Zack Arnold

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How Reality Editor Gray Jones Lost 60 Pounds

About Episode

Gray Jones is an accomplished reality television editor (here are his credits on IMDB), who recently completed his journey to lose 60 pounds. He is no stranger to a sedentary lifestyle and long hours, but he bucked the trend and decided it was time to make a serious change in his life. And the greatest part about his story is that he lost the weight doing nothing more than making a series of very simple, small changes over time.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: So I’m here today with Gray Jones, who is a fellow editor and post production peep. And to say editors probably doesn’t go quite far enough because you have a really kind of long list of all kinds of different types of projects that you’ve done, and you’ve kind of seen it all. And the the main reason that you’re on here is because you’re probably one of the best marketers for the Fitness and Post program because you have been all over Twitter. You’re at Gray Jones on Twitter, and you’ve really been sharing your story about your fitness and post journey. And I just want to talk today about what that journey looks like, where you started, where you are now, how you did it. But before we do that, just kind of give my audience a little bit of background about who you are, what your experiences in this industry, and just kind of what you do for a living.

Gray Jones: Well, I started out in Canada. I went to York University in Toronto, and it was it was sort of a general film school degree, like a lot of people have, like where you try everything. I finished with a dual major in screenwriting and production. I wanted to do screenwriting, and I actually applied to USC and couldn’t. I got accepted, but couldn’t afford it, so I stayed in Toronto and ended up just taking a bunch of different routes. Landed back at TV editing around 2000, and so have been TV editing since 2000. But in a whole bunch of different things, things I’ve done: offline editing, online editing, color grading, sound editing, a lot of compositing, a lot of finishing, and now I do primarily offline editing, but I also dabble in in a lot of other stuff.

Zack Arnold: And where are you currently located?

Gray Jones: Located in Valencia, which is just north of LA,

Zack Arnold: Right? Because you and I have actually met in person. We met, I guess it would have been a little bit less than a year ago. I was speaking at one of the Alpha Dogs events in Burbank. So free plug for Alpha Dogs. Love those guys. But you were at one of their events where I had done one of my first presentations when Fitness Impost was really in its youth and its infancy, and it still is. But when I look back at that presentation, I just kind of cringe because it’s just thinking, “Oh my God, what was I doing? Because I’ve made so many changes, and I’m in the process of making so many more to just make this better and more accessible for people. But you and I met there, and you had already started your journey. You weren’t nearly as far along as you are now. But just just let’s kind of talk about where you started. Just where you decided, you know what? I need to make a change. Let’s just start from there.

Gray Jones: Sure. Well, my own personal like health journey. I I ran track in high school, I was a rail, like pencil. In in high school, I played rugby and and all sorts of stuff. In and I I think I was like a lot of people where my health came from the physical activity that just naturally happened in my life, and it just seemed like all my friends were, you know, running and and doing rugby and all all this stuff. And then I I get to film school, and it was a completely different lifestyle. Like nobody exercised, nobody did that kind of thing as part of their life, and I just kind of fell into a lifestyle that was a lot less healthy, a lot more sedentary, and and like everybody’s done in the last 20 years, come in television, video games, and and all these kinds of things, and then pretty soon, by the time that the 2000s hit, I was doing really long days reality TV editing, and then I’d come home, and a lot of my leisure activities were also sedentary, and so I found that my weight was just getting higher and higher and higher and higher, and my just overall health was sort of in the kind of territory where if I would get kind of a little bit of a scare, I would get a little more serious for a while and get back into that sort of territory where I was healthy enough but not really healthy, and and then what happened in a specific example is my blood pressure was just sort of at the high moderate for a long time, and I and if it started getting a little too high, I would I would cut back a little bit and and ride that wave. Pretty soon, I got to the point where I had to start taking blood pressure medication, and I just said I can’t do this. I don’t want to be taking long term meds, and this is this is a sign of something that I really have to take seriously, and so it that was just kind of perfectly timed. With I was doing some seminars for Boris Effects. Well, actually, it came. I had already started largely because of when the this the seminars got on the schedule. I saw that your Fitness and Post was on the schedule, and I thought, wow, this is actually that’s when it kind of it kind of clicked into me about the whole sedentary lifestyle of my work and why this was so important. And so that’s why I I had started the journey and really kudos to you because I because I think that light switch didn’t go on in my head until I realized all that you were doing and the research that you were doing on this. That was a little over a year ago, and since then I’ve lost 60 pounds. I’ve gotten lots more active. I’ve made big changes in terms of my lifestyle, and this for me wasn’t a diet. And I think that that’s a really important thing that I had I had dieted in the past, but I never had the approach of having a. Lifestyle change. I never had the approach of doing something permanent, and I and I realized, especially with with what you started, and then just bringing that into my own life and and work was that I mean I’m going to be a reality TV editor for a long time, and and there’s going to be long hours. I’m going to be freelancing, which means that I don’t always have a standing desk. Props to companies like Entertainment One has standing desks. I freelanced there for a while, which is awesome. And then I freelance somewhere else that doesn’t have them, and that’s just the life of an editor, where where you’re freelancing all over the place. Sometimes I have a long commute. Right now, I have a four-hour daily commute, and so I’m sitting all the time. Which means that if I don’t have a permanent compensation in place, if I don’t have a permanent diet, like I use the diet in the context of daily eating plan that compensates for the sedentary work that I have, I’m in trouble.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I think that everything you said there just makes complete sense. And when you talk about the lifestyle plan versus the diet. For anybody that listens to this show, they know that that’s exactly where I stand. I make it very clear that I know as much as anybody else that has Google and the internet about diet and food and nutrition. I’ve just dug a little deeper and talked to some experts and made some friends in that world to understand it a little bit better. But I don’t recommend specific diets. I don’t say everybody has to go paleo or everybody has to go South Beach or everybody has to go bulletproof or vegan or whatever it is. It’s a diet is so specific to who you are. But I just I hate the term diet when it encompasses making all these sacrifices and eating a specific plan for 90 days to reach a specific goal of weight or waist size or whatnot, and then after those 90 days, the mindset is, “Yay, I’ve achieved what I need to achieve, and now I can go back to all the things that I enjoy doing. Because that’s why 90 plus percent of all diets in this country fail, because that’s the way that they’re designed. They are designed to fail because that’s how they make money, and if you see those less than 10% that are successful and have the before and after pictures, those are what are marketed to everybody. But the idea is that you just have to find something that you actually want to do, where you don’t need willpower and you’re just changing your habits and rewiring your brain to say this is what I enjoy and this is what’s making me feel good. So it just becomes a part of my diet per se, meaning like you said, my daily eating plan, and I have to say kudos to you for losing us. Like literally, that’s a seven-year-old, 60 pounds. You just lost a seven-year-old. I mean, that’s that’s not a small amount of weight. So where did you start, and where are you now?

