Tommy Caldwell - Heavy Brain: How to end snacking, overeating, and other binge behaviour

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to those who have trusted their health and wellbeing to me over the years. I hope I have served you well and made an impact in your life. I would also like to dedicate this book to my wife, Laura, and my three beautiful children, William, Evelyn, and Madelyn. It is for you that I never stop trying to improve. My journey to being better for you is what has allowed me to help others better their lives.

The new edition

If you are seeing this paragraph, you are reading the second edition of Heavy Brain. I originally wrote this book in 2016, and I wrote the original version of Heavy Brain with a "quick and dirty" approach. I had concepts I wanted to introduce to people, and my sense of urgency took precedence over important considerations like multiple rounds of editing. Suffice it to say that the first edition of this book was not my best technical writing. The concepts were powerful, but the book was demanding.

This time around, I have refined my concepts, simplified my approach, and made this book much more reader-friendly. I spend less time looking at statistics and arguing for the validity of my approach, and more time providing helpful insights and solutions. Clear guidance is what you are here for, and I quickly get to the answers you crave in this version of the book. I hope that you find this second edition to be both easy to read and easy to apply in your own life.

Who am I?

What comes to mind when you see a person like me? Chances are you assume that I have it all together. I must be one of those lucky people with endless willpower and the discipline of a Buddhist monk. If you saw me hiding under my older sister's bed eating the lifetime supply of chocolate bars she won, day after day, you might change your mind. I finished those chocolate bars in less than two months, before anyone got wise to my gluttony.

When I was a young boy, I was in pain. When my family moved neighbourhoods when I was eight years old, I lost my sense of self. I was bullied, I didn't have any real friends, and I was struggling. I didn't know who I was, and the person I believed myself to be at the time was not a person I liked. I often felt scared, alone, and not good enough. These negative thoughts and feelings pushed me into much unfavorable behaviour. I sacrificed my self in an attempt to fit in, and I lost the ability to be my true self. I sought out a variety of ways to stimulate, numb, and distract myself from the pain I didn't know how to manage.

I carried this pain with me through high school and into early adulthood. Even as an athlete, my weight climbed as high as 245 pounds. and I recall eating myself sick, night after night, in an attempt to run from my emotional distress.

This pain, and the attempt to escape it, is what I see in most of my adult clients today. It is the reason why diet and exercise don't work for most people. If you don't understand and solve your motivation for destructive behaviour, it doesn't matter what diet and exercise program you are following. Your fear of failure, negative self-image, and unchecked emotions are going to pull you back to ground zero.

So how did I get to where I am today? How did I become so disciplined and in control of what I put in my body, and of how I move it? It all started in my mind. As soon as I went into the darkness and began to address my psychological motivations for self-destruction, everything changed.

That is what this book is about, and that is the gift I am offering you today. I know what it is like to be in pain. I know what it is like to suffer. I know how it feels to have so little faith in yourself that you are always looking for a way out. Most importantly, I know how to change that mindset and become a success story.

If you know you have a problem inside you that is showing up on your body, and you've had enough, please join me. If you are not yet there, I hope you return in the future.

Preface

I didn't write this book because I knew it would sell 100,000 copies. In the world of weight loss, this book isn't the kind that typically sells well. You aren't going to find any tricks or hacks in the pages that follow. The absence of such quick-fix solutions makes for a challenging sales pitch. I could write a book that would sell many copies. I could propose a unique and exciting weight loss approach that seems totally plausible. But if I wrote a book like that, I'd have to sell my soul. Worse, you'd end up with another ineffective weight loss book for your trash can.

Whenever I'm checking out the diet section in my local bookstore, I always see the same themes. How to lose thirty pounds in thirty days. Eat this, not that, and do these exercises. The magic method by celebrity so and so." I see hundreds of diet books that promise an easy solution to your health and fitness problems. Each comes with a formula that is sold to the reader as unique and compelling. The message of each book is the same: You have a problem. I have an answer, and the answer is easy and effective." This is the false promise that has made us suckers.

This book does not fit the mold of over-promising and under-delivering. I am going to tell you that the road to long-term weight loss success is not an easy feat. I will tell you that you are likely to 'fail' a few times before you taste sweet victory. I will prove to you that hard work must be done if you are serious about taking back your health. Are you ready to put this book back on the shelf yet?

I'm sure a part of you would prefer the next diet, cleanse, detox, or reset manual instead of a book that talks about the reality of a long, hard, bumpy road. I get it. But you need to ask yourself if any of the tempting solutions you have spent thousands of dollars on have worked for you. If you're reading this book, we can assume the quick fixes of the past have not delivered. Whatever you have tried before is clearly not what you needed. This book just might be the thing that works.

At various points while writing this book, I thought to myself, No one is going to do this much reading to solve their weight loss problem. I hold this view because wanting results in thirty days or less with the least amount of effort is the prevailing mindset. It is the default thinking that props up the multi-billion dollar weight loss industry. At the same time, the overweight and obese populations continue to grow (both literally and figuratively). It doesn't matter that the quick fix solutions we have tried over and over again have never worked for long-term, sustainable weight loss. For some reason, we can't get out of the cycle of spending money on weight loss products that give us hope but not results. The optimist in me believes that people are going to read this book, and something will click. Someone out there wants to resolve their weight problem, and take control of their health, and that person is waiting for a book like this - whether they know it or not. I wrote this book for that person.

The chances are not high that you are the person for whom I wrote this book. Statistically speaking, if you are picking up a book in the hopes that it will solve your weight problems, you are looking to be saved. I hope this is not the case. I want you to be the person who is seeking a reality check by which you can save yourself. If you are hunting for a book that is going to change your life by giving you some sort of magic weight loss solution, you should move on. However, if you are one of the few people willing to forgo the eat this, not that approach and focus on deep self-exploration and problem solving, you will succeed.