My Name Is Earl and Remember the Titans star Ethan Suplee opened up to The New York Post about his full-body makeover, going from nearly 600 pounds to having ripped abs.
Suplee’s transformation has been decades in the making. “There were a lot of things in life she wanted to do that I was like, just physically incapable of doing, like going to the beach or on a hike,” the 49-year-old recalled of the early 2000s, when he weighed 536 pounds. By age 10, Suplee had already reached 200 pounds. He admitted to using food, drugs, and alcohol to “numb” himself throughout his teenage years.
But, finally, the actor decided, “I have to also confront my weight, and I have more problems to fix.” Before that, “I spent years going to the doctors and telling them their scale couldn’t weigh me,” Suplee admitted. “But the scales in doctors’ offices back then went to 350 pounds. So I’d say I was 360, and I just had no idea.”
By 2005, Suplee had shed 250 pounds. But the Butterfly Effect star still wasn’t satisfied, finding he still “didn’t feel any better about myself.” “I would get on the scale and see I’ve lost 100 pounds, he said, “and then the next day I’d still feel s—ty. My sense of shame would come back [along with] my low self-confidence.”
He Continued to Struggle with Self Hatred
Even while he was meeting and even exceeding his own goals, Suplee battled with self hatred. “I wanted to be able to ride my bicycle 200 miles in a day, and I did that. I wanted to have visible abs, and I did that. But I still look in the mirror in the mornings and often have to convince myself that I’m not a piece of garbage,” he said. “And that’s just my condition that I have to manage day to day.”
Suplee continued: “It’s complicated because if you try to improve too much in one area, you might overdo it and not be able to improve the next day. If I work out too hard and hurt myself or exhaust myself and become fatigued, then I can’t go to the gym the next day, so there’s no more improvement in that.”
Despite having completely overhauled his physique, Suplee has instituted check-ins to prevent himself from obsessing about his weight-loss journey. “If I’m just hyper-focused too much on weight loss, my life suffers, my relationships suffer, my parenting suffers, my ability to work suffers,” he said. Suplee shares four children with his wife of 19 years, Brandy Lewis. “My goal today is how do I fit all this into my life so that it’s complementing all the aspects of my life rather than detracting from them.”
‘I Was Finally Able to Have Some Success’
Suplee was finally able to change his lifestyle by radically changing his way of thinking. “I think I clung to this hope that I could locate the problem in food that was causing me to be obese…and there was a lot of shame associated with food,” he explained. “I had to get rid of the idea that food was the culprit and work more heavily on concentrating or thinking about what behaviors of mine were contributing to this condition. I had to think about the condition as a chronic condition versus an acute condition, because all of these diets were acute solutions.”
Suplee concluded: “When I got super dialed into that, I was finally able to have some success with dieting where I would lose weight and I was able to maintain it. I had been looking for solutions that didn’t feel like they required a lot of effort. Then I finally looked at it and thought, ‘Well, this is going to require effort forever,’ and similar to sobriety that too will require effort forever. However, it gets easier.”
