Meet Jonathan Ressler And Shut Up And Choose

In this first episode of Shut Up And Choose, Jonathan Ressler discusses his journey of losing 130 lbs in less than a year and gives some background information on what this podcast will be like

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Transcript

  If you're a whiny snowflake that can't handle the truth, is offended by the word fuck and about 37 uses of it in different forms, gets ass hurt when you hear someone speak the absolute real and raw truth,  you should leave. 

This is Shut Up and Choose. The podcast where we cut through the shit and get real about weight loss, life, and everything in between. We get into the nitty gritty of making small, smart choices. that add up to big results. From what's on your plate to how you approach life's challenges, we'll explore how the simple act of choosing differently can transform your health, your mindset, and your entire freakin life.

So, if you're ready to cut through the bullshit and start making some real changes, then buckle up and shut up. Because we're about to choose our way to a healthier, healthier world.  This is Shut Up and Choose. Let's do this. Now your host, Jonathan Ressler. 

Welcome to Shut Up and Choose, the podcast that'll show you how to lose that weight once and for all or do pretty much anything else you want without all the bullshit. So like you heard in my intro, if you're afraid of the F word, also known as fuck, this is not the podcast for you. I say pretty much whatever I want.

I mean, it's my podcast after all, I should be able to say whatever I want. If on the other hand, you want to finally lose that weight, do it effortlessly and keep it off, then you're definitely in the right place. So put on your big boy or your big girl pants and get ready to learn how you can take control of your eating and your life once and for all. 

Hey, cool. You're still here. So anyway, my name is Jonathan Ressler and I'm going to share with you how I lost over 130 pounds in under a year, all while eating anything I want to do. That's right. I eat whatever I want to do and still lost a lot of weight. Oh, and by the way, I did no exercise at all. None. 

Uh, actually that may not be true. Uh, I did drive by the gym a few times and I did beep the horn. So I guess that's got to count for something.  So let me start out by telling you, I'm not a doctor. I have no fancy degree in nutrition or exercise or anything like that. And I don't even own a lab coat.  Well, the lab coat thing is mostly because they're white and when I used to eat, I ate so fast and furiously that I always dropped something on my shirt, my coat, whatever it is I was wearing, and I stained it.

So I kind of didn't like that, but at any rate, I digress. I'm just a regular guy who figured out how to lose weight, and a lot of it, without fad diets, pills, shots, surgeries, or anything else. I mean, I basically cracked the code, kind of.  And I learned how to lose weight and still eat whatever I wanted to. 

So having said that, there's only three possible reasons that you're listening to this.  First, is that you're a friend of mine, and you're doing me a favor by listening. I just want to say thank you, and I really appreciate you being here. Hopefully you give me some great feedback. The second reason is you think I'm funny and you love to hear what comes out of my mouth because you'd never know what gems I'm going to spew out. 

Probably not likely. And the third, which is the most likely is that you're fat. Now fat can mean you're 15 pounds overweight or 150 pounds overweight. It doesn't matter. It's all relative. But if you want to lose weight, which is probably why you're here, then you have to kind of admit that you're fat.  I mean, that's why you're here, right? 

Just so we're on the same page. I want to let you know that I am the self proclaimed king of yo yo dieting Uh, let me start out by saying if there is a diet out there i've been on it. Okay, Weight Watchers did it Nutrisystem  Paleo did it and fucking loved it. I mean, who wouldn't love a diet where you can eat fistfuls of bacon and steak and hamburgers and all kinds of great stuff.

I'm incredible. Juicing did it. I did it for 90 days and I was fucking amazed that a human being could go that long without eating anything solid, without chewing basically. Atkins. Keto, Suzanne Somers, intermittent fasting, the Mediterranean diet, Noom, Dash, Zone, Pritikin, South Beach, Jenny Craig, SlimFast, I did them all and I killed it on every one of those diets.

Every diet I was on, I lost weight. But the problem is, As soon as you go off the diet, as soon as you start putting in the things that you have to take out in a diet because the diet is restrictive, I put all the weight back on and in my usual fashion, I put it on with a whole bunch of extra pounds too. 

So how did I lose 130 pounds and keep every pound off and have not come back for over a year? Well, It's pretty simple. Actually, I just shut up and chose.  I literally chose to lose the weight. It was a simple choice. And the reality is if you're fat right now, whether that's those 10 or 15 pounds or those 150 or 200 pounds, you're fat because of the choices you made.

It's your fault. It's nobody else's fault. It's not your genetics. It's not your special disease. It's not any of that crap  It's because you chose and probably continued to choose to be fat may not be conscious But you're making choices to be fat, but we'll get into that before I start spilling the beans on All kinds of stuff.

