Toxic Diet Culture: @MetalJesusRocks

and so really the idea here is to involve you guys to give me the accountability the accountability partner that i would have if i was going to the gym or if i was checking in with every week to make sure i'm on track plus there is the uh there is the public shame aspect of this that i think will motivate me greatly what happened to mjr's weight loss he still looks the same as he did when he made that video now more than one year ago i'd say that's a generous comment from the audience looking at this photograph here i'd estimate he's well over 280 pounds not only has his diet failed him but he has in fact been gaining weight a well-intentioned member of the audience says in his most recent video he looks bigger than ever as someone who's lost over 80 pounds the past two years i know it's not easy that being said i feel relying on other people to hold you accountable for your success is an absolute recipe for disaster it may sound like a good idea but usually it just adds a bunch of unnecessary pressure well i've got good news and i've got bad news he made that promise to upload a weekly update as to how much weight he lost and how much exercise he was doing the last time he even attempted to hold himself to that standard was july 20th 2021 so whether that was a good idea or a bad one he gave up on it and perhaps he gave up on himself that's a topic for a video [Music] now you might remember that last august i made a video where i was talking about how i was fat and i was really excited to start losing some weight i was going to use the ring fit adventure on the switch i was gonna be riding my bike and i was gonna be using the apple watch to track my motions and my workouts and things like that and i was pumped to do it and as you can see it didn't go quite as planned [Music] man yeah i kind of let myself go a little bit but over the last couple months i've made a conscious decision to try to lose some weight now what's funny is that i have spent my entire adult life sitting in front of a computer whether it's support or help desk or answering emails troubleshooting things editing audio editing video when you do that basically the hours slip by and pretty soon you are just a zombie sitting at your desk and so yeah i've got a lot of excuses but the truth is that i really need to lose some weight so i've been thinking about it for for a couple weeks now and i need to make a change and i'm reaching out to you guys because i think i've got an interesting idea because you know listen it's all my fault you know i i'm just lacking the motivation and the inspiration to do it and i feel like i've let a lot of you down a lot of you have asked about it uh brought it up in the comments and i've let let myself down you know most importantly [Music] so if you go to metaljesusrocks.com you will see the the top post in the blog section right there is going to be sharing my current weight as well as how i'm doing with the fitness app on my my watch and my phone just how much i'm standing how much i'm moving and how much i'm working out and i'm going to publish that once a week on my website starting today [Music] it's really easy to trick yourself into thinking that because something is normal it's easy and that because something is normal because it's commonly done by millions of people in society around you that at any time you can flip a switch and you can join the pack you can have all the benefits of being one of those normal people reciprocal with this it's so easy to tell yourself that just because you do something unusual just because you do something exceptional that it's therefore special that it's what makes you special that it's part of your identity that makes you different from and frankly better than other people it's completely obvious that if jesus wants to lose weight he has to quit playing video games if he quits even just for one year if he quits playing video games if he made a youtube video announcing that he's not going to press a single button on a single controller until he has lost 60 pounds who is he when he looks in the mirror who is he now that he is no longer the world's greatest video game collector video game reviewer video game historian when he takes a step away from the mirror and he opens up his phone to send text messages back and forth to other people who is he in relation to his friends what do they know him as why do they know him why did they respect him what do they like about him what do they talk to him about video games it's all video games video games aren't just something that he plays not just something that he does it's become part of who he is and clearly it's a huge part of the way in which he feels that he is special that he's different from other people going to the gym and doing push-ups oh that's normal anybody can do that you see how easy it is to convince yourself that therefore it would be easy for you that it'd be easy for you to develop those virtues to develop that self-discipline that experience and then you find out that it's not easy that all those people you've been kind of dismissing and denigrating and looking down on for doing something normal mainstream comment something anyone could do millions of people can do actually if you stop and think about how many hours they put into fitness over how many years and i'm not talking about olympic athletes here i'm talking about the average middle-aged man who just cares about his health who just stays in shape the number of hours he's put into learning about diet and exercise and then living with that discipline the number of hours per week week after week all that preparation that's what makes it easy for him now to go to the gym and do the push-ups and the absence of that that's what makes it so hard that's what makes it pot impossible for you jesus you're dealing with the deficit created in your life by the hundreds of hours by the thousands of hours that you spent instead playing video games and i see this same pattern play out again and again with these young men who call themselves incels but without exception what they are video game addicts they are video game addicts who felt that having a girlfriend or having a wife was normal that was something everyone was entitled to that was something easy right getting to level 99 in runescape that was what made them special spending all these hours playing video games spending all these hours