Jonathan’s Story
Choice Weight Analysis
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Shut Up And Choose Book
Hey, welcome back to Shut Up and Choose, the podcast that cuts the noise and the nonsense and all the bullshit that the internet gurus and Instagram influencers are throwing your way. But the reality is we all know that it all comes down to what you choose, how you choose to eat, when you choose to eat, and why you choose to eat. It all comes down to choice. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. We’re gonna talk about something that you’re not gonna like, but it’s important. And here’s the big thing. Nobody forced the fork into your mouth. Sit with that for a second. I know you hate hearing it because it removes your favorite escape hatch. No choice. Long day, I deserved it. Those phrases all sound harmless, but they’re not. They’re permission slips you hand yourself so you can keep doing the same thing and pretend you’re not responsible for the outcome.
Weight gain follows defended decisions every time. You don’t gain weight from ignorance, you gain weight from the choices that you protect. You defend those choices with stories and you repeat them with confidence, and then you have the balls to act shocked by the result. Your body isn’t confused because your body responds to behavior, period.
So here’s the uncomfortable truth: stress didn’t make you eat. Your boss didn’t make you eat. Your kids didn’t make you eat. Hunger didn’t force you. None of those things have hands. You chose food as a response. That choice felt automatic because you’ve practiced that for years. Automatic, though, doesn’t mean forced. Most people confuse discomfort with danger. A long day feels heavy, so they reach for food. Boredom feels itchy, so they start to eat, and emotion shows up, and food becomes the release valve. I know I’m guilty of that for a hundred years.
The moment you say you had no choice, you handed control away. But you also keep every calorie that you ate. So look at your language, because language exposes ownership. When you say I deserved it, you’re not talking about food. You’re talking about permission. You’re rewarding survival with sabotage. So you survive the day, big fucking deal. Congratulations. That has nothing to do with eating in a way that keeps you overweight.
People love to say that they eat clean all week and still can’t lose weight. That sentence, as crazy as it is, but that sentence hides the truth. The damage happens in the moments you excuse. So those bites, I call them BLTs, bites, licks and tastes, the bites that you don’t log, the snacks you don’t respect, the nights you explain away because you were tired or stressed or proud of yourself for making it through. Your body doesn’t grade the effort, it just tallies your behavior.
You want to know why that feels harsh? Because responsibility feels heavier than helplessness at first. Helplessness lets you complain. Responsibility demands change. Complaining itself, it burns no calories, but change does.
So here’s where the control comes back. You stop saying, I had no choice. You replace it with one phrase. I chose this. Say it out loud every time. That sentence may sting, and that’s good because pain wakes you up and awareness interrupts your patterns.
Then you slow the movement down. 10 seconds before any unplanned eating, no negotiations. That 10 seconds forces the decision into consciousness. Conscious decisions reduce regret. Regret drives overeating.
So you decide food before hunger shows up. Planning removes drama. Drama feeds overeating. You eat sitting down. No screens, no standing, no pretending it didn’t count. If you will not sit with it, you shouldn’t eat it.
Stop tracking calories for a minute and really start tracking decisions. What time did you choose to eat? Why did you choose it? What were you feeling? Patterns reveal themselves fast when you stop lying to yourself. You don’t need motivation, you need honesty, and you sure as shit don’t need discipline. You need fewer excuses.
Weight loss accelerates the moment you stop defending behavior that hurts you. Nobody is forcing you to eat like this. That’s the bad news. It’s also the best news you’ll hear today. Control never left, you just handed it away, and you can take it back the same way. So you’re not broken, you’re choosing. Face it, that’s a fact. Change the choice, and the outcome follows.
You keep giving your life credit for decisions you made. Work didn’t do it, family didn’t do it, stress didn’t do this. Those are circumstances. They don’t eat, you do. Outsourcing responsibility to your schedule feels logical. It feels fair. It also keeps you overweight because it removes ownership while every calorie stays exactly where it landed. That’s the illusion. If the cause lives outside of you, the solution has to come from outside of you too. A better schedule, less stress, more support, different job, different phase of life.
Meanwhile, your body keeps responding to what you actually do, not what you wish would change. Stress doesn’t create fat. Stress does expose habits. Two people can live in the same day, same workload, same chaos, same bullshit, same emotional pressure. One eats like an adult, and one eats like a victim. Same stress, different choices, and of course, different outcomes.