Let me tell you my story Because I've had an entire life of fat fuckery. I mean, I'm talking about almost 60 years worth.  I've been overweight my whole life, and to be honest, by clinical standards, I definitely still am. I'm 6'3 and as of today, I weigh 285 pounds. I'm still a big guy, okay? I don't look good or graceful doing ballet in a tutu.

I definitely would not want to see myself in a speedo. And I surely don't get a blown around in windstorms.  I wear a double XL shirt now and have a size 42 waist. That's down from a size 54 pants and a five or six XL shirt, depending on the cut. And even those were a little bit tight. Sometimes my shoes still are still a 13 or 14.

I mean, I'm always going to be a big guy and that's just a fact, But big Israel live. So as far as I'm concerned, fuck clinical standards, I look and feel completely different. And I lost 130 pounds and I'm still going. So I know I'm much healthier than I've been for more than 25 years. And I feel incredible.

Like I told you before, I did all this literally with no exercise. Having said that, I also have no illusions or even aspirations of having like an Adonis body ripped like a bodybuilder to look like Arnold. You know, I mean, that's not what I want. I want to be fit. I want to be healthy and I want to be able to have a normal life.

And I didn't have a normal life when I weighed 411  pounds. I mean, that's craziness. So on April 24th of 2023, I started this journey.  411 pounds. Yes, you heard that right. 411 pounds. I was that guy that you stared at when you were out with your friends and said, Holy shit, look at the size of that guy. I mean, you know, I was, I was, I didn't even look human.

I looked like someone put an air hose up my ass and inflated me. I looked like I was really ready to have like quadruplets.  I couldn't walk a hundred feet. I couldn't wear shoes because my feet were so swollen and I was so fat that I couldn't tie my shoes. So I wore slides everywhere. I mean, I was not living a normal person's life.

I was not,  I was trapped. I was humongous and I couldn't figure out a way to do it. And the idea Of going on a traditional diet  just was not appealing to me. That honestly was overwhelming. And you may feel that way if you have to lose 15 pounds or like I said, 150 pounds, the thought of going on a diet and restricting what you eat and putting yourself through all this torture just is not appealing.

So before people start like losing their shit and sending me emails and saying, I'm not saying to exercise, I'm, I did it without exercise because I was too fat to exercise one day. I may want to exercise again. I don't know. I mean, when that day comes, I can assure you that I'll do what I need to do, that I'll make the choices I need to make and I will exercise, but I don't want you to think that you need to exercise to lose his weight because the truth is you don't.

If you just make smart choices, you can lose the weight and I'm living proof of that. So I'm going to tell you how I turned it all around. But. In order to do that, I need to give you a little bit of history and let you know where I was. I mean, I'm not going to go all the way back to my childhood because like I said, I've had a lifetime of fat fuckery.

Um, I was overweight and I kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and then I get smaller, then I get bigger, then I get smaller, then I get bigger until I got to my biggest weight. Um,  which again was 411 pounds, which is just shocking. So  for my, I don't know, last five or six years, I've had, uh, Uncontrollable gout.

For those of you that don't know what gout is, I mean, technically it's a buildup of uric acid in your body and the pain of gout is mind bending. Okay. It's like they say the pain of gout is the equivalent of taking whatever joint is being affected and imagine putting it in a vice and tightening it as tight as you can make it.

Then you turn it one more turn and that's the pain of gout. Now, most people get gout. In their, in their big toe, that's where it seems to affect 90 percent of the people, but not me. I was an all pro. I mean, yes, it started out a long time ago on my big toe, but I get it in pretty much every joint on my body, my hands, my knuckles, my wrist, my elbow, my shoulder, my knees, my ankles.

I get gout everywhere. Like I said, If you look up gout in the dictionary, I think my picture might come up. So I was all pro when it came to gout. That was terrible. The pain was intense, but one of the things that happens with gout is you get really swollen  in that joint. And I seem to get gout a lot in my legs and my legs were humongous.

In fact, my gout was so bad that I was hospitalized for it. I'm probably 10 different or 15 different occasions. And I was at the emergency room with a gout attack. Certainly. I don't know, once or twice a month. And in the end I was getting it quite a bit more. So let's go back to about 2017, 2018. I was getting gout all the time.

The gout flares were getting more and more intense. Um, and even though I didn't want to admit it, I knew it was weight related. So in maybe 2018, I went on paleo, lost a ton of weight, was feeling good. Um, everything was going great. And then I.  Paleo. I became like  somewhat paleo, not completely paleo. And sure enough, the bad choices stacked up and I put all the way back on plus more. 

My weight thing has always been, you know, I hit a certain number. I remember when I first got to 300 pounds, I was like, oh man, I gotta lose weight. Then the number are jumped to three and a quarter, then three 50, then 3 75. At 3 75. I said, man, I really, I, there's no way I'm gonna hit 400. Then I hit 400, and then I topped out at four 11.