watching japanese cartoons anime or whatever oh this is their hobby this is their passion this is what makes them special and it's rare but once in a while you get an incel who was actually highly motivated to go into the sciences get a phd in chemistry or something right and they felt like oh now that they were accomplished this way like maybe it's not something as laughable as level 99 and runescape now that they have a phd in chemistry now they're entitled to having a girlfriend they're entitled to having a wife and they're embittered that they don't get these things they feel entitled to right oh yeah yeah that's normal that's common therefore it's easy you think it's easy for other people and you think it should be easy for you but you're wrong and you're wrong in the same way doing 200 push-ups for me today is easy because i've done it thousands of times before because of all the hours i've put in at the gym over decades before therefore it's easy for me now and therefore even if i'm injured even if i have a car accident then i have to recover right getting back into doing 200 push-ups a day oh yeah yeah it's easy for me sharing my life with a woman doing the dishes together talking to her about all the frustrations and disappointments in her life really sharing my life with a woman in a tiny apartment like that all right we're not talking about the manual skill of washing dishes all right man and woman living together in that way okay it's a skill and it's a skill i built up over years of suffering suffering and sorrow that you pour into one relationship after another and yet in a sense you build up that relationship right but you're building up yourself even if it's just your capacity to listen it's your capacity to feel it's your capacity to cooperate in this way and there's there's a lot of tears there's a lot of screaming a lot of weeping right it's all this stuff that goes into it it's like you know the the sorrow and suffering that goes into building up your physical fitness even if you're not an athlete even if you never went to the olympics right which goes unseen and unappreciated by someone like jesus in the same way right it's only easy it's only effortless for so-called normal people to have so-called normal relationships because of the extraordinary preparation they have because of the extraordinary suffering and sorrow they've already been through now most perniciously of all i think people feel entitled to be parents people feel entitled to be good parents they feel that they ought to be respected and admired by their own children as good parents without ever putting in really any thought as to what it's going to take to be a good parent without putting in any kind of preparation and this may not be the video game addict stereotype and it may not be the phd in chemistry stereotype although i've met a lot of bad parents who fall into that category i really have you know you can meet a beautiful young woman and all she ever did was put her effort into being a beautiful young woman she put all her time into her hair and her nails and her makeup let's just say she even worked as an esthetician she worked in a beauty salon for the sake of it and how to wear high heels and how to walk in high heels all those skills that i recognize that's a certain kind of skill set and then she thinks one day she can become a mother and she's going to be a good mother and she's going to be a great mother and she's going to be loved and adored by her husband by her parents and grandparents by her children and grandchildren that there's going to be all this admiration and adoration directed her way and she finds out too late that in the same way that jesus here lacks the skills the attitude the knowledge he needs frankly just to save his own life that she has none of the preparation she needs to be a parent and just because it's normal just because it's common for people to be parents doesn't mean it's going to be easy for you it's gonna be hard for you because of all the thousands of hours you put into playing video games instead of becoming a person of substance and if it's not video games maybe for this beautiful young woman all the thousands of hours you put into hanging out in a nightclub doing hair nails and makeup all the thousands of hours you wasted making yourself into a shallow brittle person instead of someone who's really substantive who's really profound and he's really robust in dealing with the challenges of being a parent i've got to tell you something it's not only the child that breaks down weeping in that intimate context under those pressures parenting is hard what people think is normal is hard it takes extraordinary sacrifice extraordinary self-discipline extraordinary preparation and it's the people who've been through that who then have the luxury of laughing about it of taking it utterly for granted hi my name is dan i'm a video gaming addict [Applause] [Music] one of the biggest points of anxiety for me over the last 10 to 15 years has been that i've never had a girlfriend and i've never really had many friends but i feel like coming from a dual parent alcoholic household i had no real connection with my parents you couldn't really talk to them every day they come home from work it was just go and get the captain morgan rum and get the diet coke and mix them together and drink until you're drunk every single day [Music] and when i go to school it was like i mean a lot of people were on drugs and even i remember my best friend in grade school he told me he was using meth and this was in grade school i turned towards video games because i saw these behaviors models around me that were destructive and i looked at video games as being a lesser evil than drugs alcohol and just going around having sex with random people i grew up around kind of crazy hood environment just alcohol drugs all that type of stuff and i never wanted to be a part of it and i avoided it but i feel like as a result [Music] i never had those kind of foundational experiences socializing with other people to be able to build upon it to have relationships to have friends i suffered to some extent from anxiety and maybe in some way it was my safe space in the chaos of my life in these times it was constant always available and gave me a sense of accomplishment i climbed through the ranks and achieved max combat and had every single piece of gear i could want but it wasn't enough i sought