My Story of Obesity, Addiction, and Rebuilding

In this episode, Dillon sits down with Sean for a deep conversation about fitness, psychology, coaching, and the patterns underneath physical transformation. What starts as a conversation about the body quickly becomes something much bigger: identity, pain, behavior, and the invisible architecture driving most people’s lives.

Dillon shares the story behind how fitness became more than aesthetics for him. From a devastating fall in his early twenties, addiction struggles, personal loss, and years of trying to regain control through his body, the conversation explores how pain became the entry point into coaching and eventually into working with more than 1500 clients over the last 15 years.

The episode also dives into Dillon’s years owning a supplement store and what he learned watching consumer behavior from behind the counter. Why people buy what they buy. Why most products fail to solve the real issue. And why convenience, emotional regulation, and identity matter more than most people realize.

A major focus of the conversation is the shift from retail into coaching and the realization that the body is almost never the true problem. The body is simply where stress, shame, trauma, disconnection, and broken systems eventually show up. This is where Dillon breaks down the differences between protocol-based and needs-based coaching, and why working with large volumes of people changes what a coach can recognize.

The conversation also covers body image, family health history, behavior patterns, emotional eating, and why most people fail not because they are lazy, but because their internal structure cannot yet hold the life they are trying to build.

This episode is not about hacks, supplements, or motivation.

It is about understanding why the body changes when the deeper layers finally do.

What We Cover

• Why fitness first became a source of control and agency
• What owning a supplement store revealed about consumer behavior
• The hidden patterns most coaches never get close enough to see
• Why the body is often the symptom, not the source
• The psychology underneath fat loss, body image, and self sabotage
• What 1500 clients teaches you about human behavior and change
• The difference between protocol-based coaching and needs based coaching

Key Takeaways

• The body often reflects deeper unresolved patterns
• Sustainable change requires psychological alignment, not just information
• Coaching fails when it only addresses surface level behavior
• Family history is data, not destiny
• Transformation is less about intensity and more about internal structure

This is one of the deepest conversations yet on The Rebuild for understanding why physical change is rarely just physical.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Alright, welcome back to another rebuild episode here. Today's gonna be a fun one, a little bit of a different setup for us today. I had my man Sean come in instead of producing today, he's gonna lead the charge on this conversation. We're gonna talk a little bit about kind of my journey through through health, fitness, mindset, and sort of how I ended up at this at this place where I'm I'm so blessed. I get to coach so many people. And I just thought maybe there'd be some inspiration drawn from it and or a deeper understanding of why I coach the way that I do. So whether you're working with me now or you're interested in the future, just gives you a deeper look. And so I I thank you, Sean, for doing this. It's it's a lot of fun to have you here, man.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Yeah, I'm really excited. Um, when you sent me some of the show notes, I didn't realize I didn't realize a lot of things about you. So I'm excited to kind of get into where everything started.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Super fun, man. And I I think I think there's no one else I'd rather have do this than you. Oh, I appreciate that. Yeah, because I I just thought like a lot of the conversations we end up having as we've grown a friendship from you doing a lot of my production stuff, content stuff, I always feel so comfortable around you. You know, you make me feel at ease. And so I thought, what a better, no better place to to kind of put this conversation naturally.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Amazing, yeah. So I want to start when everything happens. So I guess that was when you fell you said roughly like 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Yeah, so my health and fitness journey started, and so first I have to caveat this, and I think it's what's made me a good coach, maybe aspirational, inspirational in some small sense. I tried to lose weight and get healthy one time, and now I'm here now. Doesn't that make sense, you know? And so I know a lot of folks maybe have wrestled with this this curse for a lifetime, they've tried many times, you know, they've done keto three times and and had some results, but then ended up right back where they started. But I grew up in a very small community, a very dangerous small community. And reality, the closer you are to baseline survival, the more that the realities of the world will appear themselves. Yeah. And so politeness and cultural normities that you see in a city just didn't exist there. And so I grew up as a very heavy obese kid my entire life. Like I don't I don't have a childhood memory where it's like, oh, I wasn't obese here. I was basically obese from the time there was pictures of me. And whether it was, you know, play days or sporting events, like by the time I was six years old, I realized, oh, some people have an advantage over me physically. Like I can't run the potato sack race as fast as I, you know, we're doing monkey bar hangs and I could barely hang on for five seconds, you know, there's people just hanging there for you know minutes on end. Um, but I never looked at that as like uh a victim mentality, I never looked at that as like um you know my identity per se. I just thought it's the way that I was supposed to be. I grew up in a Roman Catholic background and I thought that's how God made me. And I grew up in this small community where affirmation is very powerful. And so my teachers would say things like well, you're if enough, that's how you guys are. You're all big big men, big boys. And that actually gave me a gift because from a very young age I realized like if I want to compete in a competitive marketplace as a human being, I have to be smarter, I have to be more intellectual, I have to be more articulate, I have to be more orated, I have to be more personable, more charming, because I don't have like a physical gift. And so I just like accepted that. There was no like, oh, I wish it was different. I never thought about it, honestly. I think subconsciously you do, especially when you get to the age of puberty and you start wondering about female attention and things like this. I think that's where I started to realize, like, oh, this kind of sucks.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

Yeah, so when you're younger though, as an as a child, if you have adults constantly telling you, like, oh, this is how you should be, it's okay, you're if enough. I mean, you don't see anything wrong then.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

And I mean, uh I don't want to get too far into this subject, but that's how I have a heart and I can see, and I, you know, in certain settings, especially in the faith community, you know, whether it's like gender dysphoria or a lot of the stuff that we see now, it's like, well, yeah, kids think stuff's okay because the adults are telling them it's okay. Yeah. It doesn't have to be that topic, it could literally be anything. And I just thought, like, I never I never once considered that the way I ate was why I was obese as a child. You know, or like in I'm talking even 12, 13, 14 years old. Like, I never considered like, oh, well, I'm eating more calories than two grown men should eat put together. I just never thought of it. My dad would make my plates, eat this, this was the food I was provided, and then I had free reign to like just you know, what was ever in the cupboards, and my dad's obese, so there was snacks and chips and all that type of stuff was always around baking and you know, hearty farm-fed meals and cooked with creams and butters and oils and you know, designed to taste good.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

So you just grew up surrounded by people who were, let's say, a little bit on the heavier side. Yeah. You just thought it was okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

Yeah, just thought it was normal. And so to get to your point now, that would have been about 16 years ago, upcoming this fall. Um, because the first year I spent really getting in shape, and then I became a personal trainer kind of within year one of the fall at the back end of the rehab. But when I was 19, just before my 20th birthday, my birthday's in June, and it was uh about six weeks before, so the beginning of May, I was working a construction sales job, and I walked up to the top of a four-pitch 12 12 roof about 45 feet high, and I ended up going through the roof, through the drywall, through the rafters, and then down into the concrete. And I broke my L1 through L5 spinal vertebrae, I both broke my right elbow, my left ankle, and both my heels. And so obviously, very lucky to be alive, very lucky to not be paralyzed, which was definitely a concern when I first fell. And that wasn't even the worst part, interestingly enough. Like getting to the hospital and then finding out at 20, like I'm sure you're like this too, every man. At 20 years old, I wouldn't have known what blood work. What do you mean blood work? Like I'd been to the hospital for getting in fights and stuff, or you know, maybe going to reman, going to jail overnight, and you have a medic look at you for something stupid you did. But like I never got routine blood work done as a 20-year-old male, especially then. No one was doing that.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

That was your first time.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Yeah, like probably, you know, I probably had it done a few times, maybe you know, if you have like a bad flu or something as an adolescent or teen, but all of a sudden that they come back and they're like, Okay, yeah, your body is basically destroyed, so that's that's that. And then on top of that, you your cholesterol is through the roof. We need to medicate that now. Your blood pressure is through the roof. Some of that would have been acute from the stress of like falling five stories and having uh immediate entire body rhabdo. And then uh you're pre-diabetic. And so not only did I break my body, but now it's like going to a doctor's appointment where you also find out your metabolic health is like terrible. Yeah, you're metabolically like a 60-year-old obese person.

