Welcome to 2023 on the CSC blog everyone! Above is a video I compiled of a great majority of the surfing I did in front of a camera in 2022. I left out the SoloShot clips since it’s long enough already. As I have attested below and in my newsletters, I went through a radical diet and fitness transformation in 2022. By May (post Chile trip) I was in major lower back pain and I could tell my pants were fitting tighter than normal. I have one pair of chinos that are the litmus test for whether I’m losing, gaining, or maintaining weight. Do you have one pair of clothing like that? It’s weird it should be all the clothing, but there’s one pair in particular that really tells me what is going on. And in May they were uncomfortably tight. Then I went and got my yearly physical. The scale didn’t lie. 153, almost an all time high for me. I think 155 is the highest I’ve gone. I’m 5’6”. Truth be told, on a person of my height, getting near to 160 is going towards obesity. That may not be a popular opinion in today’s “body positive” social media climate, but it is also a scientific fact that I, for one, am not going to refute or deny. I am also aware that I was not obese during 2022 or any time before, and that I was doing some pretty damn fine surfing. I definitely made progress during the pandemic just by adding a daily yoga practice into my life. But yoga and surfing were not enough to keep me in optimal surf shape. I was in pain. And I had astronomically high cholesterol. So what did I do? I went vegan and hired a diet and fitness coach. The results fall just short of miraculous. Check out these side by side photos of me in January 2022 vs December 2022:
In the first picture I was pretty pleased with how I looked. I had some slight ab definition, and was drinking beer and eating whatever the hell I wanted. But you can see some extra fat around my belly button area, and those shorts are a size 32! In the second pic, the belly fat is gone, and the shorts are size 30. I actually can’t even wear those shorts surfing because they’re a little too baggy for that now. I’m now around 136-141 lbs (weight is something that fluctuates, not a static number), have a six pack, and those chinos that were tight? Yeah those are baggy on me now. Most importantly of all, I FEEL FKING GREAT. And I think you can see the change in my surfing in the video. Pop up is faster. Pumps have more oomph. Cutbacks have more wrap. Snaps have more snap. What’s not to love?
Is this mostly due to the fact that I hired a coach? 100%. I would never have been able to stay motivated enough to follow through. In fact am still with my coach Nathan at www.vegancoaching.com and will be through September this year. I message him every weekday morning at 5a EST (he’s in Wales so it works)! He keeps me positive, focused, and informed about the latest science in diet and fitness. He’s there when I’m feeling depressed about a higher weigh in, and when I’m pumped that I got to a new personal best in my workouts. He gives me a new workout program every 6-8 weeks so that I don’t get bored, and has helped me find affordable equipment online so that I don’t have to spend extra time getting to a gym.
How much do I think I can attribute this to going to a WFPB (whole foods plant based) diet? Some large portion of the 100% I ascribed to getting coaching. Overall this is a dietary pattern that favors sustainable, long-term healthy eating. Why? Because you get to eat higher volumes of food, which equate to lower calories overall. What more food and fewer calories? Yeah, that’s basically the WFPB life hack. It does take some training to get right. While I’m sure there are a few savvy autodidacts that can figure it out on their own, I recommend hiring someone to help you out, at least at first. My first recommendation are the folks at Vegan Coaching (please mention me if you go with them!), but after I’m done with their program, that will switch to me and the team that I assemble here. They’ll be second place! But my aim is to develop surf-specific dietary and fitness coaching to get you to do the best surfing in your life.
Stay tuned to the blog and newsletters for announcements of master classes in calorie tracking, exercises, and plant-based nutrition designed specifically with surfers in mind! If this is something of immediate interest to you, please do not hesitate to reach out to me personally through the site! I can design a coaching program for you to get started that will work with your goals, budget, and schedule. Early adopters will certainly get some percs!