The Discipline of Shame

A fat loss story no one really tells

I wasn't going to write about weight loss. Too many of those stories already exist.

But this isn't really about that. It's about shedding expectations, and finding a way of living that finally made sense in my body.

I was teaching martial arts while actively avoiding mirrors.

Telling students to breathe, move, and trust their body - while mine felt like borrowed meat wrapped around shame. The gi pulled tight across my chest, seams straining. My knees made sounds like old floorboards when I demonstrated techniques.

But I kept bowing in.
Kept teaching the sacred while carrying the profane.

Not because I was lazy.
Not because I didn’t know better.
But because my body had become a stranger I was too embarrassed to introduce.

I’ve never been sedentary. Even during my heaviest years, I moved. A lot.

Training, teaching, traveling.
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu mats slick with other people’s sweat and my own quiet desperation.
Kickboxing drills that left me gasping... but still 250+ pounds.
Airport gates. Hotel gyms. Time zones that scrambled my eating like a slot machine.

Hotels, airports, stress, shame, mirrors, avoidance.

I didn’t drink soda. Haven’t in over 25 years.
Rarely touched alcohol. Still don’t.

So it wasn’t sugar water bloating me up like a parade float.

It was food. Stress. Depression. The slow-motion self-sabotage that happens when you stop recognizing yourself but keep pretending everything’s fine.
When every photo looks like someone wearing your face as a costume.

There’s a space people don’t talk about:

Being strong and ashamed.

Disciplined and inflamed.

Teaching others to trust their bodies while yours feels like evidence of your own failure.

I lived there for over a decade.

Living in Southern California while avoiding any place that required removing your shirt.

Pool parties became polite declines.
Beach trips with friends turned into: “I’ll meet you guys for dinner after.”

I wouldn’t even get in the water with my kids at the swimming pool.
Stood on the sidelines, fully clothed, while they splashed and called for me to join them.

The shame was stronger than my love for them in those moments.
That’s the part that still stings.

Avoided cameras like they were subpoenas.

There are whole years of my life barely documented because I’d find reasons to be behind the lens, never in front of it.

I became a master of strategic positioning in photos.
Always in the back.
Always angled.
Always wearing layers... even when it made no sense.

The weight wasn’t just physical.
It was cultural displacement made visible.

I’d spent my whole life adapting to different expectations.
The ha-fu kid in Japan who never quite fit.
The foreigner in Europe learning new rules.
Always adjusting, always trying to squeeze into systems that weren’t built for someone like me.

And here I was again.
Carrying extra weight like armor, hiding from my own reflection while teaching others to trust their bodies.

I stopped stepping on the scale the way you stop calling an ex.

I had all the tools and none of the answers.

Training BJJ a few times a week.
Sweating through Jeet Kune Do Kickboxing drills.
Teaching Karate to students who looked up to me for physical wisdom I couldn’t access myself.

Tried the delivery services where someone else makes your choices for you, shipping perfectly portioned meals to a guy who was still carrying 250+ pounds despite training almost daily.

Someone once suggested I Photoshop my head onto a body I admired.
I didn’t just consider it — I actually did it.
Saved the file on my computer and would look at it occasionally, this version of myself that existed only in pixels.

Embarrassing? Absolutely.
But maybe that ridiculous digital fantasy was the first time I let myself imagine being different.

The math should’ve worked. The effort was there.
But my body kept its secrets.

Done P90X - that late-night infomercial fitness program that was all the rage in the mid-2000s - until I got injured. Did it at least three times, actually. Dropped 40 pounds, then watched them crawl back like unwanted houseguests.

Even when I lost weight, it didn’t stick.
Because I didn’t.

The real shift came quietly.

Around April, 2010.

Almost 40 years old, resigned to being the chubby sensei who taught others what he couldn’t master himself.

Someone handed me The Primal Blueprint.
I’d heard of it... another diet book in a world drowning in diet books.

But this time, something clicked.

Like finding the right frequency after years of static.

Maybe it was timing. Maybe it was readiness.
Or maybe it was just the right message for someone who’d spent his life trying to adapt to broken systems.

I’m not going to lie… I wanted to look good naked.
I was tired of being the fat martial arts teacher.
The out-of-shape guy preaching physical discipline while avoiding mirrors.

This book said:

Forget the conventional wisdom. Go back to what’s fundamental.
Trust what’s natural instead of what’s marketed.

For someone who’d never quite fit anywhere, that felt like coming home.

It felt like permission to stop adapting to systems that weren’t working.
Like someone had handed me a map back to my own body.

And strangely, the path looked familiar.

I’d never been a breakfast person. My eating window had always been chaos - grab food when you could, where you could.

I thought I was undisciplined.
Lacking the structure everyone else seemed born with.

Then I read about intermittent fasting.
For the first time, my weird pattern had a name. And permission.