SPEAKER_01 7:11

Do you remember like what it felt when you were falling? Like any recollection of that.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

That's such a good question. No one's ever asked me that before. Uh, yep. I remember falling through, so just like trying to describe this. Uh the roof was just like a regular kind of it was a very abnormal building, normally wood frame buildings. So it was built like a big house or a big shop. They usually don't get four or five stories high. Uh, it's just like a usually you that turns into a metal building. Yeah. Um, but anyway, that's building science. And so the the I fell through the sheeting, right? So for everyone, imagine you're walking up onto the shingles of your house. Well, I stepped on the bottom of a board that wasn't nailed in, and so it just trapdoored me. Does that make sense? So I stepped on the bottom of the sheet, and then the the plywood like came up towards me, and then I fell through the rafters. I actually remember going through the rafters because it's probably from the pitch of the roof to the bottom of the rafters, like an eight, ten-foot fall. I actually remember getting my like I fell kind of basically like onto my stomach-ish, like I was going down, and I actually remember um like going to catch the rafters, and I thought I was gonna catch them. You know what I mean? So, like uh end up in a push-up position within the rafters, but I hit the rafters so hard with my hands. I think that's actually when I broke my elbow or it really screwed it up, and then my hand slipped in between the rafters, and then I basically just two-handed, like uh palmed, like a sumo wrestler pushed basically the drywall, and the drywall is just screwed in with little drywall screws. You fell through the and so I all now I realize like, oh fuck, I'm going through the drywall too. You know, like I'm not just gonna end up in the attic here and have a 10-foot fall. And once that drywall broke, now I'm head first because my hands hit first, so I'm going down head first, but we do have an equilibrium system in our body, and when you fall far enough, I tried to get to my feet, like to land on my feet. I didn't quite make it. So my heels hit first, shattered both my heels, and then my feet were out in front of me, and then my chest basically like my if you sit down and put your feet out in front of you, like I am right now, my forehead would have hit the ground, and so I just folded myself in half, basically. So the impact, and that's what broke the lower spinal vertebrae. I actually have compression fractures of about 30% on L1 through L5, which is the bottom five spinal vertebrae.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

So that was going like floor through floor where the floor so there was no floor basically, it was like roof and then like through the exterior roof and then through the what would be called like in your house, the interior roof. Got it. Right? Because imagine there's a burglar up in your house. Yeah, you hear them fall through the shingles. There was no shingles, but fall through the shingles, then they're gonna come through the drywall and then onto the kitchen floor, let's say. But this kitchen floor just happened to be 44 feet away from the roof, if that makes sense. And crazy, this is some final destination shit. I've never really talked about too much because it still makes me queasy. They had poured concrete for half the building, and because it was a big building, yeah. Big, it was actually um multiple, it was like a they were gonna lease like multiple 6,000 square foot shops out of one big building, and the guys were working on the far side, paving the other half. Where I fell, I fell onto the concrete half, and so it was freshly poured concrete, so concrete's not forgiving, it sucks, but it's way better than 15 feet away from me was all rebar sticking up. Like, so I would have been like final destined, like filleted 100%. Jeez, like rebar sticking up everywhere, metal shrouds, like um the tubing that they use for the concrete, like I would have fell on something and literally been like final destination.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

So, is that a safety protocol the company just didn't follow? Like, how were you able to follow it?

SPEAKER_00 10:56

Such a gray area. I probably should have been tied off, yeah, to be honest. Um, but because it's this weird 412 pitch design where it's built like a house but it's really tall, um like because I had done inspections in the attic and I like prior, and I was tied off in the attic. But because I was only supposed to go on the outside of the roof, to be honest, I would have never even got to tie off because the tie-off points are at the peak, and so I fell walking to the peak. Does that make sense? Yeah, because they put the anchors at the top, and then you tie off so you can kind of walk from like peak like um bottom of the pitch to the other side of the bottom of the pitch. So I couldn't have even I didn't have to be honest, uh transparent, I had no harness or anything anyway. I was not planning on tying off, but I wouldn't have been able to anyway without that. Like I would have had my harness on, but I wouldn't have been tied to anything.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

Got it. Yeah. So prior to that accident, in terms of you know, fitness, you never really paid any pay any attention to like working out or no, I I I lifted weights a little bit in high school just because some friends got into it and they put a cheap little small gym at my poor, poor community school.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

Um, and a lot of that was just to get a little bit better at martial arts. So I had a I have a pretty extensive martial arts background, specifically judo and jujitsu. Yeah. And uh I wanted to get a little bit stronger there, but the truth is my dad worked me like a rented mule, and so my cardiovascular performance, not for everything, like obviously I wasn't going jogging, I wasn't doing, you know, uh, I wasn't on the relay team, but for like everyday type of movement, I learned how to move big from a young age, and my dad worked me like a rented mule. I was always cutting wood, or and so I was strong. I got a lot weaker after my fall, yeah, because I had total body rhabdo, impact rhabdo. So all the muscle in my body basically died and turned acidic. And that's why I have I have even some like loose skin in my ass. I remember waking up and feeling my like my hamstrings because I I landed on my hamstrings and ass. I remember knowing nothing about muscle physiology, nothing about training. And I remember like in the days where I I woke up in the hospital, I started to like feel my legs, and I was like, where's my muscle gone? Like it feels like this empty sack now, if that makes sense. And so um I I I really wasn't, you know, I played some sports, like I was okay. You know, I have good I'm amidextrous, I have good hand eye coordination, so I could make up for what I lacked and like the physical ability, but no, I definitely wasn't interested in like I wouldn't have known what a calorie was, I wouldn't have known like what certain exercises were, no, not at all.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

Yeah, yeah. So a life-changing event happens, huge you're in the hospital, you're recovering, the doctor comes to you, blood work is done, he gives you the results. What does he tell you?

SPEAKER_00 13:45

Yeah, so it's kind of like okay, we're worried about your your spine. Uh, you know, we've taken x-rays, you have compression fractures, L1 through L5, and they kind of brought in like uh one of those skeleton models, you know, and he was like, You're so blessed that you're already not a quadruplegic. And so he kind of bent that thing, like he put the feet flat on the bed or whatever the table beside me, and he took the the head and he pushed it towards the floor, and he goes, This is like a minor car accident, this is always L1, slight fracture, and then he pushed it a little farther, and you know, he's going through and he goes, And goes by the time he got that thing's head on the table between its legs, he said, This is almost always paralysis. And that was where you're at. Yeah, and he's like, Yours is worse than this. And so he's like, You're very blessed, but there's a lot of inflammation, so we don't know your body just needs a little time. And I was having some numbers my left leg, I had no feeling in, I couldn't move, and so I kind of thought my one leg was never gonna walk. Their initial analysis is that I wouldn't ever walk um without a limp, and that I wouldn't carry over 50 pounds comfortably, probably.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Looking back on that now, do you think that was the Lord looking over you?

SPEAKER_00 14:56

100%, bro. It's I've had extreme favor my whole life, and you know, we could get into a lot of the debauchery I did as a kid and stuff, but like it wasn't the first time I almost died. That was the first time I paid the consequence. I think that was the Lord giving me some consequence because he had kept me so protected. Like I've been in, you know, Sarah and I were talking about this the other day because she's lived such like a softer life experience. Yeah, like I think we counted up like legitimate experiences where I should be dead probably 19 times, whether that's from vehicle accidents, drunk driving, massive amounts of violence, you know, and um that was the first time because I used to brag. I never even broke a bone besides you know my rib or my hand whacking it on someone's head or having my nose crooked smashed in a fight or something. Like I had never broke an arm, I had never broke a leg. And then it was like, oh, I guess I just did it all in one shot. Let me break a bunch of shit once.