That example makes people angry because it removes the fairness argument. Fairness has nothing to do with physiology. If you want proof, just look at your own life. Think about a day you claimed was impossible. Now think about another impossible day where you ate less. It exists. You didn’t need perfect conditions. You needed a different decision. That difference didn’t come from circumstances changing, it came from you.
So comfort language keeps you safe from that rationalization. Phrases like, I was exhausted, I had no time, I was overwhelmed. They sound reasonable, but they’re also shields. They protect behavior from inspection and they make overeating feel earned instead of chosen. And you know you’re choosing it.
Here’s the part that people like to avoid. You use food as relief. Relief feels necessary in the moment. It’s still a decision. You could choose a walk or some silence or protein or water or sleep. You didn’t because food worked faster. Fast relief always costs you later.
Your environment matters. Your life is busy. None of that removes agency. Agency exists even in chaos. It shows up in those small moments, you know, that extra bite, the second plate, the snack you grab while standing up. Those moments, they feel minor, but they stack up fast. You don’t need a calmer life to lose weight. You need to stop pretending chaos makes choices for you. Chaos may test your decisions, but it doesn’t remove them.
If your language keeps you comfortable, your body stays the same. Comfort preserves patterns. Growth demands friction. And that friction, that’s called ownership. So stop blaming your life. Start auditing your decisions. Same day, same stress, new choice, new outcomes.
So you want results. Then you need enemies, not abstract ones, but real ones. The habits and phrases and systems actively working against your progress while pretending to help you. Name them, identify them, and they lose power. Ignore them and they’ll run your behavior on autopilot.
So the first villain here is emotional permission eating. This one hides behind feelings of stress and frustration and even celebration or relief. You eat because something happened and food becomes the reward or the release. You tell yourself it makes sense. You had a day, I earned it, you needed something.
Here’s the reality: feelings don’t require food. They never did. You train yourself to pair emotion with eating. Now the emotion shows up and the behavior follows. That pairing, it feels natural because repetition is what built it. Natural doesn’t mean necessary. Emotional permission eating keeps weight exactly where it was because it turns eating into a coping tool instead of a fuel choice. So every emotion becomes an excuse. You never run out of reasons to eat because life never runs out of feelings.
The second villain here is convenience disguised as necessity. This one, of course, sounds practical. I had no time, I grabbed what was there, it was fast, it was easy, it was better than nothing. Convenience foods thrive on this lie. They position themselves as survival tools for busy people. You were trapped, you chose speed over intention, you chose ease over outcome. That’s a decision. Fucking own it.
You didn’t need the drive-thru. You wanted the relief of not thinking. You didn’t need to eat standing up out of a fucking bag. You avoided the pause that forces awareness. Convenience keeps you from slowing down. Slowing down exposes your behavior. Exposure is what creates change.
So the third villain here is food marketing pretending to give a shit about you. This one deserves some real anger on your part. These companies aren’t confused. They design food to override fullness cues. They label it smart and clean and balanced, protein packed, low sugar, guilt-free. None of those words guarantee restraint. They exist to lower your guard. The packaging calls you while the portion size quietly doubles. The health halo gives you permission to eat more than you planned. You trust the label and study your behavior. But here’s the thing: if a product needs to convince you it fits in your lifestyle, it already knows it doesn’t support your goals. Real food does not negotiate. Marketing does.
Here’s the fourth villain. The phrase, I had no choice. This is the most dangerous one because it sounds final. It shuts the conversation down. No choice means no responsibility. No responsibility means no change. You always had a choice. Sometimes it was uncomfortable, and sometimes it felt unfair. Sometimes you didn’t like the options. But choice still existed. That phrase protects your identity. If you had no choice, you’re not the problem. Your body disagrees. Biology tracks behavior. It doesn’t accept excuses as payment.
Say the phrase out loud and listen to it. I had no choice. It’s never true. It is convenient. Convenience helps patterns stay intact.
The fifth villain is scale avoidance and selective memory. You can’t manage what you refuse to face. Avoiding the scale does not pause reality. Believe me, I know. It delays awareness. Selective memory finishes the job. You remember the good old days. You forget the snacks, you forget the drinks, you forget the nights you ate without sitting down. Then the scale moves and you feel blindsided. You aren’t fucking blindsided. You were disengaged. The scale is not cruel. What it is, is consistent. It reflects accumulation. When you avoid it, you avoid feedback. Feedback corrects behavior. Avoidance protects comfort.