the next thing my new goal was to achieve 99 everything and get the prestigious max cape the first time i seriously quit putting video games was in 2016. i saw that it was really dragging me down and that i was getting older and starting to fall behind in some areas of my life so after setting a goal in the video game that i played at the time of getting a max cape and then achieving it i then quit you know i'd wind up dropping out of college four times and blowing like 15 grand or so in the process you know of my own money i i paid it off now but i mean it was just a waste of money life improved a lot for me in the next few months i re-enrolled in a local community college after dropping out from a different college a few years before i was making good money all my bills were paid i was having money in the bank i felt like i was on top of the world because things improved so much i thought it was safe to go back to video games i thought that i was cured of my video gaming addiction big mistake i started playing about 10-12 hours a day i bounced around between a few steam games and minecraft found my way back to runescape and then i started playing 16 hours a day i wound up dropping out of college in one semester because it wasn't for me and because my video game addiction made it hard to do anything but play video games since i dropped out and didn't have school anymore i was able to live at my grandparents and play video games all day so i did during this time which continues to this day i played up to 16 hours a day everything from runescape minecraft gta 5 7 days to die terraria and a host of other small games i started neglecting my health again and my room was a constant mess of stuff on the floor you needed 99 agility just to make it from the door to the bed in this room my income went way down and i enjoy work a commission job and i was making one fifth about what i was making previously i rarely took showers and oftentimes didn't brush my teeth i pretty much drank five cokes a day ate breakfast and ate junk the rest of the day playing runescape today i woke up at 4pm and i played runescape for 10 hours so far maybe 11 at this point i'm trying to be honest with where i'm at right now and i think it accurately represents where i'm at and all that being said i want this channel to document me improving my life and beating my video game addiction i quit playing video games about 100 days ago i probably made my first video probably 130 days ago or so where i kind of showed that i was a runescape video gaming addict and i was at the time actively playing like i said i haven't played 100 days now i set a date several months out when i would quit cold turkey and follow through with it and here i am four months later video game free i recently wound up relapsing with my video gaming addiction long story short a friend of mine recently got killed by a drunk driver who was going the wrong way down the road get rid of your councils get rid of anything that's going to make you reliable a lot of people will associate like oh but it costs money i paid money for this your 300 xbox is the you run the risk of your 300 xbox costing you thirty thousand dollars over the course a year in lost wages lost experiences which one's worse smashing the 300 xbox or losing thirty thousand dollars in lost wages and lost experiences in the next year's time there's this sunk cost fallacy where you you have so much time invest into it so you think it's worth something but at the other side of the coin there's if you continue to keep it it's just gonna continually drag you down to me video games are a disease of complacency i know that if i keep the video games in my life it's going to be a struggle to move forward i see this with a lot of young men a lot of those who have gone before me and a lot of those who are coming after me they're playing all these video games and they're not quite doing their schoolwork the way they should they're not quite as ambitious as they probably could be and [Music] it accumulates over time and the rest of their life kind of suffers from it i also want to make a disclaimer that just because you have not played as much as me doesn't mean you're not a video gaming addict in the same way that a two-pack a day smoker doesn't think he's an addict because he knows a three-pack a day smoker or you could substitute that with alcohol or drugs whatever gambling you know whatever once you formed an addiction to video games at least in my experience it's nearly impossible to stop you may think you're good you may think you got your life back on track and you may think you can self-regulate i did but i couldn't and i realized that now i thought i was cured of my video gaming addiction i wasn't and maybe i never will be adhd and anxiety oftentimes i wonder how these are interlinked i don't know which one came first i think a lot of my anxiety and adhd mate or at least my anxiety kind of came from my parents and my upbringing grew up in an attic household so that always gave me a lot of anxiety growing up because you never know what's going to happen i got a lot of problems with my family being my family are alcoholics and pretty severely so my father's got a number of duis and i always worry about all the stuff that goes along with that and the drama romantic i'm not even going to worry too much about that at the moment i've got to get myself right before i can go back to being in a relationship i do not want to be like my parents i i do not want to be complacent in life and you know i want to live up to my full potential and i'm willing to sacrifice things to be able to do that i don't want to be 40 50 years old and think man i could have done this i could have done that but i just did this impulsive stuff like video games and alcohol and for a lot of people that's it's insidious in the fact that it's a multiple of these things and it's never quite bad enough to make the change it's you know i watched my parents drinking over all these years now and i just i see the slow decline the slow dimming [Music] of you know once bright people i made big changes to quit video games to stay off it made me very uncomfortable making these youtube videos in the past and still at the beginning makes me very uncomfortable it's embarrassing to make youtube videos with your face and then talking about your problems but guess what if i didn't do it i'd probably still be playing video games [Music]