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Yeah, because you kind of were a bad kid growing up, hey. Very much so.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

Yeah, I was hell on wheels. Got it. And uh, so yeah, no, I I I was very lucky to have massive amounts of favor, and it was a big wake-up call. And so they say, like, hey, we're worried about your your spine. Interestingly enough, which still annoys me to this day, goes to show you the Western medical system. I was more worried about my arm because I had asked them, I'm like, hey, my elbow hurts more than my back, and my back hurts a lot, but my arm hurts a lot. And uh they were like, and I was like, and it's not seeming to go straight either. Like I can't get it to straighten out. And they were like, uh, it's just impact, you know, we've x-rayed it, there's nothing wrong with it, blah blah. Lo and behold, this is kind of funny. Um, it still doesn't go straight, so I only have about 60% extension in my right elbow, and it's it's right now if I x-ray it, it looks like an 80, 80-year-old arthritic elbow. And uh it was severely broken, and they never never I just got out of the hospital, like you know, I'm fast-forwarding some weeks later and yeah, didn't have a proper rehab plan or nothing because I'm a hillbilly and I didn't want anyone helping me. Well, no one's gonna be able to do that. I started to I started to train lift weights and golf like that that you know, six months later. Every time I would take a golf shot, it would feel like someone shot me in a beanbag shotgun in the arm. Yeah, and I would just thought, like, oh, it's not it's not healed yet. Two years later, a friend of mine became a chiropractor, and he was helping me with some like my hips had nothing to do with really the injury, I guess. My hips took a beating in the injury too. But I showed him my elbow and I'm like, Yeah, you know, I've had massage people, and at this point, there was still hope. Like, I would go back to my doctor and he'd be like, Oh, honestly, it's probably just gonna straighten out over time. Like, that was his like literally this lame excuse. And they did it an x-ray initially, and they said it was fine. And they say it was fine in the hospital, and then he did a requisition, like off this random chiropractic appointment, and he was like, you know, just go get it done. Let's look at it. When I come back and he starts explaining to me, you know, a week later after the x-ray, and he goes, Well, yeah, like when you broke your arm, and I said, I never broke my arm. He goes, Yeah, no, I can still see there's two distinct breakpoints on both sides of the joint. You severely broke your arm, and I'm like, That makes a lot of sense. And because of that, it calcified and then it like strengthened like that, and I was like already lifting weights on it and like golfing because I'm an insane person, and now it just doesn't go straight.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

Well, there's only a certain amount of time to rehab and get that into motion back, right?

SPEAKER_00 18:14

And now they're like the whole thing would be like cutting it open, peeling the tricep off like a like I'm flaying a pickerel, and you know, cutting my whole arm open so that the raw bone is exposed. Probably shattered. You know the the posts on social media right now that are like my top five horror movies? Yeah, this is that's that in there for me. Like looking at my humorous and seeing the bone just like being hanging out, and some random man in a white coat that I think is probably a dickhead is playing with the insides of my tissue. No, sir. I would rather sword fight someone to the death than do that, actually.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

So do you think they just didn't even do an x-ray in the beginning? I kind of think that, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

Or they just rushed it like radiologists are often very um overworked, yeah, especially in the past, because they're the only ones who can read the data, which I think is this is a a little bit of an aside, but I think is gonna be very good. It's one of the amazing integrations of AI technology because it's pretty much gonna replace radiologists for that thing. Yeah, everyone thinks it's gonna replace radiologists, it's gonna replace the need for backlog because we can scan images and diagnose the image, and then the radiologist can make the treatment plan. And a lot of the time they spend bogged down reading these stupid things, but AI can do that better than a human.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

Yeah. Okay, so blood work gets back, because I remember you told me before, but I don't think a lot of people know there was something that the doctor tells you that was the trigger to essentially completely changing your body.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

Yeah. And so I probably, you know, so I I had just turned I was 19, probably about 16 weeks later. I think I spent six weeks in the hospital and about six weeks um, you know, like really suffering in in my basement suite, basically. And there's a part of this that I've never really talked about before, but I th I think that it's it's important to share because it's really shaped me. And so now I fell and I had a business that I had just started, a construction business and a job. So I had a s I always had done two things. I've either had a side hustle and a job or two businesses. I've never not done it. Yeah. And uh I lost my job and I basically essentially lost my business. And so now all that purpose is gone. I was in a long-term relationship of about five years with someone that I basically moved. We kind of ran away from home together at 15. And um we had a daughter that I then found out because of this disaster that popped up in our life, and there was already some issues, and I was a big part of the issue, so I want to make sure that that's stated very clear. I was wild and and insane. Um and I found out that the daughter that I had raised up until four years old wasn't mine. And so now my body's destroyed. I've lost my means to make income. I'm literally losing a family, and and this is kind of leading right up to this doctor's appointment that you referenced, and I'm severely addicted to prescription painkillers.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

So this is probably one of the lowest points of your life.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

It was the lowest point of my life. Like by a significant margin, and all that was was the that was the that was the interest of all the credit card payments I had made with getting away with stuff my whole life. You don't we uh w one thing I've learned in in in my um growing up is that we actually don't get away with anything. We're like little kids that think we do. It's just a matter of time. Whether that's your health, how you look after your money, how you look after your family, how you look after your mindset. There's only certain certain fuels only last so long. And when they run out, you're gonna pay you're gonna pay a bill. And uh that was just me paying my bills, the best thing that ever happened to me, but severely, severely painful. And so I go to the doctor and uh this would have been about like I said, about 16 weeks after, and I had actually gained weight because now I'm not working in a business and at my job. I've lost all my purpose and meaning. I'm sitting in a basement by myself with two like boot casts on my thing, my one arm's in a sling, and I can't even really like moving out of the recliner to go pee was like a huge undertaking. Yeah. You know, like I would plan for an hour, like, okay, I'll let the chair, the recliner, I'll power it down so my feet are flat, then I'll cold sweat and pain until that passes. That'll take 10-15 minutes. Then I'll figure out how to get my arms on the chairs and like get myself vertical. Then it's gonna take me 10 minutes to just get to the bathroom. You know, so it was it was quite it taught me a lot about have you seen that movie called The Whale? Yeah. It was kind of like that, very much like that, but a mix of obesity and injury, right? So not just, you know, and the injury part was was hard. I could, you know, I could barely load bear, right? So yeah, but I'm stubborn and I go to the doctor for this checkup, and I had one boot off at the time. So I was driving again, my arms started to work-ish a little bit better. I was out of the sling and it was just hurting all the time. And so about four months after this, I go see the doctor, and this wasn't at the hospital or nothing, just like his c his like clinic piece.

SPEAKER_01 23:17

So four months later, how much weight do you think you gained in that four-month period?

SPEAKER_00 23:20

I'd never checked. So the last recorded weight I was was like 297. Um, but four months later, I was eating more, I was depressed. I kind of guessed that I was like 305, 306, 307. I don't think I was over 310. That's almost like me seeing so many bodies over time and then remembering what I used to look like. So it's a pretty uh I would say it's pretty accurate.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

It's so wild to think you were over 300 at one point.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Yeah, it was just it was not a good look for me. I'm only five foot seven, you know. So uh it wasn't a good feeling or a look. Anyway, I go to the doctor and he says to me, you know, we're going through some of this stuff, and he says, your cholesterol's getting a little bit better, the medication's working. But I I I I just I didn't feel good about being on medication. I kept thinking, man, I'm only 20. And like, to be honest, the di my family is all obese, but I will say the males all get obese usually. Like my dad, my uncles, my cousins. I'm I'm the I don't know if you guys relate to this, but like I was such a mistake in some sense. Like my next nearest first cousin is further from me than their kids. Wow. So like my sister and I are further apart than me and my niece. My niece and I are only 11 years apart. Me and my sister are 14 years apart. So does that make sense? You know what I mean? So I can't my dad was like old when he had me, and my mom's quite a bit younger than him, but he he was my dad was over 40 years old when he had me.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

It might have been a mistake. Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_00 24:45

I was unplanned. It was one of these unplanned miracles, as my mom would say. But uh, you know, kind of going from there, it's like the cholesterol, but I I kept thinking like I watched my family, like I would see pictures of my dad before I was born at my age, he was actually in pretty good shape. Oh, and uh, you know, and they all played hockey and stuff, and then when they stopped those certain lifestyles, then you know, and I think there's a trauma there in my family, to be honest. I I think as you get older and you find out more information about your family, you realize how many snakes are in the garden that get passed down. Yeah, you know, and this is in the Christian community, we you know, we would call this like um you know, uh plagues of the spirit or or certain things get passed down, you don't even realize that you're walking with an ailment. Yeah, you know, like this is a little bit of an aside, but like I struggled with like lust and hedonism a lot. I didn't realize until I got to be a grown man how much my dad struggled with that, or like how much I didn't know about my parents' marriage or his marriage before that. And and then you realize, like, oh, we never talked about this. I didn't even know that he had these things. Yeah, but yet they there they are in me.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

Because you start tracing back to why are you this way? Yeah, why yeah?