Gray Jones: I started at 220-three pounds the beginning of May last year, and now I’m 160-three

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and you’re a tall guy. I mean, you’re you’re. It’s not like you’re five six or something. You you towered over me. Yeah,

Gray Jones: Six two.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, so to be 163 pounds at six two. I mean, that that’s quite the feat, especially in this industry. I mean, that’s quite the feat for an athlete. But to be able to do it as a reality television editor, I mean, that that’s pretty amazing. That’s inspiring to me because sometimes when I get into just these periods where, like right now, I’m just finishing up a pilot and working on all kinds of different things, even I gain a little bit of weight here and there because it’s really, really hard to maintain these schedules. And I’m thinking, man, I got to lose five or 10 pounds, and just the mere thought of having to lose 60, like that’s overwhelming. But it’s also inspiring that you did it, and that was the whole reason I brought you on the show. Is that we had kind of had this little fun, friendly back and forth on Twitter, where every week or two weeks you’re like, “Yep, I’m 10 pounds down, 50 more to go towards my goal, and then 15 and 45 to go. And I just started watching that, and you were just really, really consistent, and you never slowed down. It was just really inspiring me, and I eventually said to you, “Hey, you hit your goal. You’re on the podcast, and guess who’s on the podcast? So you obviously hit

Gray Jones: It. Yeah.

Zack Arnold: So if somebody’s listening to this that is 5060, pounds overweight, and they are a reality editor or a colorist or anybody in this industry, and they’re thinking, “Wow, this is actually possible to do in our industry, I have no idea where to start, though? Just kind of walk me through your journey, where you started, and just let’s just go by the let’s do the step by step. So there are some actionable steps that people can walk away from this and say, “Hey, I think maybe I’ll try this.

Gray Jones: Sure, sure. In in and I I really have to start with some caveats too, because I know a lot of people with regards to their health have these built-up kind of self sabotages that they do. Oh, that guy can do it, but not me. And so I have to say, I I am 43 years old. I’m not a mid 20s or mid 30s. My body is not very resilient. I do work long hours. Reality TV is long hours, and since beginning of September, I’ve had a four-hour daily commute. I don’t have natural, built-in ways to exercise. All of this stuff has had to be sometimes working six days a week with these kinds of hours. Where it started was a decision, and I think this is really, really important. I just made the decision that this was going to happen, and. I was going to find a way. Number two was I knew it had to be permanent. It had to be something permanent. So I know a lot of people do these crash diets, and a friend of mine just lost like 20 pounds in two weeks. Great for him. I need to know that this is sustainable, and so anything that I knew was going to be too radically different from my existing lifestyle wasn’t going to be successful. I couldn’t do any any quarter sort of expensive diets because that wasn’t going to be sustainable. I had to do something where where the choices that I made could be permanent. And so one of the things I did was I started walking stairs. I never take the elevator or escalator anymore. I worked on the sixth floor of a building. If I went down for a coffee, I was walking down and up. I would take breaks throughout the day as a 12-story building to walk all the way up 12 stories and then back down again. And and then what I started doing is, well, maybe I could run up a couple of flights and then walk the rest. And then maybe I could run up three or four flights and then walk the rest. And I was always trying to add to my daily activity. I was commuting by car for the first few months, and then I decided, well, maybe I could take transit instead. Santa Clarita, north of the city, take a commuter bus, and between my connections, I actually average 8000 steps just from my transit commute, going up and down stairs at the train stations and things like that. I get there in about the same amount of time, but I’ve added 8000 steps to my day. So I mean, win win win by taking the transit and then my eating. I I love the zone. I I I have to say a caveat that I know that there’s a lot of different great eating plans out there. I know that something that works for my body type is the zone by Dr. Barry Sears. You can find the books online. Basically, it’s it’s very similar to a paleo diet. It’s basically cutting a lot of the the white foods, so no rice, no anything that’s high in the glycemic index, potatoes, pasta, all those things for the most part cut out. If you think shopping, I shop around the the outside of the grocery store. So fruit and vegetables. I do have dairy and meats. So yeah, I mean dairy meats, fish, all all that stuff. I don’t have the processed foods. I don’t eat fast food ever. I don’t eat junk food. And then then it’s it’s just about the amounts, and with with the zone diet, when you start out, it seems like it’s a it’s a lot of numbers. But I’ve just sort of gotten the handle on what the amounts are. If you think of a plate, one hand, what can fill one hand is the protein, and then two times that is the fruit and vegetables. And beyond that, I’m trying to eat greens wherever I can. The the darker the color, the the more healthier it is, and that’s about it. I mean, there’s a little more to it, but that’s that that’s about it.