During that time.  All those kind of ups and downs I did, uh, Nutrisystem, I did Paleo, I did, well, you name it, I did the diet. Like I said, they all work. They all work. But as soon as you go off them, the weight eventually comes back. There's just no two ways about it. Diet, traditional diets. Work as a band aid to get down to a certain weight,  but as soon as you go off them they no longer work and I needed to figure something out because Honestly at 411 pounds the thought of going on another diet the thought of the amount of weight I had to lose was just it was just overwhelming.

I I just I I couldn't I couldn't even Fathom how I was gonna do this. So if we jump again to 2023 in April I was once again hospitalized this time You I got sepsis and sepsis. If you don't know what that is, that's basically your body trying to kill itself. It's poisoning your blood. And it's not, the prognosis is never good.

I mean, people don't get sepsis and live. I got sepsis twice and live both times. I mean, somehow, some way I, I, I beat this thing and, and I'm still here, but I was laying in the hospital with sepsis. I finally got myself better. I went home.  And I could barely walk. I couldn't do anything, but I was so happy that people would just stop telling me to fucking lose weight and tell me I was going to die and tell me I should consider bariatric surgery and all this shit, because the truth is my thought in my head was like, look, I know what I'm doing, you know, of course I'm a little bit sore and I can't get around that well because.

You know, I just got out of the hospital. Give me a fucking break. Will you? I, you know, I know I have to lose weight. I don't need you to tell me. I didn't need my brother to tell me. I didn't need my cardiologist to tell me. And I went back home and I just went right back to eating shit. I went right back to it and I said, I'm going to start a diet tomorrow.

The number, probably the number one shittiest excuse for not dieting or the shitty excuse for putting it off. So yeah, I'm going to start tomorrow. I'm going to start after the holidays or whatever it is, but I always had an excuse. And when I was going to start it and why I couldn't start it today because I had stuff to do and I was going to go out to dinner the next day with someone and I didn't want to be on a diet.

There's always an excuse, but the reality is if you want to lose the weight, you got to make a choice and you got to start the diet. So here's what happened to me  over the years as I got bigger and bigger, I became masterful at not being in any photographs and not being able to see myself on any reflective surface.

I literally could go to the bathroom, brush my teeth and not see myself in the mirror. It was, it was remarkable, but it's something that you kind of teach yourself to do. Some of you probably know what I'm talking about. So anyway, I got out of the hospital and my birthday was coming up, uh, on April 24th, which is when I started this kind of whole journey.

And a friend of mine named Vicky told me that she was going to do something really stupid for me on my birthday, because I wouldn't let her come see me because of the way I looked. I was, I, you know, I just couldn't, I couldn't bear that. So she sent me this. Stupid Pink singing Gorillagram, which you can read more about in my book.

But the bottom line was at the end of the day, I was forced to see a photograph of myself. And when I saw that photograph of myself, I could not fucking believe what I looked like. I mean, I had built up this image of myself in my head that was nothing. Nothing like what I really looked like. I mean, I looked like I was having quadruplets, like I said before.

I mean, I was massive. So I thought to myself, wow, I really needed to do something, you know? And I, I, I just can't do a diet. Um, I thought about doing Ozempic and you know, I started thinking all this crazy stuff, but in the end I decided I was going to do bariatric surgery. Did the research, I found out all about it.

Um, and I did it all in a couple hours because I, I realized I had to do something and then I started thinking about bariatric surgery 'cause I was gonna go to Mexico and do it there. And anyway, long story short is I ended up not doing the bariatric surgery, but I said, you know what?  Yeah, I made the appointment and if I decide to do it, I'll do it.

But they tell you when you're gonna get bariatric surgery that you should.  Start eating less to kind of prepare yourself for this. And that really made me think,  I started to think about everything I was putting in my mouth, everything I stopped eating mindlessly, you know, like if I put something in my mouth, I was like, okay, is this in line with my goal?

I want to, I want to live, you know, that, that was my goal. I want to be around. So if I eat this donut or if I eat this piece of cake or this fast food or whatever junk I was putting in my mouth, is that really in line with what I'm thinking?  You know, is that in line with what I want to achieve? And, you know, I couldn't do another diet.

I just couldn't, I couldn't bring myself to, you know, limit what I, what I was eating, because to be perfectly honest, the only joy that I had left in my life because I was so fat was to eat. I couldn't walk. I mean, I was winded if I walked 100 feet, I couldn't go out socially because it was too embarrassing to go from the car to any place where I was going to meet somebody.