SPEAKER_00 25:51

It's like, well, how come I how come I fuck this up like this? Yeah you know, and um or or or how come I'm like this? And the doctor sits me down and says, Okay, your cholesterol's getting better, blood pressure's getting better, I was on medication granted, and he says, but your insulin's worse. And so if you're not better and if this numbers aren't improved in six weeks, which it was kind of like we the first step is losing some some weight to to fixing this and managing your stress and you know, all of this, you're gonna go on insulin injections because the metformin wasn't working. And I remember getting out into my truck because you asked me, like, do you remember our for whatever reason I remember this like it was yesterday. I had a 1997 Ford F-150, it was white with a blue pinstripe. I got in that damn thing, it had a blue interior, which is so weird, a cloth blue interior with a bench seat. I started that thing up in the parking lot, and I just as soon as I started the truck, for whatever reason, I just started weeping. Like, and I probably had never really wept like that in my life. I and I don't think I ever have until I found Christ again, interestingly enough. Yeah, like this weeping that was like uncontrollable emotions, and I think it was trauma from the acts, and like all I was just like processing, I think, all of this stuff, losing a family, you know, losing um my businesses, my means to provide an income. And I was you're gonna laugh at this because there's a humorful part at the end of this. A large part of where that emotion came from was based on fear that I would have to inject myself with a needle. That's how terrified I was of needles. Yeah. Like I'm like an I kind of reference some of my personality around like getting a surgery. I don't like people like touching me, cutting me open, like all that type of stuff. It's like get the fuck away from me, actually. You know, dentists, like all that stuff, it makes me want to inflict violence on them. Like when someone's cleaning my teeth and it hurts me, I get up and I'm like, now I have to hurt you now. Yeah, that's how sick I am in that. I don't like people like working on me. So just like the thought of doing a needle once or twice, three times a day, and they didn't have a lot of the technology they have, you know. Now they have all these wireless type of monitors and continuous monitors, and I'd watched my grandma be a diabetic and prick her finger every day and watch a gusher of blood come out of there over and over, and then her stick, you know, the half-inch insulin syringe into her body. And I think that's so ironic now. Now, as someone who went down like the PED path, yeah, testosterone replacement therapy, peptides. I could literally take an insulin needle and just army medic myself in the forehead if I really had to. It wouldn't bother me at all.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

Yeah. So you're crying in your truck. It's a mix of just everything that's happened to you, and funny enough, just the fear of getting needled.

SPEAKER_00 28:37

That was like the stimulus where I was like, I don't I remember talking to myself out loud like a crazy person. I don't know what the fuck to do, but I know what not to do. And I'm tired of lying to myself about this. And but I was still wrestling with like, how do I change something that I'm supposed to be?

unknown 28:53

Right?

SPEAKER_00 28:53

Because it and that's why I referenced that kind of that childhood frame because I knew nothing about calories or pro like I wouldn't have known any of these words.

SPEAKER_01 29:01

So you still believed it?

SPEAKER_00 29:02

Kind of, because I'm like, well, he's telling me I gotta do something that isn't really possible. Because growing up but now I have massive leverage because I'm so terrified of the needle thing, yeah, and just feeling bad about you know, uh there was this um, I think it was the Lord speaking to my spirit, but I just I wasn't walking with him, so I didn't hear him the way that I would now. Yeah. I think he was showing me that like it's time to pull your feet out of the grave because this where you're headed is death.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

So, did you still think at that point that it was normal for you to look this way because of your genetics and how like you know, how your family told you growing up, like you're a fanoth or your teacher told you it's okay?

SPEAKER_00 29:42

It's a good, good question. I think by this point I started to wrestle with that. And if you notice anything that we're breaking an old identity off of or coming into something scary or challenging that we know is gonna stretch us, I've watched you do this in the spirit. It's the same thing. You for you're you know, as a young man, you probably had an you know, full growing into getting a full grown man, all of a sudden in your mid-30s, you have some different questions. And that could come at 25, there's no specific age, but for me, because of the experience I had lived, and I had been around some doctors telling me like your weight's unhealthy. And in my head, it was like, well, why would they be saying this if it was if this is how it was? Like, why would that even be a factor that we would bring up? Yeah, you know what I mean? And so I started to question it. And that's honestly, I have a heart for this because this is why I really speak against like people that um one of the villains I have, let's say, in in kind of my coaching is like, oh, you have PCOS, now you have this outcome, that's it, the end. You have hypothyroidism, this equals that outcome, that's it, the end. That's basically what I had been told, but a little bit different of a story. But I started to question that and then wonder like the fuck it is. Maybe it maybe, maybe I can do something about this.

SPEAKER_01 30:57

Did you feel any anger? Maybe change.

SPEAKER_00 30:59

Angry F, yeah, yeah. Like angry, bro. I spent the next two years, again, losing what I lost, coming from the hot-headed background and you know, like hell on wheels person that I am. It took me a couple years to like start to view that as something that was good for me. You know, it's easy to say now, 15 years later, like, oh, it's the best thing that ever happened for me. I thought it ruined my fucking life. You know, and so I had to I had to chew on that for a while. It was like a it was like a well-cooked steak, a piece of leather. It takes a while to get it down, you know.

SPEAKER_01 31:30

So, how did those like first couple weeks or even months feel when you decided to make that change to be like, you know what? I do not want to take these needles, I have to do something with my life. Because probably a lot of people can relate that. A lot of people are probably at that lowest point, and it just seems so hopeless. Like, how do you get out when you're so deep in that hole?

SPEAKER_00 31:50

So crazy because even in doing this interview, which I just appreciate you so much for doing, I I I start to see how the Lord was moving in my life way before I could see him. I'm trying not to get emotional. Because I could see how He he's given me He had given me these people, places, and things at the right time. That doctor saying that to me was one of the things. Interestingly enough, and I'm sure you know this because I had said family, you know, four months prior, basically. I think it was like 15 weeks after the fall, and that had all fell apart kind of in the middle of this coming out of the hospital, getting home, and this is all falling apart now. We had actually bought and paid for, and in these days, this was a lot of money for me. I think it was twelve hundred dollars. That was like a lot of money for me. Um, we had actually gotten a puppy, but you don't get a puppy for 12 to 16 weeks, you know what I mean? Like you like uh he wasn't born yet, I already paid him basically because it was a it was a bull mastiff Rawweiler specific brand that I wanted. And so three days after that very doctor appointment, now I'm driving all the way to southern Saskatchewan by myself to some random farm to pick up a dog, and I'm crippled AF. And you know, my ex didn't want the dog or anything like that, and it's like that was kind of it was like it was the breed I wanted, you know, it was like gonna be your dog. That dog saved my life, man. And I didn't realize it because two people, my mom and that dog. I got that dog and uh I would call my mom sometimes to come and help me like let him out or take him for a walk and got like nothing but props to her, and this would have been hard for her to do because I know she's not this type of person. She came downstairs one day and she was like, Dylan, enough is enough now. And I went, What do you mean? She's like, We have to get your life moving. You can't just sit and rot here. And um she gave kind of laid down the law. She was like, I'm not coming here to look after your dog and walk it every single day. Will you sit down here and take these pills and just rot? I'm not gonna do that. Yeah. And so that forced me to literally like take taking the dog for a walk because my recliner and everything was down in the basement. That's just where my setup had to be. Yeah, like I was young, I had no money, that's just like with the hat way it had to be. It would take me two hours to get to the door. Like, and again, it's not like two hours of this slow motion moving, but it would be like because pain builds up, and then you got to take a break. So just getting to the edge of the chair, the pain would build up so much, I'd be in a cold sweat from the nerves all in my back. And then I'd uh you catch your breath, and okay, now now it's standing now, and you know, so it comes in stages. I would get to the landing of the bottom of the stairs, and now from the landing to the top, that was another half an hour, one step at a time, and I'd be on my hands and knees. And because I had to take that dog for a walk, I had responsibility. Him and I going around the block was like a three-hour event, yeah. But every day, all of a sudden I started to walk. Boom, boom. And then I started to notice about, you know, and I'm I don't remember all this in great detail, but I remember a couple weeks later, I started to feel a little bit better to the point where I'm like, hey, I think I could take this other boot off now. And it would hurt like like a motherfucker, but like I could I could bear it, you know. And I started to push myself, and then that dog became like my best friend, you know, and like he was the thing that pushed me. He was a crazy puppy, a giant puppy who could wreck things in three seconds, and I couldn't chase after him, and you know, so it taught me a lot of patience I didn't have actually. Uh, it gave me a responsibility for caring for something other than myself. And I think when you lose everything, I think depression is uh a form of depression is only caring about yourself. That is actually the definition of an anxiety. When someone is really anxious, that means they're self-conscious and they're thinking about themselves. And so caring about something else other than myself gave me a little bit of light back in my spirit that I think that had been diminished in this kind of recovery journey. And so that was a great person. And then let's say about three months later, now I'm figuring out how to go back to work, you're because it's like, well, I gotta do something. Yeah, and um that's when I got into like automotive sales and like power sports sales, selling boats and trailers and stuff. Lo and behold, I started there and it was an amazing group of guys to this day, to be honest. Still one of the like um like if I ever had to not be an entrepreneur and they would take me back there just to work with those people. We had so much fun. Yeah. And a couple of the guys are still my friends, you know, freaking 10 years later. Wow. And um, one of them was more even of like a mentor to me for just seeing some things the way he was around his family, and etc. I started to realize like, oh, maybe a family doesn't have to look like what you think family looks like. And uh there was a it's car sales, a lot of people are fat, to be honest, because they're you don't have set lunch break, you're just kind of like working, and there's a lot of wing nights out, there's a lot of I I work well in this environment, it's feast and famine. Yeah. When you're working hard, you're working really hard, and then when you're playing, you're playing. And you know, and so um there was tons of guys around the dealership, and it was a group of dealerships who needed to lose weight, and so this uh uh this idea came up that we were gonna do a weight loss challenge.