All those villains that I just named, they share one trait. They remove friction. They make overeating easier, and they make responsibility blurry. They make that weight gain feel accidental. Accidental weight gain is a fantasy. It doesn’t exist.
You defeat those villains by making decisions visible again. You slow down eating, you sit, you plan earlier, you stop letting feelings dictate intake. You read labels with skepticism, you weigh in with curiosity instead of fear. None of this requires motivation, but it does require honesty, aggressive honesty.
If you want to keep your weight, keep those villains alive. Defend them, use their language and avoid the mirror like I did. Avoid the scale and avoid the pause. If you want to change, you got to kill them one by one. Name them when they show up. Call them out in real time. Take ownership without negotiation. Because weight loss doesn’t fail. People protect the wrong enemies.
You always chose. Say it again. You always chose. Not once, not sometimes. Every single time food went in your mouth. A decision happened. Even when it fell fast, even when it felt mindless, even when you swear you weren’t thinking, a decision still occurred. You might not remember making it, but your body sure as shit remembers the result.
Eating being automatic does not make it forced. Automatic actually means rehearsed. Automatic means practice. And it means that you ran a script that you wrote over time. You didn’t wake up one day eating like this. You trained yourself into it. And training works both ways.
People love to hide behind the word automatic because it sounds scientific. Habit, conditioning, wiring, those words feel clinical. They make behavior feel distant. They also quietly suggest you’re powerless. That suggestion is a lie. If automatic meant forced habits could never change, but of course they do every day in people who stop negotiating with themselves.
So here’s the escalation. The first excuse feels small. One night, one snack, one stressful day. You defend it. Defense matters more than the food itself. Defense turns behavior into identity. Once you justify a choice, your brain stores it as acceptable. Acceptable becomes repeatable. Repeatable becomes routine. Routine becomes invisible. Invisible behavior builds your body faster than any single meal ever could.
This is why weight loss stalls without obvious mistakes. You’re not making new bad choices, you’re repeating defended ones. You keep telling the same stories, but your body keeps the score. You say you didn’t have time. Next time arrives and time disappears again. You say that you’re too tired, fatigue returns, and the script just runs. You say it was a special occasion. Life gives you another one. Every defended excuse teaches your brain what to do next time.
People think weight loss is about food quantity. It’s not. It’s about permission and frequency. How often you give yourself a pass, how quickly you excuse, how confidently you defend. And here’s the part nobody likes. You can’t outwork repeated behavior. You can’t gym your way out of defended eating. You can’t offset a story you tell yourself every night. Repetition beats intensity. Always, every time.
This is why escape routes have to close. No loopholes, no vague rules, no flexible boundaries that bend under pressure, because pressure reveals structure, and weak structure always collapses. You need decisions that survive bad days. Not perfect days. Perfect days are fucking easy. Everybody can be great on a perfect day, but bad days are honest. If your plan only works when you feel motivated, it’s not a plan, it’s a wish.
And automatic eating ends when you interrupt it. Interruption requires awareness. Awareness requires friction. Friction feels uncomfortable. Good. That’s good. Discomfort is the cost of change.
So I would tell you, do this. You pause before eating anything unplanned. Not to debate it, just to notice it. Noticing it breaks the loop. You heard me talk about mindful eating. If you read my book, you know mindful eating was the key. Thinking every time I opened my mouth. That’s the key.
You should always eat sitting down. Standing hides behavior. Screens like your phone or your iPad or your TV while you’re eating hide quantity. Sitting forces you to be present. You stop using emotion as a reason. Emotion is information, not instruction. Feeling something doesn’t mean you have to eat something.
Every time you choose differently, the automatic script weakens. Every time you defend the old choice, it gets stronger. Your body reflects the strongest script you can run most often.
This is escalation. Small choices repeat. Repetition builds structure. Structure shapes outcome. You didn’t wake up overweight. You wake up with the body repeated behaviors earned. That sentence pisses people off because it removes the mystery, and that’s comforting. Clarity, though, demands action.
