Health Is Wealth: How Losing 220+ Pounds Changed One Man’s Life— and What It Teaches Us About Person

0:15 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicit or implies shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or it's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. Welcome to to Ask Good Questions Podcasts, broadcasting live every Wednesday, six pm Eastern Time on W four CY Radio at W four cy dot com. This week and every week, we will reach for a higher purpose in money and life, as well as a focus on health and wellning. Now, let's join your host, Anita bell Anderson as together we start with Asking Good Questions.

1:16 Hey, and welcome to the Ask Good Questions podcast. This is your host, Benita bell Anderson. I'm so excited to have you here today because we have got somebody that transformed his life and has some very definite opinions about what are some really good ways to do that? So with that I would like to welcome to the podcast stage Stanley Bronstein. Hi, Benita, thank you for having me. Yeah, thank you so much for being here. Well, for those of you that this is your first time meeting Stanley, like to give you just a little a little bit of a heads up on who this guy is. He's an attorney, he's a CPA, he's a life coach, and he's a multi book author that has focused on two big missions, helping people reach their maximum potential and helping those who need it to lose weight permanently through healthy, sustainable lifestyle change. And one thing I always say is health is your first wealth. So he is, He's lost, and over time he lost a total of two hundred and twenty pounds, and he's maintained that he uses that as part of the learning and the story that he has around about what really drives lasting change, including willingness, belief, discipline, and commitment and how to align mindset and healthy eating

2:49 and healthy movement for life that keeps getting better. So with that, Stanley, is there anything he'd like to add to that. Sounds good to me? I'm ready to roll when you are. Well. You built a career around money and business. So when did you realize that health was another form of wealth? Probably, you know, forty years ago, but I didn't do anything about it. Yeah, you know, I mean I think it's I've known for a long time health is another form of wealth. I mean, I've been around a lot of people have very I have a lot of money who are not healthy or are miserable for other reasons. Yeah, it's just too by having money helps and it's nice, but it is not everything.

3:49 No, And I've seen way too many times where you can have all the money in the world, but if you don't have your health, you're miserable and it's no fun because you can't do anything. That's absolutely correct. So you said that your peak weight was three hundred and sixty seven. Yes, right here, here's a picture. Three hundred and sixty seven pounds. I had a fifty eight inch waist. Well today I have a thirty waist. Good for you. Well, what was it that made you say something has got to change? Well, as I was getting ready to turn fifty February first, two thousand and nine, little over seventeen years ago, I wasn't at my max weight then like you saw in that picture. My max weight was three sixty seven, but I wasn't three twenty. It was four months from my fiftieth birthday. And to be honest with you, I was disgusted with myself. I, you know, had a lot of success business wise, but I said, Stanley, you're blowing it.

5:05 I mean, and you know, you keep putting it off and putting it off and putting it off, and one day you're going to put it off a little too long and it's going to be too late. Yeah. So I asked myself when I woke up that morning, I said, where am I going to be in five years if I keep doing what I'm doing? And I didn't like the answer because the answer was dead. And I decided right then and there that I did not want to be dead. So well, I might hazard to say that I might hazard to say you asked yourself a good question.

5:45 Yeah, I think everybody should ask themselves that question all the time. So what was the question again? You asked yourself? Where am I going to be in five years if I stay on my prison course? In my case, dead? Because to be honest with you, I was committing what I call slow aside. I was slowly eating and drinking myself to death. Yeah, slowly, yeah, but nevertheless, you know, I was doing it to myself. And so I turned to my wife and I said, I'm done. I'm cooked.

6:31 I mean I'm toasted. No more. Yeah, I said, I'm going to stop tolerating BS in my life. And the first person I'm going to stop tolerating it from is me. Yeah. After all, you're the only one that's You're one hundred percent responsible for your own life and not anybody else's. Yes, and I took personal responsibility, which is a very important part of what I've learned and a very important part of what I teach when I work with others.