SPEAKER_01 37:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 37:12

And so it was uh it was October, late October, and so I kind of fell at the beginning of May, you know, and then late late October, something like that. Um we had done we had decided to do this thing where everyone was gonna throw in a thousand bucks, whoever wanted to participate, and uh whoever had most the lost the most weight percentage-wise coming into Christmas gets the whole pot. One winner, that's it. And I think it was like six or seven grand. Bro, you know how I am, especially in those days. Six or seven grand, that's like 14k now, probably of today's money. And I did not have like a lot of money, you know, like five grand to me would have been a lot of money. Yeah. In my head, that so that was like the thing the Lord did for me. He placed this, I realize now this challenge because that's what gave me sufficient leverage, right? Where it was like, let me, and I had I think already lost a little bit because I'd done this walking and I'd done just very minimal stuff. How much do you think you've lost until now? I I think probably I'd got back to like what I was, like 290, 295. So like 18, 10 pounds. Yeah. Um, kind of like the going from doing absolutely fuck all to doing like literally anything. Yeah. And um, I had also cold turkey come off all the the medication. And so that I think there was a bunch of inflammation from being severely addicted to those painkillers. And I went through an interesting experience. You're not supposed to come off those cold turkey. I didn't know that. I'm just very stubborn. One day I was looking at an addiction sneaks up on you. I'm gonna I'm gonna state this because I remember I would have my my recliner and my pills all beside me, you know, and I I started counting them out. And I remember one day being very worried that I only had like a certain amount of days left, and there was a holiday coming up. So I'm like, what if the pharmacy closed? I call my mom, I'm like freaking out. I'm like, hey, you gotta take me to the pharmacy after work because if they close and then I run out, I'm gonna be fucked. And then I hung up the phone, and again, this is this is all the grace of the Lord. Something came over me and like whispered in my ear, like, Dylan, this is addiction, that this is it. And I remember arguing with it, which now I know is the Holy Spirit, but I was like, no, this is not addiction. Because it I had this addiction of view of addiction, like I'm not in the streets, I'm not this, I'm not that, I'm not whatever I had pictured culturally in my head. Yeah, and for whatever reason I went back and forth, wrestled with this, and then I was like, no, fuck, yeah, this is like I this is not it. And so I literally took all the pills, put them in one giant container, and took me five minutes to get out of my chair and get to the bathroom. I went and flushed them all down the toilet, and that was the last day I ever took a pill. I just decided, like, no more, that's it. And so, kind of tying that back into the work thing, we start this challenge, and I'm a very necessity-driven motivation person. Everyone finds motivation from different things. If so, if you can prove that there's a necessity to do something for a payoff that I want, I'll do anything. Like a Dylan, you have to you have to fight this trench war for 15 years straight every day. Okay, no problem. As long as long as there's an I can understand the necessity to need to do this so that when there's a payoff, that I actually want that payoff. I wanted the money. So that's the it was very simple. I want that 6,000 bucks. That's life-changing money for me at this time. I also don't want to be really fat anymore. I'm single now for the first like you know, I was 14 when I got in that long-term relationship, lost a family. I'm 20 years old, rebuilding my life, and I'm single. And at 20, I cared a lot more about female attention. So it's like, okay, well, that would that would solve two problems at once. And money, you know, it gets me out of the basement into a better apartment, and you know, it and so it does the these things. Guessing you won. Yes. And so I got on the computer, and lo and behold, I just started, you know, kind of doing what everyone does, and we didn't have chat GPT and all this stuff. Then it was like really shitty versions of Google, etc. I came across an article from Lane Norton that was about calorie balance, energy balance. And I was lucky that that's I didn't get some weird, like I could have easily ended up in keto land or some yeah, like at some fucking you know, HCG drops or something, but I just came across like an energy balance article. And uh it was basically like, oh, well, this is like uh this isn't math, like there's an equation to this. And it if anyone's really honest with themselves, it's like, okay, well, I'm supposed to be eating, let's say, you know, because it it's never like a super everyone's different, right? But anywhere from 2,000 to 2,700 calories a day should be my budget. And in my head, I'm like, most days after work I drink that beer. I was drinking, I was like one of these six or eight beer after work. That was just my and that was my water. That was a slow day, and then I would drink 24 on the weekends, you know, every day. And so in my head, I went, Oh, and then it's like, oh, and when you go to Wendy's for lunch, like let me look up what my lunch is for numbers. I was getting like a triple cheeseburger meal, a chili, and a frosty, and sometimes a wrap on the side. And I'm like, well, that's 4,000 right there. So I started adding this up. I'm like, I'm eating eight to twelve thousand calories a day. Damn, damn it. And then so I went, like, well, let me try eating a six-inch sandwich, some Subway. That's gonna be my new lunch. No more than that. And for dinner, I have to cook at home. Yeah. And you know, for me, it starts like, What do you do? Especially back then, it was all bro shit. So it's like, let me make some meat of some sort, you know, steak, chicken, fish. And I always liked those foods. You know, I got fat from overeating good, hearty foods. Yes, I ate snacks and pop and shit, but I was also just eating way too much. I have a big appetite. My dad was 400 pounds, and I was this eight-year-old that's like, you eat the same, I ate the same plate as a 400-pound grown man since the time I was like in grade one. And I was forced to eat it. Like, you're not leaving the table. Yeah, and so how does that not come become like a heavy spirit that you carry? Exactly. Right? And uh, I think anyway, in the first 10 days, I had lost like seven pounds. Once I saw that, game over. That was the thing. Like, because you said, like, I'm assuming you won. I was like, Yeah, now I've won. But but I this is weird. I knew I won the whole game. Like two months later, I would be telling people I would go to the gym and I would see guys now that would be like as jacked as me, which I thought they were like insanely jacked, you know. And I would come back and tell my coworkers, I'd be like, I think I kind of want to train people like that. Yeah, it's so interesting. It just caught my interest. The idea of training, and I was you know, I started off like with the Arnold Encyclopedia bodybuilding. I really loved Arnold, I loved his mindset stuff. I've always been very into philosophy and mindset long before fitness.

SPEAKER_01 43:45

It's interesting how you look at them in your first thought is you want to train people like that versus most people look at people like that and they're like, Oh, I want to look like that.