So if you want a different body, you don’t need a new plan every fucking Monday. You need fewer defended excuses today. Today matters more than the week. The meal matters more than the plan, and the choice matters more than motivation. You always chose. You still are. Automatic doesn’t mean forced, it means familiar. Familiar can be changed. Familiar falls apart under attention. So pay attention. Close those escape routes and stop defending behavior that keeps you stuck. Repeated choices build bodies. So choose accordingly.
So what works is pretty fucking boring. It’s blunt. It doesn’t care how you feel. It works because it removes fantasy and replaces it with ownership. So start with a sentence you avoid. I chose this. Say it out loud right now. I chose this. This single change collapses the lie instantly. I had no choice keeps you protected. I chose this puts you in the room with the decision. You feel exposed. Well, that’s fucking good. Because exposure restores control.
Every time you say I chose this, you cut the bullshit off at the knees. You stop pretending the food appeared on its own. You stop blaming the day. You stop outsourcing responsibility to your feelings. People fear that sentence because they think it creates shame. Let me tell you, it doesn’t. It creates clarity. Shame comes from lying to yourself. Clarity comes from telling the truth.
So the next thing I want you to do is pause 10 seconds before you eat anything unplanned. And I know 10 seconds doesn’t feel like much. It’s trivial, but it’s not. 10 seconds is enough time to interrupt autopilot. Autopilot thrives on speed. Speed keeps you unconscious. That pause, that 10-second pause, brings the decision into awareness, which reduces overeating more reliably than any rule.
You don’t use pause to negotiate, and you don’t use it to judge. You use it to notice what I am about to do and why. Is this hunger or escape? That question alone changes behavior.
So that’s a great rule. Unplanned eating is where weight loss goes to die. Not meals, but moments. The pause forces moments to reveal themselves.
The next one is you decide meals earlier than hunger hits. Hunger makes terrible decisions because it wants relief. And relief choices are fast and sloppy. Believe me, I know. Planning early removes emotion from the equation. You eat what you decided when you were calm. Calm decisions beat hungry decisions every time.
I’m sure you’ve eaten a thousand things when you’re in a panic and go, why the fuck did I eat all that? Calm decisions beat hungry decisions every time. This doesn’t require meal prep containers or perfection. You know I’m totally against meal prep. All it requires is one sentence. When is my next meal and what will it be? That decision can happen hours earlier. But once you decide it, the hunger becomes irrelevant. It becomes a signal, but not the commander.
Most people wait until hunger shows up and then ask, what should I eat? That question invites chaos. Chaos always chooses the convenient choice, and convenience chooses excess. Decide first and eat it later.
The next rule: eat sitting down. No screens, no hiding. This one exposes everything. It was the biggest one for me. It’s really what drove my weight loss. Standing eating pretends the food doesn’t count. And screens erase the quantity because you’re focused on something else. Hiding removes accountability, and sitting down with no distractions forces you to witness your behavior. People resist this rule because it feels restrictive, but the truth is it’s not. It is revealing. Revealed behavior changes, hidden behavior repeats. If you wouldn’t sit down to eat it, you shouldn’t eat it. That rule alone eliminates most overeating, not because the food disappears, but because the excuse disappears.
And now the last piece, and this is super important, track your decisions, not your fucking calories. Everybody knows how to track calories, although the truth is tracking calories is completely inefficient. Track your decisions first. Calories matter. Everyone knows that. Focus on calories before behavior fails because behavior drives your calories. You can’t manage numbers while lying about the actions. Track when you choose to eat, why you choose to eat, whether it was planned, whether you paused, whether you sat, whether you said, I chose this. Patterns show up fast when you track decisions honestly. You’ll see the real issue. It’s not portions or permission. It’s not macros. It’s moments. It’s not weekends. It’s language. Once decisions improve, calories follow without obsession. When decisions stay sloppy, calorie tracking turns into a math game that you lose every time emotionally.
This system works because it attacks root behavior. It removes escape routes and it slows the moment down. It forces you to own the moment without any drama. None of this requires motivation. None of this requires inspiration. None of it requires a better life. It works in chaos. It works on shitty days. It works when you feel like shit, when you’re tired, stressed, annoyed, or bored.