7:13 But even when you take personal responsibility, you know, there's a funny thing about blame. The blame game. Yeah, you know, everybody wants to blame somebody else, and then when they finally get around to taking personal responsibility, they want to start blaming themselves. Well, there's just one problem. Blame is irrelevant. Blame does not fix problems. The only thing that fixes problems is figuring out what needs to be done and then doing it. So little side note here. If you're a politician in Washington and you're listening to this, stop blaming each other and start fixing things right, work together, blame doesn't and going to get us there. That's my political side note for the book.

8:08 Okay, well, what do you think the real cost of being unhealthy is? Well, let's I'll put it this worth an example, Okay, every time I was getting going to a Chinese buffet for lunch at work, every time I was coming home from work and drinking a bunch of scotch, sitting on my butt, eating a bunch of unhealthy food, getting no exercise, I was knocking days, weeks, months, years off of my life and worsening the quality of my life while I was alive. Yeah, so that's the cost of living an unhealthy lifestyle, right, and healthy eating is just a part of that.

9:09 Well, what would you say, I mean, because you know, I don't think when somebody makes a major change like that, I think you pretty much have to do it one thing at a time, like I don't know, and maybe you can, maybe some people can change a whole bunch of things at the same time. But what would you say were the core habits? Okay made losing it possible. Okay, first of all, this has been This was and has been and continues to be an evolutionary process. Yeah. I did not instantly flip a switch and instantly turn into the person I am today. No, the person I am today is who I have evolved into over the last seventeen plus years. Now, well, a lot of this depends on where are you at health wise. You know, me, I had not had a stroke yet, I hadn't had a heart attack yet, my knees hadn't given out yet.

10:19 All those things were probably coming, but the necessity to do it all at once was not there. Right. But some people, sometimes you're making me think of You're making me think of a member of my family that we lost last year who was fifty eight, very successful guy in business and with his family, and he doesn't come up from their exercise room and he had a heart attack and he died right there in the exercise room in their house. Yeah. So I mean, you know, it's like sometimes you don't get a check to fix it. But hopefully, if there's anything, I always try to make these podcasts so that somebody will go out and take some action and do something.

11:10 So hopefully what you're sharing today is going to help Some people, say Okay, can we elaborate turn around? Can we elaborate on your family member example, for a moment without getting too deep into it. Okay, you he was exercising, good, But there may be and there may have been other factors. There may have been dietary factors. There may have been stress factors. There may have been genetic factors. There may have been environmental factors. It may have been many things. You know, you don't know. I mean, I pride myself in what I do every day. But as you sort of were hitting at, you know, I could cross the street and get him by a bus at any time. I mean, you don't know. All you can do is focus on what you can control and what you do have power over, and do the best you can with what you're giving. Does that make sense? Yes?

12:23 Well, what let me ask you some mills. What did you have to stop believing about weight loss? Okay? Well, many things. First of all, weight loss is easier than you think. All that's involved in weight loss is permanent, lasting change making permanent lasting changes. That's the whole key. I had lost weight many times in my life life, but I did not keep it off because the changes I had made were temporary, and I would go right back to my old bad habits, and then lo and behold, the weight would come back on and all the problems would resurface. So I guess what I had to believe. What I had to learn was that first of all, I could do it believing in yourself and then becoming permanently willing to permanently make changes for the rest of your hopefully very happy, hopefully very healthy, hopefully very long life. Now, this whole experience taught me

13:56 some things along the way. I learned from the experience was that I'm more powerful than I ever imagined, way more powerful. That's a change that I had to make, realizing that most of the limits I were feeling were in my head and that in reality I was capable of so much more. But let's take that a step further. If I am more powerful than I ever imagined, what does that say about anyone who's listening to this podcast.

14:41 It says that they too are more powerful than they ever imagined. That's because I am no more special. If you're listening, I am no more special than you are, and you are no more special than I am. The truth is, we are all special, and every one of us. We are all capable of so much more than we ever imagined. So it's you have to change what you tell yourself. And here's another change. You really don't have to change what you tell yourself. You get to change what you tell yourself. It's a privilege to change your life.