SPEAKER_00 43:55

Yeah, I just thought it would be so cool. And at this time, like uh some of the superhero movies. Are really starting to take off, and I thought, imagine, and I by this point now, let's say by the end of the challenge, I think I I had lost a good amount. Like in eight weeks, I probably lost like 35, 40 pounds. Yeah. And so now I'm starting to, you know, I'm like 240 and I'm thinking I'm just the shit. You know, like you got that momentum. Yeah, like I'm looking so good, you know, even though I was still fat and I did not look good. You know, but I but I catch on to things fast. I taught myself how to lift weights pretty quickly. I I have a very interesting gift where if I watch you doing something, I can mimic it perfectly. Yeah. If I under and then the more that I learned about physiology, it was like, oh, femur is sinking here, this is doing this. I'm very good at like making things into a sequence and then acting that sequence out. So if you were more jacked than me, I'm watching you do lap pull downs and I realize you're doing them differently than me. I'm watching, I'm like, oh, why is his elbows coming here instead of here? Mine are going here, his are going here. And then I would watch and then I would go try it, and then I'd be like, oh, that feels better. And so then, like by process of elimination and like structured patterning, I taught myself how to lift. And I would always, I was never shy. I would ask people more jacked than me, like, hey, help help me with this, you know. And like I I wanted information. I just when I get obsessive uh about information, it's almost like an autistic person. I can't like let it off the bone. So you have an addictive personality, very addictive. And so then I just got addicted to that. And so instead of drinking and fighting and doing all the things, drug dealing, doing all the things I was doing, trying to hustle and make money, a lot of that effort all of a sudden just switched into now I'm gonna fix this thing, which lo and behold, over the next 18 months, I got my first job as a personal trainer working in the gym setting. There was no online coaching, literally didn't exist at this time, and uh, you know, I started to train some people, I lost, you know, 100 pounds. Uh uh within about 18 months, I had lost uh 150 pounds and I was competing in my first show. And in my first show, I had lost more weight than what I weighed. So from the top from 297, I stepped on stage uh at 137 pounds as a lightweight natural bodybuilder, and so I went from 297 at the peak all the way down to 137, which I think is like 153 or 4 pounds lost total. And so I had lost more than I existed as on stage.

SPEAKER_01 46:13

Is that all through just being on a caloric deficit?

SPEAKER_00 46:15

100%. And again, I never like if people to be honest, it's taken me this long to really get comfortable talking about my story as a professional because no one's gonna do what I did. I was gonna say and a lot of a lot of coaches or people who have led their system works well for people, but Dylan's system works well, like the one I personally did would work for pretty much nobody. I actually don't, and I hope this doesn't come off arrogant and egotistical. I think it's just like the gifts that I've been given. I don't think this is me, this is all glory to God, and and the very harsh, interesting upbringing I had, I can suffer in dirt amounts of pain that people just won't even conceptualize. And I've actually worn that as an identity too much. I I I'm working on suffering less because when I'm not suffering, I'll go figure out a way to suffer. And I think that's a negative thing, yeah, uh, especially as you get older. But like as an example, my first bodybuilding coach, or like he wasn't even I wasn't, I didn't even know I was bodybuilding, but uh and he's still a friend of mine, honestly. He's done very well for himself, Mr. Chris Gethin. But I didn't understand that people play characters. Like this was like start of social media era, but like bodybuilding.com era, video trainer era, and so I hired this guy, and his persona was like this hardcore Welsh dude who's like pretty jacked, but like no fucking around, no excuses, no bullshit. And I think I needed that because I basically done whatever I wanted my whole life, right? And so I think you get what you need. And uh I remember asking him, like, well, like it's been like a couple weeks now. Like, uh I my friends are asking me to go to the restaurant, like uh, what should I do? You tell him, fuck no, that's what you tell him. And he was like, Don't you you're you're so fat. I remember him telling him you're you're fat enough, you don't need any free meal, your whole life's been a cheat meal. Yeah, so get this for 17 months, including Christmas, my birthday, everything, I did not eat out of anything that wasn't in a Tupperware, not one thing, bro. And this isn't just like a dramatized story, not a chocolate bar or not a Halloween-sized chocolate bar, not a piece of this, not a lick of this, not a bite of this. And the reason that that's that that is a hundred percent true is because I couldn't, because I knew if I had one little thing, it's not gonna be one little thing. And so then I just refrained. Like, no, I treated it like quitting OxyCon. That's it. No more bullshit. You've had bullshit your whole fucking life, you're done with this. The end. I made a decision. And again, I don't never coach people like that. So like I want to really make that static. Like, I wouldn't even conceptualize giving that. But I had lived enough pain and hardship in my life that that didn't even seem that bad. And because I was seeing results so rapidly, I was so addicted to seeing I love control, I'm a control freak. And so the whole my whole life I've been told there's this thing I can't control, and now it looks like I can control the shit out of this. Watch me cook.

SPEAKER_01 49:10

So, what stage were you at in terms of coaching other people at that point in your life?

SPEAKER_00 49:14

Um, so I was like working basically, like you know, a full-time job. So for this is where it gets a little bit blended, you know, when you've lived a life of doing stuff, but I do know this. I worked for a few years in sales, I worked my way up at this in the dealership setting, I was doing very well there. My life for two two years straight uh was Monday to Saturday. I would work in the dealership from 7:30 to 5.30. From 5:30 to 10:30, Monday to Friday, I would train other people, usually group group settings. So I would leave work with a half an hour to get downtown for six o'clock to be training people, sessions from six, session hour sessions with groups, six, seven, eight, nine. I would finish those group sessions at 10 and I would train myself 10 to 12 p.m. I would go home and sleep. I repeated that for two years straight with no days off except for Sundays. I didn't work at the dealership. Um, and Sundays would be like meal prepping and all the stuff that I had to do because I basically had no life. Again, talk about hunkering down into a suffering. Yeah no trips, no days off, no changes, no a few days out of town, no at the spa. And this is because I had a goal of opening a supplement store. And so the the the suffering that I had to walk through, I had reverse engineered. This is I need $175,000. A bank's not going to give me any money because I'm just a young, stupid kid with a grade 10 education. I already knew that. And because of my family situation, there's absolutely no family money coming. So you're out here by yourself. That's it. And I reverse engineered that if I do this for about two years, this is how much I'm making from the personal training, this is how much I can squirrel away from my job, etc. Then I'll be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01 50:59

What made you want to open up a supplement store?

SPEAKER_00 51:04

That first coach uh I mentioned named Chris Gethin, he had started right when I started working with him as a coach, he had started a company called Caged Muscle. And Caged Muscle would would have been one of the pioneers for what we would now call pretty standard in the supplement space as products being clinically dosed. And so a lot of the products before that time were like proprietary blends where you didn't really know. So it would say, like, here's an eight gram scoop, and there would be a bunch of ingredients, but it wouldn't say how much of each ingredient's in it. It just this is like a uh uh swamp water, and they were doing that on purpose because they could put very little of the expensive ingredients but still put them on the label.

SPEAKER_01 51:47

So it wasn't really regulated back then.

SPEAKER_00 51:48

No, and not near as much. And it was it was not even from a regulation, it was just from a competition standpoint. Everyone was just making money hand over fist doing that. Yeah. And then the first person, like him and a few other people. Um, you've probably heard of the other one who I have a personal relationship with him too. He's a great man, uh, Dr. Dr. Jim Stepani. And so, like when the product pre-Jim came out or like the Jim Stepani line, that and cage muscle were the two lines that were like, no, here's you need six grams of citrulline. And the way that I explain it for people who aren't deep into supplements, imagine that you tell me, hey, Dylan, I have a really big headache right now. It's kind of turning into a migraine. Do you have any ibuprofen? I might say something like, Do you want 200 milligrams? Do you want 400 milligrams? And you're gonna have taken it before and you're gonna go, Oh, I I noted in the past that I kind of need the 400 milligrams, right? But imagine if I just took a sharp knife, I gave you a uh an ibuprofen cap and I just sliced a sliver off of a liquid cap that was half the size of my fingernail, and I said, Okay, here you've got ibuprofen now. You're still gonna have a big fucking headache. Yeah, there's clinical doses that need to be thresholds that need to be crossed in order for a product to work. Yeah. So the supplement space had just pixie dusted everything forever, making flavorful, colorful drinks that had nothing in them. Wow. And so I was horrified by this, and um, and many other things, like finding out that most of the amino acids were actually from human hair or pig carcass, like a lot of the ways the ingredients were getting into the bottles. I was like, holy shit. And I had it firsthand because I had this relationship with someone who was starting a supplement company. Yeah. And because I'm I was always interested in it, I would ask questions, he would show me stuff, and I remember C4 back in the day. C4 had just like kind of came out and he was like, here's what I'm up against. Because he had a manufacturer relationship where he's his first pre-workout was called pre-caged, he had shown me the lab analysis, and from his from where he was getting pre-caged manufactured, he could make he could remake C4. He did it as like a mock-up. He could make C4 at this time for a dollar nineteen per tub. And the pre-workout he was gonna try to make was $19.10. It was ten uh ten times the price.