I was winded. I mean, I was, you know, I know it's kind of a cliche, but you know, the bigger I got, the smaller my world became. It really did. I was massive. And I understand that some of you that are listening to this, you know, are not in that position, but you may be, but either way, at the end of the day, it really comes down to like making smart choices and really thinking about what you're putting in your mouth.

Basically, I decided that I had to take responsibility for me being fat.  It wasn't any, anybody else's fault. It wasn't my genetics. It wasn't any of that. It was, I was making bad choices. And if you have 15 pounds to lose or 50 pounds or a hundred pounds or 200 pounds, you need to lose that weight.  Because of the choices you made.

And I'm going to tell you more about choices and how to make the choices and goals and the goals that I set. And my thoughts on diet, which, you know, I think diets don't, you know, they, uh, I take it back. They do work, but they don't give you sustainable results. I'll talk about Ozempic. I'll talk about a whole bunch of shit on this podcast.

Um, that's just really kind of. Things that I learned along my journey, uh, April 24th will be one year. And hopefully I'll be down like a little bit over 135 pounds by the time April 24th comes around. But  the reality is if you want to lose weight and keep it off, you absolutely can, and I'm living proof of that.

And, you know, I definitely want to share my experience, share this journey. You know, I'm just about one year into it and I, I know I'll be on it for the rest of my life. So.  If you want to lose 15 pounds or 50 pounds or 150 pounds I'm gonna share everything that I did and talk about a whole bunch of different shit because you know, I think it's  It's not that hard.

We make it hard the diet industry tries to make it hard The exercise gurus try to tell you, you got to do this workout and that workout. And the reality is I fucking hate the gym. So for me, if it was about going to the gym and by the way, I don't think you can do enough exercise to burn enough calories to lose that kind of weight.

But for me, if it was about going to the gym, I would. I would fail immediately because I fucking hate it there. You know, I just don't like going to the gym and I proved you can do it without going to the gym and I'm not saying exercise wouldn't have helped. I probably would have lost weight faster, but I did it.

I did over 130 pounds with no exercise at all. So if I did it, you can do it. Anybody can do it. So on this podcast, like I said, I'm going to share a bunch of stuff. I have a few people that I want to interview who have some, you know, real scientific thoughts on why mindful eating and think about what goes into your mouth, uh, is the only way to go.

I'm going to talk about.  Setting your goals because a goal is important and saying, I want to weigh. This is not a fucking goal saying I don't lose 25 pounds by my sister's wedding is not a fucking goal. There's a million reasons why I'll get into that. You can also read about it in my book and I'm just going to, you know, ramble about my journey and, and hopefully inspire people to want to follow what I did.

It's not like there's some meal plan or some exercise. There's none of that shit. You can eat whatever you want, but you'll be surprised what you want to eat when you start seeing the results. Once I started seeing results, the whole want what I wanted to eat completely changed because I wanted to lose weight.

I wanted to lose weight more than I wanted to eat donuts. I never said. You know that I couldn't eat doughnuts and no food was off limits.  I kind of figured out what I really wanted. So that's what this podcast is all about. That's what it's going to be about. I can't promise you it's always going to be great, but I'm going to do my best.

And I got a lot of shit to share and hopefully you'll tune back in and listen to it. You can also buy my book. Which is called shut up and choose. It's available on Amazon starting April 24th. And, you know, you can follow me on Instagram, which is Jonathan wrestler, Boca Raton. Uh, you can read my blog, which is also Jonathan wrestler, Boca Raton.

com. Um, and that's kind of it. I mean, that's Basically all I got today. I hope you were entertained if you were offended by my language or anything else I said, you know, sorry too bad. I mean i'm just telling the truth Tell them the way it is hopefully exposing the diet industry industry for the kind of bullshit scam it is and really I hope that I can inspire people to lose weight the right way.

Um, I, I have a lot to say. I have a lot of experience. Like I said, I've had a lifetime of fat fuckery. I know what it's like to be fat. Um, and I know what it's like to diet. And I just want to share with people that, you know, you don't need to  torture yourself to lose the weight you can eat.  Anything you want and live a great life and not have to be on diet and not have to restrict yourself and really get yourself healthy with the power of your mind.

So with that being said, I'm going to sign off and you know, I hope you subscribe and I hope you like my podcast and uh, I hope to see you again. Thanks. Talk to you later.  You've been listening to Shut Up and Choose.  Jonathan's passion is to share his journey of shedding 130 pounds in less than a year without any of the usual gimmicks.

No diets. No pills. And we'll let you in on a little secret.  No fucking gym.  And guess what? You can do it too. We hope you enjoyed the show. We had a fucking blast. If you did, make sure to like, rate, and review. We'll be back soon, but in the meantime, find Jonathan on Instagram at JonathanWrestlerBocaRaton. 

Until next time, shut up and choose.