171 Pounds, Sleeping All Day, and the Comeback Trail

After the divorce I weighed 171 pounds. I am six foot four. If you can picture that, you know the number tells the whole story. I was sleeping all day, getting up to drop the kids at school, and going back to bed. My body was a reflection of everything else: depleted, neglected, running on nothing.

I had been living with multiple sclerosis for years by that point. The MS was not what put me in bed. The emotional collapse was. The MS just made the climb back steeper, because the medications and the fatigue and the neurological reality of the disease were all still there underneath the depression. I was not fighting one thing. I was fighting several at once, and for a while I was not fighting any of them.

The turn was not dramatic. There was no single moment where I decided to rebuild. It was more like a series of small decisions that added up. I started eating again, with intention. Not a diet. A meal plan. I started training again, not hard, just consistently. I showed up. I did what I could. I did a little more the next week.

The body responded. It responded because that is what the body does when you give it fuel and stimulus and rest. There is no mystery in the physiology. The mystery, if there is one, is in the decision to start. Everything after that is just execution and patience.

Over the months that followed I put on 42 pounds of muscle. A colleague looked at me one day and said, "You're a freak of nature." I appreciated the compliment, but it was not nature. It was the meal plan. It was the four-day split. It was sleeping enough. It was doing the boring, repeatable work that nobody wants to hear about because it does not make a good story.

What makes a good story is the transformation: 171 to 213, from a man who could not get out of bed to a man who was physically stronger than he had been before the marriage ended. But the story underneath the transformation is the one I actually teach. The body is not separate from the rest of your life. When everything falls apart, the body falls apart with it. And when you decide to rebuild, the body is often the fastest and most tangible place to start, because the feedback loop is immediate. You eat well, you sleep well, you train, and within weeks you can feel the difference. That feeling creates momentum. The momentum carries into the business. The business stabilizes. The being leg, the meaning and the relationships, starts to fill back in.

I rebuilt from the body outward. That sequence was not strategic at the time. I was just trying to survive. But looking back, it was exactly the right order, because energy is the asset everything else spends. When the body came back, I came back.

I tell this story because the man I coach is usually not at 171 pounds. He is usually doing fine, on the surface. But somewhere underneath, one of the three legs is weak, and the weakness is dragging the others down in ways he has not connected yet. The rebuild does not require a collapse. It requires honesty about which leg needs attention, and the willingness to start.

What would your body tell you if you listened to it honestly today?

~b