Gray Jones: In interestingly, there’s some things that are myths out there, and I’m sure you’ve talked about this on your your podcast before. But the low fat foods are actually generally not good because they they add sugar to it, they don’t fill you up, and they make you hungry later. And I stay away from artificial sweeteners as well. There’s research that says they actually can hamper your ability to break down sugar, which kind of defeats the purpose of having artificial sweeteners in the first place.

Zack Arnold: Well, with the the zone diet, my understanding, and I don’t know a whole lot about it, just because I don’t really study a lot of specific diet plans per se. I just study general dietary choices. But my understanding is that it’s called the zone because you’re breaking down your macronutrients into a third, a third, a third. Is that correct? Yeah,

Gray Jones: Yeah, yeah. That’s a that’s a very simple way of looking at it. Basically, a third protein, a third healthy carbs, so not high on the glycemic index, and a third fats. You know, saying a third sounds like a lot, but fats are are a big number of calories for a very small amount of fat. So it’s interesting. Fat is not your enemy. Try to have healthy fats as you can. But I mean, I’ll have a cheeseburger every once in a while, but as long as I kind of figure out the the amounts of things, I’m not putting a lot of sugary ketchup on it and stuff like that. I can actually have fat every once in a while in that context, like a really fatty kind of kind of meat. Another thing is eating before bed. I always eat before bed, and one of the the concepts of the zone is that you’re keeping your metabolism going all the time. It it’s it talks a lot about eating on a schedule, so I make sure I never go four hours without more than four hours without eating. I’m eating every four hours, or or having a purposeful snack, a small snack to keep my metabolism going, and so I always eat a little healthy snack before before bed. Lost 60 pounds in this time by always eating before bed. That that surprises a lot of people.

Zack Arnold: It does. It even surprises me. And there’s so much research that goes in both directions on this. Where if you look in the paleo community, they really have kind of almost backlashed against this idea of you have to eat every three to four hours, and you have to eat before bed, and you have to constantly keep the metabolism going because if you look at the way that our genetics. Were evolved over hundreds of 1000s of years through our ancestors. They obviously weren’t eating every three to four hours. They were eating whenever they could kill a deer or kill an antelope, and they might go a day or two where they’re just foraging on leaves and berries, and then all of a sudden they would have this giant meal for two days straight. So that it’s funny because I see the research going back and forth, and my feeling is that if you’re making the right choices, it kind of isn’t going to end up mattering because if you’re having salads and greens and fruits and nuts and healthy fats like avocados or avocado oil or coconut oil, if you go the paleo approach and you’re staggering your meals and you’re doing intermittent fasting, or if you’re doing it every single time, every three hours, when your alarm goes off, it doesn’t really matter because you’re putting healthy food into your body. I think that the the idea of eating before bed that’s one that I’ve experimented with, and I’ve been doing some reading and research just into improving the the quality of sleep because for me, quantity is is an elusive holy grail that I don’t think that I’m ever going to get with two kids and working the hours that I do, but quality is something that can absolutely be controlled regardless of the quantity. And I’m seeing a lot to saying, like for example, if you have a handful of nuts or even a spoonful of organic raw honey, or you have like I’ve I’ve had a tablespoon of coconut oil right before bed, and sometimes that will have an effect on my sleep quality. And I actually track my sleep quality, and I will see a difference where I am in the the deeper sleep states a little bit longer if I have a little bit something in my system. The prevailing idea that I’ve always followed is that I try to stop eating anything three hours before bed, and that is something I still, for the most part, will do just because a lot of times, if you do eat a heavy meal or something that’s not very healthy right before bed, the digestion slows your ability to get into deeper states because your digestive system is taking the resources from the rest of your body that would usually put the energy towards getting restful sleep. But if you’re doing something fairly light, a lot of times that can make a difference, and if I’ve gone too long, like sometimes I’ll eat at 6o’clock or 630 and then all of a sudden I’m not going to bed until midnight, and I and I’m actually hungry. If I don’t eat something, then that hunger will keep me awake and will affect the quality of my sleep. So that’s that’s a really good point that you made about that.