SPEAKER_01 54:05

So C4 has always been.

SPEAKER_00 54:06

Yeah, and so then it was kind of like, oh, and I remember just feeling because I had taken, you know, a couple years and in I'm a couple years into this journey by now. I had tried every pill, potion, and powder that there was. I wanted to, you know, and I felt like I'd been let down, like I had been sold all this magic bullshit. That even if I thought it did something from a placebo effect, I had now had evidence that, like, oh, I probably didn't do that. Yeah. And I wanted to open a supplement store to be the hero against the villain. And that the villain I thought was like these supplement stores, you go in and they just try to sell you something on commission because they get paid to sell you this. GNC was very popular at the time, or Popeyes with all their bullshit shit. And so it's like, here, you know, we'll sell you this, knowing full well that it's crap. Yeah. And I wanted to a different experience for the customer.

SPEAKER_01 54:54

So being in the supplement industry for how long were you there for?

SPEAKER_00 54:57

The supplement space for me, um, from about 2016 to 2024. So six years I had owned retail supplement stores up to a peak of four.

SPEAKER_01 55:11

Yeah. So what did you I guess what did you learn and what are some of the secrets maybe these supplement stories even now aren't really sharing?

SPEAKER_00 55:18

Yeah, that's so good, bro. I'm getting myself in trouble, but I'm gonna answer it anyway. It ended up all being a wild goose chase because this is where I learned the harsh realities of most businesses, especially product-driven businesses, that they have to turn a profit or no one cares. And so I got into this position where I had these supplement stores and I couldn't even bring in a lot of the products that I wanted because there's no way that I could sell them and keep the doors open. And so a lot of the stuff that I wanted to do, I couldn't do whether from a corporate boundary. So someone was like setting a rule that I couldn't do it. But even if I wanted to, it's like, well, yeah, and I'm gonna go broke. Yeah, what's the problem? And so I I felt like it was always um kind of going against my morals, or like in the supplement stores, what they'll teach, what we taught employees is get people on recurring. And so the only one that I kind of agree with is like protein powder. If you show someone that if if you come into the store and you're like, I never used a protein, but I know I need to get my protein up, and I get you a powder that you like or a brand that you like, um, you're gonna keep buying it. Yeah, right. And so, and I think that's actually great. However, and that's the goal is to get you on something very useful, and then it's like, well, now we could add some greens, and then now over time, do you have do you you know you ask people the right questions, they're like probing questions, yeah, right? Like, oh, have you ever considered this? And it's kind of like being one of those psychics where if you know enough about human nature, you could just ask the right question and someone kind of sells themselves, yeah. Right? It's like, do you ever struggle with any joint pain? Yeah, all the time. It's like, mmm, well, I got something for that too. And the goal is to have every one of your customers on three to five things recurring, and then you stack sale products and other new niche shit on top of that. But the idea is Sean always buys his fish oil, Sean always buys his his greens powder, Sean buys his protein, Sean buys his pre-workout and his intra workout. He comes in every you know month and the and then he might get more stuff. Maybe he's traveling, he gets bars, he gets some chips, maybe I bump him on this new cool product that came out, you know, because I have a relationship with him, because he's for six months now bought three, four hundred dollars worth of stuff. Um, and I started to realize because of my coaching experience that I'm like, this shit is actually all situational use, it's not recurring use besides a few things, such as protein. There's a few things like a multivitamin. There is creatine's amazing, it's great. And the good supplement stores will try to stack those key products, and so good for them. But a lot of supplement stores do this where they know it's like, well, you need a fat burner, you need a testosterone booster, and the things that are the most useless are the highest profit margin for the company and for the store. And so I realized the rules of the game are incentivized for bad, bad morals, and that started to really eat at me to the point where I just didn't like the business anymore. And then as I grew more locations, I thought I would make more money, which was true, but your job changes, excuse me. And people don't realize this with entrepreneurship. My job was very different from pouring my life savings into one supplement store that I essentially managed, run, sold. I did everything. Yeah. And I had a couple staff, and then eventually I did have a manager, and that's how I moved into getting a second one. By the time you have three or four, your job is managing young people who are always quitting and fighting with each other and sleeping with each other and doing debauchery, stealing stuff, not doing inventory right. Your job becomes inventory management. Now I'm not even connecting with customers. Now I'm not doing any of that. I'm working on a laptop in the back, you know, fixing broken ice cream machines or, you know, doing a bunch of stuff that I didn't like to do. And so it's like, why this job sucks now, even for more money.

SPEAKER_01 59:02

It's not even about the fitness at that point.

SPEAKER_00 59:03

No, it was not. And then it was like, if I'm just gonna focus on making money, I ain't gonna do it in this industry. The fitness industry as a whole is a small, small industry. If I'm, you know, like I'll go play in a different industry that's worth two trillion dollars, not an industry that's worth a billion, you know, if I'm really just only focused on money.

SPEAKER_01 59:23

Well, fast forward. You're an online coach, you've trained over 1,500 clients, very few online coaches touch or even close to that number. How do you think you got to that number?

SPEAKER_00 59:39

That's such a good question. Relentlessness, right? So, like just never stopping. I've beat a lot of people that you know how many people I've saw who are gonna be the next big competitor, the next big coach, and they come out of the gate really strong five years later, where are they? You know, and so I just have this like honey badger mentality. I'll just keep doing the same painful things over and over. That's actually what to me what resilience is is doing a non-rewarding behavior over and over again without failing. And um, a lot of it is that, a lot of it is passion, and I kind of have weaved in and out of losing it and finding it, and losing it and finding it if I'm being really honest. I've never been more passionate about the work that I'm doing now because it's a blend of everything I've always wanted to do. When I first started, you have no authority as a young person with no life experience to talk about deep mindset issues or stuff like that, but I would want to, and so there was always this thing missing from inside my coaching. And uh now, because of all the experience I have, you know, I get to change lives on such a rapid level. Like you know, helping someone out of a disease state, autoimmune condition, or a lifelong obesity struggle, or just getting in the best shape of their life, and now their family dynamics are better, and we've sorted out communication issues on the back end, so they they're having a better life. I love all that. I've I've got to do, I've got to see all the way to the top of bodybuilding and you know, work up to working with pro athletes and doing a lot of that stuff. And so I've been very blessed to see behind a lot of the curtains. And yeah, it's been like this fall will be like 16 years of me, like including like a one-on-one personal training, you know. And I was one of the first online coaches to exist.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:17

I was gonna say, how many online coaches have there?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:19

There was actually like 14 of us, and I know I know all of them. Yeah, and we were all doing it, yeah. A lot of them are, and um it's so interesting because I always had other businesses and other things in the go. This is the first time in my life where like really online coaching is my sole focus. And uh I always was scared to do that because I had my dad's voice in my head of like, you need real businesses, not just like a computer business, you know. And so I thought having all those other things was gonna be my retirement or my and the online coaching has funded all those things and survived and paid for all, like it's been able to retire my mom and you know, give me a great life and get get me so much blessing by proxy from seeing so many people's lives changed. And the truth is, bro, is um I'm very high in trait conscientiousness, which essentially means how much duty and pride do you put behind the work you're doing? Yeah. And I've never, Sarah just asked me this the other day, because she's been coaching for a couple years now, and she was like, How have you done this and never taken a week off? And I'm like, What do you mean? And she's like, I'm just like, I've talked to a lot of people in the last couple weeks. Her business is growing, you know, and she's like, you know, her roster is like a third of the size of mine, and she's like, just looking after all these people. Like, I feel like my brain is cooked.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:34

