When I stepped on the scale on November 25, 2012, I weighed 225.0 lbs.

My friend Marika and me in San Francisco just before Thanksgiving, 2012.

When I stepped on the scale on August 14, 2013, I weighed 183.4 lbs.

Kristin and me at Red Rocks in late June. I had about 5 lbs. to go for my goal at that point.

It took me nearly nine months, but I lost 40 lbs, which was my goal. I did it slowly, and I did it deliberately. When you lose a bunch of weight, you don’t realize how infrequently you see most of the people in your life because they all remark about how much weight you’ve lost (this never gets tiresome, by the way). You think to yourself, “Has it really been since November that I’ve seen this person? Longer? Where does the time go? And have I really been at this for this long?”

The answer to each of those questions is yes. After someone remarks about your weight loss, the next question is inevitably, “How did you do it?” This series of articles lays out exactly how I did it, along with some thoughts on the process and a few things I learned about myself along the way. You’ll get a new post each day that discusses a different aspect of the process for me. Today’s post is what finally drove me to action.

The mystery of weight loss, solved here! Just click on, and come inside!

(Spoiler alert: The secret is no secret at all. You need to adopt a healthy lifestyle, eat less and better, and continue to enjoy your life. That’s it. If that’s all you needed to hear, feel free to go back to online shopping or whatever. For the rest of you, here are the exact steps I took that have resulted in my loss of over 40 lbs.)

Nexus

I wrote about this a bit here, but it’s worth revisiting briefly. Between our grizzly bear of a VP equating as a couple of “little fat boys,” my struggle to shoehorn myself into Banana Republic clothes that used to fit fine, my massage therapist telling me losing my gut would alleviate my back pain, and my horror at gazing at this photo, I finally reached critical mass on the desire to be less of a fatass.

Without some sort of external stimulus (or in my case, stimuli), you’ll never be motivated to change. Sure, I’d put on a suit and think, “There’s no way my gut is this big. I must have eaten too much salt today or something.” Or I’d see photos and go, “Oh, that’s just a bad angle.” Or, “This washer sucks. It keeps shrinking my clothes!”

It’s all the bullshit you tell yourself in order to avoid facing the harsh truth that you’ve gotten fatter than you’d like, and to avoid the hard work that looms in order to undo that. I knew that in the back of my head for a long time, but denial is powerful and it took four harsh things I didn’t want to hear to shake me out of my cocoon.

But once I was able to shake off the denial, which led to resolve, which translated to action, I knew I couldn’t fail. I ultimately couldn’t lie to myself anymore. And once I accepted that, the pounds just started coming off. I’ve always said I didn’t want to just cross a goal line and spike the football. I’ve known people who have treated weight loss this way, and they’ve always gotten re-fat.

I wanted to move a better neighborhood and live there. I didn’t want to yo-yo. I didn’t want think of this as something I did, and then went back to my old ways. I wanted to change my life. That was my thought process before I ever lost one pound.

So how did I do it? Tune in tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Every sculptor needs a tool. This was mine…