Gray Jones: Yeah, well, and I think it’s it’s extremely important to establish that there are widely different body types. Say say for instance, one of the things that the zone talks about is one out of every four people is carb resistant. In other words, I mean everybody knows. I had a friend in in high school who could literally eat an entire box of Oreo cookies at lunchtime and was a rail like pencil. You know there are people who can eat anything, absolutely anything, and they will never put on weight. They’re they’re carb resistant. There’s there’s other people on the other side of the scale, and one out of every four is they’re not resistant to carbs. So basically, it’s like you look at a piece of cake and you gain weight, and I know that there are people listening that is like that’s me. It’s a fact of life. We have the bodies that we have, and and you may have to try out a couple of different things to to figure out which one works for your body. For me, I’m I don’t think I’m in that 25% that looks at a piece of cake, but I’m almost there. My my body, I think it. If I have the the pasta, the potatoes, the rice, it does more for my body than the average person, and so I have to be really really vigilant on on those particular things, just because I know I know my body, and and I think you establish something tracking. I’ve found for myself tracking is incredibly important. I do have a sleep app that tracks. I weigh myself every day, tracks my steps. I know a lot of people when they hear tracking, they think, “Oh, I don’t want to be counting calories. I can’t remember the last time I counted calories or or that kind of thing. But tracking my health and understanding if I’m doing something with my, if I’m making changes to my either my activity or my my diet, I should get a sense of what this is doing to my body over the next few weeks. Is I I don’t want to just do this arbitrarily and and think that because it works for my friend, it’s going to work for me.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I think that’s an excellent point. There are like 12 things that you just said that made me bring up separate questions, but the first one I want to bring up is actually something you said a couple of minutes ago, and just to go backwards slightly, you would mention the whole idea of low-fat food not necessarily being healthy and artificial sweeteners and sugars. I don’t want to go into that too much in depth, just because I’ve gone into it before. But anybody that’s listening that’s fairly new to this program, in the show notes for this episode, I’m going to put a link to my two-part podcast with Mira and Jason Kalten, who are micronutrient specialists, and we go totally deep into the idea of artificial sweeteners and low-fat foods and why they’re so bad for you and what you can replace them with. So I don’t want to go too far into that, but again, just check the show notes for this episode, and you can find that two-part podcast. One of my most popular podcasts because it’s such a deep dive into the idea of micronutrients versus macronutrients and things that you think are healthy that actually aren’t healthy, like just this whole myth around diet foods and low-fat foods and how they’re actually one of the main culprits in the obesity epidemic that we have in this country. But the the other thing that I want to really expand upon is this idea of tracking. You can go on the show notes for this episode, and I’ll have a link to the Fitness and Post program, which is just fitnessandpost.com/program And step one is the one that you had already mentioned, which is just that you kind of set your goal, which you called making a decision. But then step two is to develop awareness. I really feel that counting calories is not a long-term road to better health, and anybody that’s been a long-time listener, they might turn this into a drinking game. Because I honestly, I don’t know if I’ve ever had a podcast where I haven’t said this already, but just in case somebody hasn’t heard it yet, counting calories for the rest of your life is going to get you nowhere. But like you said, if you just kind of take an assessment of where you are now. What you do is you build your baseline. You say, “All right, if I just take maybe a week, maybe two weeks, maybe even 30 days, I don’t even make any changes in my life. I just start becoming aware of what I’m putting into my body, and I understand scientifically what that looks like as far as macronutrients, as far as micronutrients. How much fat am I actually getting? How many grams of carbs am I actually getting versus what I thought? If you do that and you make no changes whatsoever to your diet, you’re not saying, “Oh, well, I’m going to do the zone, or I’m going to do paleo, or I’m going to cut all the processed foods out. If all you do for 30 days is track what you’re eating now, you’re already going to subconsciously make changes because you’re going to say to yourself, well, now that I’m journaling this and now that I’m keeping track of it, well, I don’t want to write down that I just had a bag of M and M’s. That’s kind of embarrassing. So I’m just not going to eat the bag of M and M’s. And you already start to make changes because you’re becoming aware. But then once you build that baseline and you say, here’s where I am now, then you start making these smaller changes. You now have quantitative and qualitative information that you can compare, and in programs like MyFitnessPal or LoseIt, you can actually create graphs and look at one period of time versus another period of time, and you can really start to geek out. And this is a place where I really start to enjoy it because I love all the data and all the analytics. You can really look at the difference that it’s making, and then you can apply that to how you actually feel, or whether or not you’re losing weight, or whether or not you’re losing inches.

Zack Arnold: And again, that shouldn’t be the end game, but one of the byproducts of becoming healthier is most likely that you’re going to lose weight and you’re going to lose inches on your waistline. So that’s a really, really big component of the program is just developing this awareness of the choices you’re making and how they affect you, and then the next step of that, which it sounds like you’re doing as well, is quantifying the activity. So, what specifically are you using to track? Do you just use your phone? Do you have a Fitbit? Do you have a Jawbone?

Gray Jones: I just I’m going to have an iPhone six, and and so it does a lot of health tracking just built in, and I I use Motion X, and it does a pretty good job of tracking things like steps and and activity and stuff. If I go running, I use the Nike runner. I thought about Fitbit, but I haven’t had a need for it yet.