15:29 It's not something you have to do, it's something you get to do. It's a privilege, breathing, living. All these things we do are privileges. And when we start looking in life that way, we start taking better care of ourselves. Now. So, once I learned just how how powerful I was, that I was more powerful than I ever imagined, it led me to ask myself a question. And the question let me ask myself was if I could lose two hundred and twenty pounds and keep it off permanently, if I could turn into a person who's literally become a walking athlete, where I walk every day a lot and have gotten in shape and all of this from the age of fifty on. I'm sixty six now, so I've been at this.

16:39 I've been at this for seventeen plus years. You know, if I could do this, I it made me ask myself, what else is out there waiting for me to do that I haven't done yet, that I should be doing. And that's a very powerful question to ask yourself. What are you here for? What is your purpose in life? What should you be here doing? Because you see what I've learned out of this whole experience, is you know, if I could go back, I mean, my whole problem with waight, with being overweight started when I was eight years old, when my mother died when I was eight years old and I was living with my master Wilbee's father.

17:29 So wade has been a problem my whole life, you know, up until I decided to get it together, and you begin to realize that if I could go back and change my experiences, if I could change the things that happened to me, would I And the answer is yes, I would, certainly. If I could change the things that happened to me and a lot of the things I did to others and to myself, I would make those changes.

18:14 But let's follow up on that question, do I have any regrets for what I went through or what I put myself through? And the answer is no, because the things I went through, the things I experienced, were necessary to teach me what I know now and to turn me into the person I am today. And I like the person I am today, and I am a person who has knowledge and experience who I believe that I can use to help other people. And that is my purpose and that is why I'm here. I think Benita is having technical problems, so I will just continue. So either you're there, Benita, now I am okay, I've been continuing, So if you have a question, just pick up now.

19:21 If not all of no, No, I'm wondering, you know, I'm wondering about how taking care of your health. Don't you think that that would improve the quality of your decisions in other areas of your life? Certainly? So. First of all, it teaches you how powerful you are. It gives you confidence, It helps you make decisions more confidently, It teaches you to believe in yourself. All those things it definitely helps. Plus, when you don't feel like crap, you know, it's easier to make better decisions.

20:06 I have a plain and simple, Well, what does. Personal excellence really look like? Then? For you in ordinary their life. First of all, let me tell you what excellence is not. Excellence is not perfection. That's one of the things I figured out. I used to be a three hundred and sixty seven pound perfectionist who walked around complaining that people were not as perfect as I was. That's kind of funnily kind of sick when you think about it, actually perfection.

20:47 The reason why perfection is not a good standard is we are all human beings, every single one of us. If you're listening, I'm going to share a gift with you right now. You are a human being. You are imperfect. You are going from time to time you are going to make mistakes, and somewhere along the way you're gonna make some big hum dinger mistakes. You're gonna mess up. I'll guarantee that one hundred percent. So that's my free tip to you in case you weren't aware of that. So, if the goal is not perfection, what is the goal?

21:38 Instead of saying perfect being up here is the only thing that works, Let's start with the floor. Let's start with the floor called good enough. Don't be a perfectionist, be a good enoughist, because when you start with good enough, you're happy. But just because you're good enough, it doesn't mean you can't work to get better. It doesn't mean you shouldn't work to get better. That's what excellence is. Excellent excellence is starting with a floor and then constantly working to get better and better and better. I follow a two words slogan that I call beat yesterday. That's your goal. Your goal is to beat yesterday. You want to be better today than you were yesterday. You want to be better tomorrow than you were today. But let me tell you something about beat yesterday. I've already told you you're going to have bad days. You're going to fail time to time. So what happens when you fail, Well, if you beat yourself up beside the head like I used to do, say you're no good like I used to do, go back to your old bad habits like I used to do. That's not good. But if you pick yourself up, if you sit there and say I

23:09 made some mistakes, mistakes are proof that I'm trying. I'm going to learn from those mistakes. And then I picked myself up and I get started again when in the past I would have quit. That is beating yesterday. You see what I'm saying. You just see there's power in long term thinking. That's what I've learned. Life is a long term game. The problem is we live in a short term world. Take a weight loss pills. Here's uber Eve.