Skip breakfast. Eat when the sun’s out. Let the body rest between storms.

It made sense the way good technique makes sense: simple, clean, effective.

I went all in. The way I’ve always gone all in.

Dropped sugar. Grains. Anything that came in a box with promises.
No seed oils. Trained fasted when I could.
Eating like our bodies remembered being human instead of processing plants.

Moved daily - not always as workouts. Just as breathing. And for fun.

Started walking barefoot more. Switched to shoes that let my feet remember the ground.

Haven’t looked back in 15 years.

No spreadsheets.
No six-week transformations.
No before photos — because I was too ashamed to document the starting line.

Just sun, sweat, breath, and real food.
The simplicity felt like sanity returning.

The first two weeks were punishment.

Carb flu hit like food poisoning’s angry cousin.
Headaches that felt personal.
Fatigue that made thinking feel optional.
My body staging a revolt against the new rules.

Then something shifted.
Like an engine finally catching after grinding through winter.

Clear. Aligned. Good in a way I’d forgotten existed.

Not caffeinated good. Not jittery or artificial.
Just… right.

Five months or so later: 253 to 173 pounds.

A full identity shift hidden under loose clothes until it couldn’t hide anymore.

I didn’t take a shirtless photo until I’d lost over 25 pounds.
That’s how deep the shame ran - too embarrassed to document my own starting point, waiting until I’d earned the right to be seen.

Eventually I captured the arc:
225 → 173 → settled at 185, lean, strong, abs I hadn’t seen since high school.

Mark Sisson, the author of The Primal Blueprint, featured my story.
Invited me to be part of the second edition of his book.
I missed the deadline, but the invite mattered.

I wasn’t invisible anymore.

I believed in the approach so completely that I opened a martial arts school and named it Primal Academy.

Eight months after starting the diet, I was building my business around the philosophy that had rebuilt me.

The reactions were mixed.

“You look sick.”
“You’re losing weight too fast.”
“That much weight loss isn’t healthy.”
“I could never be that disciplined.”

As if discipline was harder than avoiding mirrors for years.
As if saying no to a donut was more difficult than saying no to the pool with your own kids.

But discipline isn’t white-knuckling through every meal...
It’s just habits that serve you instead of habits that don’t.

I’d already proven I could be incredibly disciplined at avoiding my own reflection.

Others called me “monk-like.”
They meant the discipline made them uncomfortable.

The way I could skip meals without drama.
Train fasted. Say no to things that everyone else seemed to need.

They called it depriving myself, but it felt like the opposite.
Finally not being deprived of my own body.

What they saw as extreme felt like freedom.
Not eating was easy - compared to carrying that old body around like luggage with broken wheels.
Compared to avoiding my own reflection.

That transformation held for years.
Five solid years at around 185 - my strongest point.

I felt at home in my skin for the first time since high school.
Taught with confidence.
Moved without apology.

But life crept in the way water finds cracks.

Injuries accumulated.
Decades of martial arts catching up with me.

Emotional baggage I thought I’d processed came roaring back.

Plans for a major move abroad got as far as putting the house up for sale before we decided to stay. The whole process left me feeling unsettled, like I’d prepared for one life and ended up with another.

The weight didn’t all come back - but enough did.
Enough to feel the familiar heaviness returning.
The old patterns lurking at the edges.

By my early fifties, my body had become a daily complaint department.
Shoulder pain from decades of punching.
Hip that remembered old injuries.
Ankle that never healed right.
I heard myself mentioning pain almost every day - as a karate teacher, as a photographer always moving, always demonstrating, always on my feet.

Something had to change.

I started moving with intention again.
Not just teaching, not just the photography hustle, but deliberate movement to rehab this collection of injuries I'd been carrying around.

Somewhere in those first few weeks, someone asked what kind of workouts I was doing.

"You should record it," they said.

Simple suggestion that took me a few days to process, then a few more to muster the courage to actually do.

Day 22, I hit record for the first time. Shirtless, no waiting to be worthy.
Because I'm not ashamed anymore.
Not of the fat.
Not of the cycles.
And if being visible in my own struggle helps just one person start moving again, then the vulnerability becomes worth it for reasons beyond myself.

Not ashamed of the part of me that goes all-in like an addict, that throws itself fully into whatever needs doing.
That part still works.

Today, I'm 54.

Down from 200 to 184 in 50+ days.

Not chasing abs or approval.
Just returning to form, the way you return to a practice you temporarily abandoned but never really forgot.

I'm not a before-and-after story.
I'm a still-at-it story.

This path isn't linear. But it's mine.

And every time I walk it again, I carry a little less shame, a little more wisdom.

Not because I figured it all out.
But because I stopped pretending I needed to.

This isn't a transformation story. It's a still-going story.

But here's the visual evidence - for the curious, or the skeptical.

The journey, 2010-2011