Zack Arnold: Well, certainly if you’ve already reached 60 plus pounds of weight loss, and I’m not going to say, well, you must get a Fitbit because then you’ll be successful. Like that wouldn’t make any sense. But what I really like about the Fitbit, or and you can do this with other apps as well, but for those that don’t know, there’s actually a Fitness and Post Fitbit leaderboard where editors and anybody in the post production industry can compete for the most steps, the longest distance, or the most active minutes. And right now, the the winner of this leaderboard every month wins a free year long subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud. So there are actually incentives that are helpful for people in our industry, but I think that the barrier of entry for most people is well, I don’t want to spend $100 just to track my steps. You don’t have to. That’s the really good news. Is now there really are almost no phones left on the market that don’t have an accelerometer in them, which means that if you have your phone in your pocket and you download the free and let me repeat that. Free Fitbit app. You install it on your phone. You say, “I want my phone to be my tracker. You’re now tracking your steps. You’re tracking your elevation gain. You’re tracking your distance. All that can be applied to the leaderboard, and you can start competing with other people in this industry to get more active. So there really is no reason why you can’t just give it a try and say, “You know what? I’m just going to see what this is like for a week or for two weeks, and I hear this from people over and over and over, where they say, “Yeah, I got a Fitbit or I use my phone, and I saw that I’m getting 2,000 steps a day. I would have thought that 2,000 was a lot when you hear the number, but then you realize that’s nothing. And just if you’re, I’m sure that you experience this as well, doing the steps and doing the things you were doing at the transit station. That if you get anything less than like 10,000 steps a day, that’s kind of a warning sign that you need to start moving a little bit more. Because even on a really bad day where I’m sitting with a client all day long and I can’t be on the treadmill in front of my workstation, if I find that I’ve gotten seven or 8000 Steps. I’m kind of in panic mode, like, oh my god, I haven’t gotten any activity today, and you really don’t understand how sedentary you are until you see that number. Because people in our industry, they’re not afraid of technology and they’re not afraid of numbers. And if they were, they wouldn’t be film editors or colorists or audio editors, whatever you might be listening to this show. So it’s really not intimidating, but it’s so eye-opening, and it’s it’s something I hear over and over. It’s probably the most common response I get to the podcast or via email or people that see me at events in person is they just say, “Yeah, I started tracking my activity, and you were right, man. When I saw that number, I could not believe how little I move around, and all I did was start making these small changes. Decided to take the the stairs instead of the elevator, or I park further away from the front door in the morning, and that’s actually one that I do at all of my jobs that drives people absolutely crazy. I’d run into to one of my colleagues. I right now I’m working at Sunset Gower, and it’s this giant parking structure that’s really far away from the building where we work, and everybody’s far away. But what I do is I pick the far back corner on the roof. Even if like there’s parking three levels down, I go all the way back over there. And I was walking to the office one morning and bumped into a colleague. And I just by habit, I wasn’t even thinking about it. I was walking to the opposite end where the stairs were. She’s like, “Where are you going? I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to the stairs. She’s like, “What do you mean you’re going to the stairs?

Zack Arnold: The elevator’s right over here. I’m like, oh, I didn’t even think about it, and I told her, oh, I just I go to the far staircase in the back corner, and I take that. She’s like, why in the world did you do that? And I say, well, because it’s harder. That’s why I do it because it gives me more activity and it challenges me a little bit. And once I get into my office, that’s it. I’m in my tiny dark 10 by 10 room, and it’s one of the few opportunities that I get to be outside for an extra five minutes and give my heart rate up a tiny bit, but what’s really fun is that you turn it into a game and you see the quantified information on the Fitbit or on your phone, and that’s what motivates you to do more. So you say, “Wow, when I started, I only got 2500 steps a day. Last week I got 5000 because I just made a couple of small changes. Now I want to get 6000 Now I want to get 8000 Now I want to get 10,000 Right. So when I first started this journey myself over a year ago now, well, actually not the fitness and post journey, but my own personal journey, I’d gotten the Fitbit. I think it was almost three years ago, and it was just about hitting that 10,000 steps. And now I’ve gotten to the point where if I haven’t gotten between 17,020 1000 in a day, I just feel like a total failure. Like, man, what have I been doing today? I didn’t hit my 20,000 step goal, and I’m not. It’s not like I’m going out and running a half marathon every day during my lunch hour. I’m just finding ways like the stairs or the treadmill at work or taking a walk in the middle of the day to just get those numbers to add up, and they make a huge difference.