23:50 You've got this thing. You've got this thing. So you have this thing that you call the Way of Excellence. Tell us a little bit more about that. Okay. The Way of Excellence is a system that grew out of this process. Because what happened is I'm in my career. I'm a systems thinker. That's the accountant me. You know, I'm always trying to take complicated things and make them simple. So what I did was, I said, how can I turn what I've learned into a system, a human operating system? Think of it like software for the soul, like Windows eleven, you know, Android, mac Os for how to be a human being? How do I turn this into a system that other people can apply in their lives in a way that works for them.

24:53 Because the goal is not to create another Stanley. There's already one Stanley, and the world doesn't need an other one. What the world does need is for you, everyone listening, for all of us, each and every one of us, to become the best we can be. That's what the world needs. So turn it into a system. Well, I started asking myself, what are the traits of an excellent human being? And I came up with twenty and that list stood the test of time. When I started with it, it was fourteen. Then I made it fifteen, and sixteen, then twenty. And since I made it twenty, I'm pretty happy with a list of twenty. And I haven't found anything that can't fit within the system. So what's the number one point of the system. Let's take a quick run through through it. The number one point of the system is learning to tell it like it is, awareness, telling yourself the truth. That day February one, two thousand and nine, when I woke up and said get in shape or I'm going to be dead, you can't tell it like it is any more than that. That's what I did. But there was a second part to that, And the second part to that is willingness. Willingness to

26:26 act on what you told yourself. See, that was not the first time I told myself, I need to lose weight and get in shape or I'm going to be dead. It wasn't the first time I took action on what I told myself. But it was the first time I permanently took action where I didn't quit. You know, whenever I made a mistake, whenever I fell down, I picked myself back up. I got started and kept going and going and going and going. Because unless and until you become permanently willing to permanently do what it takes for the rest of your hopefully very long, hopefully very happy, hopefully very healthy life, you're not going to get where you want to be willingness. That's the key. Now let's move to number two, long term thinking. I kind of touched on that a minute ago. Life is a long term gain. But the problem is we live in a short term world where we're constantly looking for quick fixes.

27:43 We want instant gratification. But that's not the way to maximize your life. Because when you realize life is a long term gain, when you start to think in decades and then add daily in a manner that's considered. With that type of thinking, you realize that there's power in the long term. See if you will sit there and you will take where you started today, and then you'll play the game of beat yesterday and you get one percent better every day. By the end of the year, you will be thirty times thirty seven times better than you were at the beginning of the year. That's the power of compounding long term. Now let's look at this this way. I am in year eighteen of beating yesterday.

28:41 The person I am today has the same DNA that I used to have, But they are not the same people. You are saying, Anita, I think you want. To Well, can I ask you something you've said that lasting change comes town down to willingness. I'll put in your words you were going to say, comes down to willingness, belief, discipline, and commitment. Yes, it does. We already touched on willingness. You know where un less and until you become permanently willing to do what it takes, you're not going to give what you one. We also touched on belief learning belief learning to believe that you're more powerful than you ever imagined, because once you begin to believe, that's where your power comes from. There's a saying believe you can or believe you can't. Either way you're going to be right. So let's start believing that you can. That's where the power comes from. Then the third thing is discipline. We're talking about the willingness, belief, discipline, and commitment The third one's discipline. And I don't mean punishment, I mean self discipline. I mean taking the time to identify all of your negative habits and consciously eliminating them.

30:14 In my case, going to Chinese buffets every day. God, get rid of that habit, drinking alcohol every day. Get rid of that habit. I quit drinking, having had a drinking over seventeen years, and I don't miss it. Drinking soda pop every day. I was drinking soda pup every day. Quit that habit. Get rid of it now that soda pop was dying camfeine free. So they tell us those are healthy, right, No they're not, that's my opinion. But no, they're not healthy. They're not good for you. It's all bad for you. It's all garbage. And then once you identify your negative habits and you eliminate them intentionally and consciously, creating new positive habits to replace those negative habits. You know me, I started drinking water every day instead of soda pop. That's a new habit. I started walking every day instead of sitting on my butt, new positive habit.