A little burnt out.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:35

Yeah, and I'm like, this is gifts, I'm not sure. Like my previous life prepared me to handle these loads. I've never missed a check-in. Not one time have I texted someone and been like, oh, I'm sick, can't get your check-in in. And so to answer your question, how I think I got there was actually giving a fuck about what I'm doing. And I'm not saying that makes me perfect. I I've made mistakes, I've protocoled things I wouldn't do now. Um, you know, and you learn as a coach and you grow as a human being. You know, I'm a lot more mature now. But I always tried to do my best. I always had this duty, like this person's paying me this money. I'm blessed that they're paying me this money because guess what? I've done sales, I've worked in the bottom of a potash mine, I've worked hard on a farm. I know what real work is, to be honest. And I was, I'm very, even to this day, even on my worst day, I'm like, yeah, but Dylan, you got to stand in front of three computer screens and do pretty well for yourself and change a bunch of lives. It gets much fucking worse. Because any Malaysia right now wouldn't be very fun. Yeah. And so I've just always had that because of that. I was raised like it was 1940. I had that delineation, and that caused me to be very grateful about the the funds or the opportunities that I was getting.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:42

Well, your type of coaching, too, is not the typical way online coaches train people. You know, I being in the fitness industry myself, what I really like about you, and I've seen it firsthand from you know, traveling with you to London and recording some customer um testimonials, client testimonials. Your focus isn't not just the physical, but the mental too. And I feel like that's where a lot of trainers struggle a bit, you know, when they talk about the mental side of getting a uh, you know, client losing that weight.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:18

Can I get real with you for a second?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:19

Of course.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:20

I think I have the competence now, but I always thought I did. And so that's what allowed me to do it. Because most trainers and coaches will say something like, Well, I don't have a certification in that, or uh I'll stay in my lane. I grew up in the middle of the nowhere where my dad was the welder, the doctor, the painter, the fixer, the therapist. There was no one coming to save you. We were our own police. You ever watch like Yellowstone? That's literally that's what it is. Yeah. I'm telling you right now, that's a dramaticized version of my life, some version of it. And so when I would when someone would say, like, oh, well, I need this person to solve this, I would just look at like, well, what does a therapist learn? Okay, well, that's all accessible in the 21st century. Let me learn everything a therapist would learn and then apply that with my life skills. And I'm very good at figuring stuff out. And so I just took a bunch of different practices and smashed them together, and that's what my coaching is. Where it's like a blend of the difficult life that I've lived, the overcoming that I've done, actual education with multiple PhD mentors. Once I started to have some resources, it was like I never thought about going to school. I quit school in grade 10. I thought it's useless. I and it's gonna be more useless. School's not gonna exist. This is a hot take, but school's not gonna exist the way that we think it is. In 10 years, it won't exist. This is why people who are having kids are very nervous because deep down they know that the the map most parents for every generation for the previous 10 generations could pretty much give their kids a map and kind of know that they would figure life out. That map is now burnt. Yeah. If you have in the last in this generation, as a millennial, like my age, our age, when we have kids, anything that I've done or you've done is completely fucking useless for how their life's gonna. To look in 50 years, I guarantee you. Yeah, I would bet my whole existence on that. School being a huge part of that. And I'm not saying school won't exist, but it won't exist the way that we it it is now. Yeah. A lot of the topics and subjects and all that crap. And for some reason, I had the prophetic gift of seeing that. By the time I was 13, I already knew this person up here teaching me this stuff is doing absolutely nothing in life that I want to do. Yeah. They have no business, I have no business learning from this person. And so I was always very good at being mentored. You know, like a couple of my mentors, Dr. Scott Stevenson, Dr. Dwayne Jackson. It was like, how much money do I have to pay you for you to tell me everything you know in this fashion over the next six months or one year? Uh well, you probably won't be able to afford it. Just tell me how much. Okay, it's 50,000, it's a hundred thousand. Okay, no problem. There, do it. And so to your question, the experiences come with not being scared to invest in myself. Yeah, I've invested amounts of money that would make most people throw up in themselves. Like I probably have pumped um in, and this is over a lot of years, by the way, but like three quarters of a million dollars of like resources strictly into my brain about human psychology, physiology, and or business growth.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:14

And and then obsessed about it for 15 years. And so what you're seeing now, I think anyone can do, by the way. I think that I have some gifts, but I think everyone has gifts. I think that we all grossly underestimate what we can get done in a few months and grossly underestimate what you can get done in 10 years. Yeah. And I always knew. Like when I when I reached some the height of my bodybuilding coaching career a few years ago, before I kind of stepped back from it, I knew it would take 10 to get there.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:44

I knew people were gonna say I was crazy. I knew people would say you don't look like this, or you blah blah. I knew it. I knew all that. I accepted it. It didn't matter, it didn't change the vision. I was convicted.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:55

And I just didn't quit. And so, like, people really, really don't give themselves enough credit for like we we're very judgmental of ourselves, especially right now in culture, because it's so easy to compare. Because, like, well, Sean's such a great videographer, and if I want to start, it's like I'm so far behind. He has the new Sony, this, that, and the other thing. And it's like, yeah, but maybe Sean has 10,000 hours of practice in this. How many do you have? Three. Oh, so I always understood. Once I figured that out, it was like it's a skill gap. That's all anything is. It's a skill gap. And most of us want to Ike, I call I use this term aikido, which is like a it's a Japanese martial art for evading things. And so it's like we all want to aikido the responsibility. Somehow we want to tell ourselves that, like, no, it's not that, it's something else. I'm missing a magic ingredient. Yeah, now you just gotta bake the cake fucking 15,000 times and figure out why it doesn't taste right, rebake. Say why it doesn't taste right, rebake. Need a new ingredient, rebake, and do that over and over again. If a human being puts 10 years of really hard effort uh into anything, they will be good at it.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:01

Yeah. I feel like I could talk to you forever on training. It's so interesting to pick your brain in terms of it, but I know we got to go. Um, my last question I just want to ask you is you mentioned like the way you lost your weight. You would never recommend any of your clients to do that way because it's so not many people can do that. Like, what do you think if you could sum it up? And I know this is hard to do in like a few sentences, but what do you see most people struggle with when they're trying to get in shape or lose that weight or put on muscle?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:32

It's a good question. And I'm gonna start with a I'll try to give a um, I'll try to give a pragmatic answer. I'm gonna start with the non-sexy, non-syllable answer, which is it is really comes down to the person. And I mean, we all hear this as like a cliche, you know, it's an individual thing because I've seen you can't judge a book by its cover. I've seen really obese people who, if you looked at them at the mole right now, like four or five hundred pounds in six months, they're a new person. They just they they've they when before they got to me, probably, they made a decision at the fucking end will I look like this anymore. You can't stop them. Yeah, you guide them, and it doesn't mean they're perfect, they fall down. And I've also looked at someone who needs to lose 20 pounds and they just didn't give themselves the leverage. And I think a lot of us um don't realize that we do what we we do what we must have, not what we want. And so when you've made a decision, that's actually what fuels motivation. And I think a lot of people in my world, because of the online coaching space, have hired a coach and they think that the act of hiring the coach is the thing. Yeah. No, no, no, the work just starts here now.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:42

It's like therapy.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:43

And to be honest, I've I've had people who I wrestle with them and the identity for six months, and then they lose the 20 pounds two months later. And so for six months we didn't move at all.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:55

And looking at them, you'd go, like, well, you're already kind of active. You're you're you're not far.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:00

But it's because you have to rechange identity and behavior. And that's why my coaching work includes that so much because the how you look is a reflection of what you think and what you act out. The end. That's it. Everyone wants it to be more complicated than that. It's not. Yeah, it's that simple. And so once I figure out where the stupid things you're doing, we need to insert less stupid things and replace them with the more smart things. Personality trait, life experience, current life trajectory, resources all play a factor in how fast someone wants to replace stupid things with smart things. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:30

Coaches, take notes. This is free game.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:33

I mean, I appreciate you, dude. And I appreciate you doing the interview too. And just like, I never talk about this stuff. I realized, you know, you should more. I know. I yeah, like come just even walking through it, I'm like, oh yeah, there was that, and there was this, you know, and it's uh it's been a wonderful journey to be on. Yeah. And a lot of this, uh, you know, a lot of my clients listen to this. I wanted to do this just because I think it's great for people to understand, like, oh, that's why he coaches me like this, or that's why he sees the world like this, you know, whether they like it or hate it. You know, it's it's it's always good to understand things, at least for me.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:02

Well, thank you, Dale, for letting me come on the other side of course and talk you through it. And I'm excited to see what the next episode will be.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:09

Me too, man. Thank you. Appreciate you, bro.