Gray Jones: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there’s a couple of really, really important things. One is not be afraid to make radical decisions. Like, say, for instance, and this is something going back a few years. Everybody knows that soda’s bad for you. How could it not be bad for you? Like, it’s it’s just like you’re guzzling about a cup of sugar. It is bad for you. So, about 1213, years ago, I just made a decision. I was going to cut soda. I was eat. I was drinking it every single day, lots of it. But I, I said, I’m just going to cut soda, and I did. I haven’t had drop since. I haven’t missed it, and I love sugar. I love sweets. I, I love snacks. So what? I also love my health, and I just had to make a decision to say I love my health more than I love these things, and so I was able to cut it out. A lot of people convince themselves I could. I hear this a lot. Like when when I mention my weight loss, I hear people say, “Well, I could never cut soda. I I could I could never walk the stairs. I could never do these things. Why not? Like, and when you do that self sabotage, it’s like you’ve you’ve cut your feet out from under you before you even start.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think the part of it too is somewhat just it’s whether it’s willpower or it’s fear. The second is that I think people may not be educated to the fact that when they say, “Oh, I could never cut out soda, it’s no different than saying, “Oh, I can never stop smoking. Like you’re addicted to the sugar. Like there, there’s plenty of science out there to prove this beyond a doubt at this point that the sugar that you’re getting from the soda or from the Oreo cookies or whatever the processed simple sugars are that you’re getting, it has been shown that they are eight times more addictive than heroin or cocaine, and this is proven by science by looking at the pleasure activation centers in the brain. So when people say, “Oh, I can never cut out soda, I think the first realization that helps them is realizing, “Oh, it’s not just because I’m weak or I have no willpower; it’s because I’m addicted to something, and once you kind of understand that you’ve been duped, and somebody else has kind of pulled the wool over your eyes, I’ve seen it before. People kind of have this anger. They’re like, “Wait, oh my God, you’re right! Oh, I want to fight this now! And then all of a sudden, something kind of kicks in where they realize that this is a battle that maybe they should be fighting. But the second thing. And this is kind of going off of what you’d said, where everybody knows that soda is bad for you. Shockingly, people don’t. And I’m going to give you the perfect example. I think probably most people on the show know who Al Mooney is. Al Mooney is the product manager for Adobe Premiere. He’s the crazy, wacky guy, the stand-up comedian slash product manager that goes all over the world evangelizing Adobe Premiere and all its amazing features, and I love Adobe to death. They’re one of the sponsors of the show. I love Al Mooney to death. We were at an event a few weeks ago, and he had a can of Diet Pepsi on his desk, and he was actually demoing a product where you could take like an iPhone photo of any item and use it to kind of create a histogram and a color palette. So, like, he shot the Diet Pepsi can and showed everybody here’s all the different color swatches from the Diet Pepsi can you can turn this into a color grade was really really cool, but then afterwards I spoke after right after he did and one of the top things on my list of small changes was you have to cut out all the soda and the joke I made was cut out all your soda but the good news is now you can color grade with it, right? So everybody loved that joke, but then afterwards he came up to me. He’s like, “Yeah, yeah, I saw the thing about the soda, and yeah, I know that I drink too much, but but it’s cool though because I’m drinking diet soda. That’s okay, right? And when he said that, I just I genuinely felt so bad because people still believe that diet soda is the better alternative when it’s actually worse, and there’s plenty of science to back this up. I’m not going to go into the studies or into the research because I don’t know it all off the top of my head. Because having that information stored in my brain is not useful because that’s what Doctor Google is for. But basically, all of the artificial sweeteners that are in soda, so they can remove the sugar, those are actually worse for you. They’re worse for your metabolism. They will cause you to gain more weight than drinking the sugar, and they actually screw up your gut biome, meaning that it’s going to mess up your digestion. It’s going to mess up the creation and propagation of the healthy bacteria in your digestive system. So it’s actually worse for you than regular soda. But once people start to get educated about that and realize that they’re not being told the truth.

Zack Arnold: That’s when the light bulb kicks on, and I haven’t spoken to Al since. But I kind of saw that light bulb switch on in his brain, where he’s like, “Oh man, I kind of thought I was making the better choice, and I didn’t realize I was. Maybe it’s time I need to make a change. And that really struck me because I realized that just having that little bit of education can be enough to get somebody to make the healthier choice.