31:20 I started bringing healthy food to the office for lunch instead of going to Chinese buffets. New positive habit. I started sitting aside time to meditate every day and focus on myself new positive habit, all those things intentionally consciously forming new positive habits. And if anybody wants to learn more about habit formation, there's a book I highly recommend called Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's a wonderful book. Fantastic book, Atomic Habits by James Clear. I recommend you pick that book up. It'll help you you figure out how to eliminate your negative habits and to intentionally consciously form new positive habits. Then you have the last of those four things, commitment. When you become one hundred percent committed to a thing, it becomes easier to do. You know, for example, if I wake up in the morning and I go I don't feel like walking today. Am I going to walk today? Just the asking of that question gives you the opportunity to say, no, I don't feel like it, I'm not going to do it. Stop asking the question. Instead. I am one hundred percent committed to walking every day. It is non negotiable. It's I become a walker, It's who I am. When I get up,

32:51 I don't say am I going to walk? Today. I say I am going to walk today, and it starts right now. It's a good. Same thing with healthy eating. I am one hundred percent committed that no unhealthy food is going to enter my mouth, plain and simple. And while I'm at it, let's pay attention to all of my inputs. No one, Hell, I'm going to do my best to make sure no unhealthy thoughts enter my head. I'm going to do my best to make sure I only hang around good people. I only associate with good people. I do my best to make sure I create a positive environment for myself, an environment that fosters me and also become who I am. It's all about becoming committed to the type of life you say you want. Becoming committed to the type of life you say that you want, because unless and until when you become one hundred percent committed, it becomes so much easier. Yeah, yeah, it just is.

34:00 Well, we're gonna we're Stanley, We're gonna have to wrap this up pretty soon. And so if someone listening today is feeling a little discouraged but really wants to make some changes, what would be the first three things you would tell them to do this week? Okay, the first thing is go to my website, the Way of Excellence dot com. That's the Way of Excellence dot com. And please put that in the show notes. Banina, go there, I will. The whole system is there, It's laid out. There's a video on each of the twenty parts.

34:44 The videos are eight to twelve minutes each, Watch one a day. That's it. In less than a month, you will learn the whole system. You will feel so much better about yourself. Your thoughts will become clear, they will become focused. And then once you do that, take action. Decide what you want. Tony Robbinson's never leave the scene of a decision without taking action action. You know, I can't tell you how many years I said I wanted to lose weight and get in shape. I said that my whole life. It wasn't until I became permanently willing to take action and then realize that when you mess up, start again, like let's go back. I started on February first, two thousand and nine. I told you that day. Would you care to guess why it wasn't January the first New Year's resolution? Why wasn't it January first?

35:52 Who weren't committed? No? Because I had made a new Year's resolution and I blew it. The imperfect human being named Stanley Bronstein blew it messed up big time. But that imperfect human being named Stanley Bronstein did something different this time. On February first, two thousand and nine. He decided to pick himself back up, dust himself off, learn from his mistakes, and get started again and keep going. See, in my life, I've probably fallen down a thousand times, and I've gotten up one thousand and one and that last time I got up, Baby, I've been going ever since.

36:46 Well, Stanley, I think we better call it, and so thank you so much for being with me today. We will have a place where everyone can go find your information and find you and connect with you. All right, sounds goods. So all right? So with that, thank you everyone for joining to Ask Good Questions podcast today and we will see you next time. Hi, Today's episode is over, but we need Ask Good Questions again, didn't We don't miss out as we broadcast live every Wednesday, six pm Eastern Time on W four CY Radio at W fourcy dot com. Joined Banina Bell Anderson next week for more conversations with experts on finances, retirement, behavioral finance issues, health and wellness, and more. Until then, remember to ask good questions.