over seven months — you would lose weight.

But the problem is everybody’s looking for the miracle diet: The Hollywood diet, the Tampa diet, the New York diet, the dog diet, the cat diet, the “crush it” diet, the “stock market” diet. You know what the stock market diet is? Put your money all in one stock, and watch it go down. And from all the stress in your body you’ll lose all the weight. Here’s another diet, it’s called a baby diet. Put yourself in a room full of seven babies. You’ll never sleep, you’ll never want to eat, your nerves will constantly be frayed from all the crying and screaming, and you lose all the weight. These diets have never been done before, but they’re obviously as good as any other.

So I looked at him during our coaching session, and I said, “Take off your shirt.” So he took off his shirt, and he stood there, and he was trying to cover it all up! He started covering up what he thought was man boobs, and I looked at him, I told him he looked fine, he looked great. This is your body, love it, love it every single day, nurture it every single day, embrace it every day and get your butt to the gym.

“Turn around.” Made him turn around. Checked out his butt, I checked out his body, and I said these are the exercises you need to do: Swim 20 minutes a day, and cardio for 30 minutes a day. Let’s go around and pick out food. That’s what we did the first day: We went, and we picked out foods. Of course we picked out foods, and we were meeting other people and so forth, and what I finally taught him was in life, you might be seven months from having the perfect body, but that’s just your excuse. You meet people every single day. No one’s looking at you and wondering wow I’m going to be really attracted to this person seven months down the road.