Gray Jones: Well, and reading labels will shock you if you’ve never done it before. Shock you. I mean, the amount of artificial sweeteners all over the place, yogurt, protein bars. One of the things I I do because of my you know transit schedule and commuting and stuff and trying to keep my metabolism up is I I would buy protein bars. Now I I know they’re not the best way to to to get my my nutrients, but in a pinch they they prevent me from getting that super hungry state where I’ll eat anything. And so I was buying certain brands, thinking looking at the sort of breakdown of the protein and fat and stuff, and not really digging into the label, and then I realized that they had artificial sweeteners. So then I go look at the protein bar shelf, and almost all of them have artificial sweeteners. So now I have a couple of brands that I use. They’re a little more expensive. I love the South Beach Protein Fit ones. They they’re also high fiber. It just shocked me how prevalent this was. Gum, obviously, but it’s hard to find a yogurt that doesn’t have artificial sweeteners in with the sugar. I was amazed at how many things have sugar. Like, why on earth should spaghetti sauce have sugar? Why why on earth should peanut butter have sugar? And so when I when I really started reading the labels, that was another thing that was just majorly eye opening, and I think you’re right. If people have been so desensitized to this, just think of it like if you saw cocaine on the label, like that. That’s how it should should shock you. They’re putting cocaine in spaghetti sauce, like they’re putting cocaine in in peanut butter, like it should madden you that they’re doing this.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that really is kind of one of the main major shifts that I made in my life. And again, I will just emphasize this one more time. If you want to learn how to read a food label, how to read the nutrition labels, go back and listen to the podcast that I did with Mira and Jason Kalton. They wrote a book called Rich Food, Poor Food, that is still my number one book recommendation and resource for learning how to grocery shop and buy the right foods, but that was the big key for me. Is that I used to just look at the front of the food, and that’s what they call the billboard. And it says 100% natural, high in fiber, contains vitamin C. Right? You read all those things, and anybody listening would say, “Oh, that sounds healthy. That’s on the front of a box of fruity pebbles, right? High in vitamin C and 100% natural, whatever it is. Blah blah blah blah blah. Like none of that stuff means anything. It’s called the billboard. That’s like looking at a billboard for anything while you’re driving to work, and you know that it’s just somebody trying to sell a product. But per food regulations, and even those are. Big political mess that I’m not going to get into, but they have to disclose what’s actually in the food, and they find so many different ways to to disguise how they’re doing it. But if you just like, for me, I can’t buy anything without reading all the ingredients on the back. I don’t even really pay attention to the macronutrient breakdown anymore because I have enough common sense to know whether or not something probably has fat or carbs or protein, just based on what the actual food is. But I have to read all the ingredients, which means that I now go grocery shopping by myself because I drive my family insane when I go grocery shopping. Because my wife just, you know, she’s pulling the stuff off the shelf, and we have two kids. It’s like just grab it. I’m like, there is no way I’m spending money on something, and moreover, putting it inside of my body until I know what’s in it, and that’s a very empowering ability to develop because you realize that you’re kind of starting to take charge of what you’re putting in your system and how that’s making a difference for how you feel and how you function. But like you said, you have to read what’s actually in the food. I don’t remember where I heard it. Now I’ve heard it a lot of places actually, but food doesn’t contain ingredients. Food is ingredients, right? So if you’re looking at something that has 30 different ingredients on it, and you most likely can’t pronounce most of them, it might not be the best choice. But if you just find something where the ingredients say, like if I buy a bag of almonds, and you can buy almonds in a can that have 30 different ingredients, which to me is mind-boggling. But when I look at the almonds that I buy, it says ingredients, almonds. I look at the salmon that I buy, it says ingredients, salmon. Am I perfect? Absolutely not. I have a really busy schedule. There are other things that I will buy that have some ingredients, but overwhelmingly, it’s going to be organic. So I know that the ingredients in it are organic or are just regular whole foods that are combined together to make another food. To me, it’s not a diet program like you know a South Beach or whatever it is. If you’re just saying I don’t want processed foods and I don’t want the white flours and the enriched flours and all of the sugars, like those are things I’ve just eliminated from my diet. So if you want to call it an elimination diet? Then I guess you could call it that. But those are really the things that I look at, and the key is understanding what is going into your body. So it’s it’s great that you’ve you’ve also kind of keyed into that.

Gray Jones: If that was all you did, you would lose weight. Like if if all you did was only eat stuff that was what it is, you know, like where where you read the label and that’s what it is. Honestly, I think every every person could do that and not do any eating plan and still lose weight.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I could not agree more. And I think that it’s it’s actually a really good place to start. You just sit down, you do a little bit of education about what’s in food. Don’t get overwhelmed by creating a diet plan or counting calories or anything else, just say you know what I’m going to start eliminating some of the unhealthier foods that are the ingredients and some of the the products that I’m buying, and you will all of a sudden just start to notice a shift where you probably feel a little bit less lethargic, you have less brain fog, you have a little bit more energy, and all you need is that kickstart. To me, the the analogy that I always like to use is you’re rolling a snowball down a mountain, right? You just take this tiny little pebble-sized bit of snow that you can fit in the palm of your hand, and you just set it on top of the mountain, and you’re just starting to push it. And it’s when people say, “Oh, I’m going to start P90X and I’m going to work out six days a week and I’m going to change my whole diet. You’re setting a giant boulder on the bottom of a mountain, and you’re trying to push it up. But if you just walk to the top of the mountain and you take this little snowball and you put at the top and you gently nudge it, that’s when it starts to roll downhill and get bigger, and that’s when it just starts to snowball, so to speak, where the term came from. So it really is just about finding that first small choice that is very manageable. You start to feel a little bit better. You notice that it’s making a difference. Maybe you’ve lost two, three pounds. You’re like, oh, this actually isn’t that hard, right? And then you make another choice, and then you make another choice, and then all of a sudden, 90 days later, you’re Gray Jones, and you’ve lost umpteen millions of pounds, and you feel much better, and you realize I didn’t do anything that was earth shattering, or that was overwhelmingly hard to do. I just started small, right?