People keep searching for this mythical perfect plan. The truth is the perfect plan is fewer lies and more pauses. The perfect plan is deciding earlier and eating consciously and owning behavior in real time. Weight loss only responds to behavior. You need to be aware. Behavior responds to awareness. Awareness responds to friction. Add some fucking friction in your life. It’s not always going to be easy. So add friction, pause, sit, decide, speak the truth out loud. That’s what actually works.
Reclaiming choice definitely feels harsh at first. It’s supposed to. Harsh is the sound of fantasy breaking. It’s what happens when you stop cushioning the truth so you can keep doing the same shit. People chase comfort because it feels kind. But comfort is what’s keeping them stuck. Harsh beats helpless every time.
I get it. Helpless sounds gentle and compassionate and understanding. But it also removes your hands from the wheel. When you believe you were forced, there’s nothing to fix, nothing to change or own. The story feels safer than responsibility, and safety keeps your weight exactly where it is.
Here’s a news flash. No one’s coming to save your weight. Not a new plan, a supplement, a shot, a reset on Monday, no coach yelling, stupid motivation shit in your face. If rescue worked, it would have worked already. You don’t need saving, you need ownership. The moment you stop pretending you’re forced is the moment control returns. That moment, it’s kind of quiet. There’s no music or breakthrough feeling. It’s just a simple realization. This happened because I chose it. That sentence lands heavy. It also puts the power back where it belongs.
Because people like to confuse harsh with cruel. Cruel is lying to someone, watching them repeat the same shit. Harsh is telling you the truth early enough to change course. You can handle harsh. You’ve been handling helpless for years, and obviously it hasn’t helped.
You’re not broken. There’s nothing wrong with your metabolism. Your hormones aren’t conspiring against you. Your age is not the reason you feel trapped. You’re choosing patterns that no longer serve you. And patterns can change. Bodies follow patterns. That’s exactly how I lost over 140 pounds and kept it off. No diets, no shots, no quick fixes, no pretending I suddenly love to eat rabbit food. I ate the foods I loved. I stopped eating them the way that kept me overweight. Choices, my choices, changed first. The body that I got followed. It always does. That’s the way it works.
I didn’t wait to feel ready. I didn’t wait for motivation. I didn’t wait for life to calm down. I just removed all my escape routes. I stopped negotiating with myself. I took the responsibility even when it felt unfair. That’s the part that people skip, but that’s the part that works.
So if you’re listening to this and hoping for a softer ending, you’re still looking for rescue. This is the ending. You either keep pretending you were forced or you take control back. There is no middle ground. Middle ground is where weight maintenance lives.
Here’s the truth people avoid. Once you reclaim choice, you can’t unsee it. Every bite becomes honest and every excuse becomes fucking visible. That awareness feels like shit at first. Then it becomes freeing, honestly. You stop arguing with reality. Reality responds fast when you stop lying to it.
So now I’ll give you a couple plugs. Not because you need another thing, but because structure helps when clarity starts to slip. So if you want a weekly reset that keeps you anchored in reality instead of drifting back into diet noise, grab my free weekly tips. One short message, straight talk, no fluff, no sales shit, no hype. Just a reminder of how this actually works when the old excuses try to creep back in. You can get them on my site, jonathanressler.com. They’re 100% free. They come every Wednesday, take less than a minute to read. If you don’t have a minute a week to invest in your body, you’re completely full of shit.
If you want the full system or the full explanation behind everything you heard today, check out my book, Shut Up and Choose. It’s not a diet plan. There’s no food list, no rules that you’ll fucking break by Thursday. It teaches you how decisions compound, why willpower keeps collapsing, and how to stop repeating the same shit the same year with a different excuse. It’s the exact framework I use to lose over 140 pounds and keep it off while still eating the food that I love. We’re an Amazon bestseller. You can get it on Amazon. Hopefully, you know how to do that.
And if you’re done circling the problem and ready to end it, I work one-on-one with people who want results more than they want comfort. It’s not cheerleading, there’s no fucking hand holding. It’s direct, it’s demanding, and it’s built around real life so the change sticks. If you want someone who will tell you the truth and hold you to it, I’m your guy. You can contact me through my website, jonathanressler.com.
Here’s the net net. You don’t need permission, you don’t need a perfect plan. You need to stop pretending you’re forced. You’re not broken, you’re just choosing. And that’s exactly why this podcast is called Shut Up and Choose.