Gray Jones: Yeah, just to put a picture on on what this represents. You know how the airports you have to have no more than 50 pounds in your suitcase. When you’re just at that weight limit, and you try to lift that 50 pound suitcase, it’s pretty hard to lift that, and you’re not going to get very far very fast carrying that 50 pound suitcase. Just consider how it feels to not have to carry 60 pounds every day. Think 10 pound bags of potatoes. How many can you carry throughout your day? Would you want to have three 10 pound bags of potatoes under each arm as you got up from your editing desk. I I now go through my day getting up and get and going down up and down stairs with three less 10 pound bags of potatoes under each arm. I mean, it literally I have had the feeling as I walk across the street like there’s less gravity or something. Like I feel like there’s a bounce in my step. And that’s in a year. I I have beer every once in a while. I I’ve had cake. I have bacon fairly frequently. I I mean, it’s not like I’m on this super crazy diet or anything. I can eat stuff, but I just understand what’s going into my body, and I understand what it does to my body, and I try to keep myself as active as I can. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: And it literally-it’s like you read my mind and you saw the question pop up in my brain because I was just going to ask you. And how many horrible sacrifices have you had to make that you’ve missed over the last year or so? And it sounds like really not much because when you do change your overall lifestyle, and it’s not about deprivation, and it’s not about eliminating all of these things that you know that you still want, then you can imbibe in things that you want to do every once in a while because you’ve changed your lifestyle. You’re not going to be able to live for the next 40 years saying I’m never going to have cake again and I’m never going to have a chocolate chip cookie. But if you’re making healthy choices 80 to 90% of the time, you can do kind of whatever you want the other 15 to 20% of the time, because those healthy choices just have built such momentum, and you feel so good that when you start to make those other choices, you’re like, oh man, that cookie was good, but I kind of feel like crap right now, right? And your your brain recognizes that, and it rewires itself to now say, I don’t even want that cookie as much because I know how I’m going to feel. So people that say, “Oh my God, it took him a year to do this, and he did all these things, like there’s no way that I could ever do that. It really is just these tiny little changes that you will actually find you want to make because it builds this momentum. And I think that the sack of potatoes is a great analogy. When I go hiking, I wear a 40 pound weight vest, and I’m only out there for maybe between an hour and three hours, but by the end of it, I just want to throw that thing on the ground and kick it, and like it’s. I’m just so tired, and I feel so heavy. And then I think to myself, there are people every day that are wearing two of these vests, but you, but you don’t even notice it because it’s just part of who you are. But you lose that weight, and you literally do feel like all of a sudden you’re floating, and I’ve had that experience when I’ve been hiking and I’m going, you know, up 10 like 1000 to 1500 feet of elevation gain in a short period of time, and I get to the top and I throw the vest off and I just feel like I’m floating, and that’s that’s the experience that you get when all of a sudden you start to lose this weight.

Gray Jones: Yeah, absolutely, and it is worth it. And and also the other thing too is it’s a permanent eating plan, but the the sort of weight reduction is is temporary. Like I’ve I’ve been able to relax a little bit now that I’ve hit my weight goal. But the way to think about it, like say say somebody who’s 250 pounds and has been 250 pounds for for five years, you have no problem maintaining that 250 pounds. So, for for a temporary time, do the weight reduction, and then you can maintain 190 pounds for the next five years. It’s not like it’s this massive sacrifice and penance and all these things. I honestly don’t feel like I’m I’m deprived of anything. I enjoy my food. I have treat items, and one of the secrets for me too is I have treat items that still actually are pretty healthy. So, say for instance, every once in a while I’ll have flavored almonds, like like the spicy almonds, and I know they’re not the best, but if you look at the macronutrients, they’re pretty close, and it’s not like I’m cheating really far. Or if if I do have a beer, I won’t just have the beer. I’ll make sure to have a you know a piece of chicken or or something to to balance out the the protein and and carbs. One of the things about the zone is not not just having a carb assault on your system. So I have ways of treating myself that don’t actually go too far, if that makes sense.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, no, that absolutely makes sense. So we’re coming to the to the end of our time. I really feel like if there’s any story that somebody could listen to and feel like, well, I’ve got no reason to not at least try. It’s yours. It’s been a lot of fun just watching you on Twitter over the last year, seeing you get towards this goal, and I’m really, really happy that you met it. And now, really getting in depth into the story, I’m really excited to be able to have this show to point people to, so they can say, “Well, I don’t think I can do it. I’ve, you know, I commute four hours a day, and I’m working in reality television, and I’m 60 pounds overweight. It can’t be done. And I can say, “Well, I got to say, you’re probably wrong because it can be done, and it has been done. And what I like the most about this story is that you’ve done this whole process with a smile on your face, and you’ve never been miserable and felt like you’re just sacrificing your life. It really sounds like this was a fun journey for you with a really great end destination as well.

Gray Jones: Absolutely.

Zack Arnold: So, if people wanted to to learn more about you. Find you’re on Twitter. Whether you have a a website, hire you to be a reality editor. Where can people find Gray Jones?

Gray Jones: Best place to find me is on Twitter at Gray Jones is my handle. And if you’re looking on IMDb, it’s Gray Jones with a brackets two. There was one before me.

Zack Arnold: Right? Don’t you hate that?

Gray Jones: Yeah.

Zack Arnold: My assistant at. For she’s like, oh, there were three Natalie Bakers that beat me to IMDb. So yeah, it’s very frustrating. Well, this has been just an absolute pleasure. I’m so happy to have you on the show, Gray, and I wish you the best of luck with your continued health endeavors.

Gray Jones: Well, thank you so much, Zack, and thanks again for the kick in the butt that got me here.

Zack Arnold: Well, that’s what I’m here for-is to kick people in the butt.

Gray Jones: Cool.