Ernie is a life coach serial entrepreneur, Group CEO, brand consultant, motivator, author, film director, and entertainer. In the past two years, he has been open about his weight loss journey from 156 kg to 72kg.
Watch our interview with him here:
Here is his story:
The first time I lost a lot of weight was when I was 19 years old when I had left for America to attend Western Kentucky University.
I was a really chubby boy, and when I was walking up the hill to my university, I almost died. I couldn’t breathe because I was so heavy.
So I said, “Dear God, give me an opportunity to live this life and I will promise you I will lose the weight.”
It took me about 4 months, but I did it. I lost about 80 kilos. That was a very dramatic change, and I became even smaller than I am now. It was a lot easier back then, because I was 19 years old.
My second weight loss journey was at 44.
This time around, I was 44 years old when I started the journey. I was 156 kilos.
I was not really taking good care of myself at all, so if you can’t take good care of yourself, you start to have late nights.
When you start to gain more of this weight, you start to become unhealthy.
I would start panting in the middle of walking because it was just so heavy having so much weight on my knees.
And that’s when I was admitted to the hospital. I was told to go for knee surgery, but I refused to do that and carried on walking.
We all have different timings for different things. There’s this thing called “Ba Zi” (The Four Pillars of Destiny), which is Heaven’s timing, Earth’s resources and you, the man who takes the action.
The timing was right for me when I almost died.
My Typical Workout Routine
I started hitting the gym.
A typical workout routine for me would be: every single morning, I wake up at 7 am, go to the gym and start pumping iron immediately. I do a 5-minute warm-up, and then I run an entire 2-kilometre stretch.
After that, I will do weight training for 45 minutes and I’ll do a warm down. Once I’m done, I’ll go back home, shower, and go straight to work.
So from not being able to walk, I began to be able to run. In fact, I ran my first ever marathon, a 21km rally marathon.
Even though I have both legs cramped up, I completed and finished my journey — I have a medal that says “21 km Finisher”.
The Day I Understood “Why”
I don’t really consider myself a motivational speaker as much as someone who understands “why”.
I understood why I needed to stay healthy, because if I was just about motivating myself, telling myself that “Yeah Ernie, you can do this, you can do that,” it’s not going to be sustainable.
The only way that anything is sustainable for the long term is when you understand your “why”.
Once you understand why you have to live, you’ll become extraordinarily driven, motivated, and self-directed to do all those things.
Everyone Has Their Own Path To Walk
I think everybody needs their own way of doing what they need to do to get to where they need to get to. We are all built differently.
I was on different phases of diets, from the Ketogenic diet, to the Atkins diet, to the Blood type diet — I tried everything.
Some people would say “Keto diet works for you,” “Follow this diet,” and so on, but somehow it doesn’t work for you!
There’s a reason why it doesn’t work for you — because that’s not you!
If you want it to work for you, it had to be meant for you. It’s as simple as that.
A Constant Battle
It’s a constant battle of trying to figure out how to lose more weight. Although I’ve lost 84 kilos from 156kg to 72kg, I’ve actually lost, put on, lost, put on, lost throughout the entire journey of one and a half years.
You’ll have to sometimes eat a little bit more, and then lose back more because of the way it’ll keep coming back, and then you have to figure out how to lose it more.
I need to keep on trying to confuse my body, so it would not be able to figure out how to protect me from losing that weight.
Till today, I still have to work very hard to lose the weight because of the way I’ll gain back the weight, due to all the demands of the entertainment industry.
Work hard before you can work smart
A lot of people say “Work smarter not work harder,” but before you can learn how to work smart, you have to work hard. Because how do you get smarter? You get smarter by working hard!
When you work hard and you do a lot of things, you learn that there are a lot of mistakes that you make along the way.
We are going to fail, and we are going to make mistakes. But what we learn is that we become smarter in what we do by making those mistakes and never repeating them.
And once you’re smarter in what you do, you start becoming faster at it too. Once you see fast results, you start to get motivated. And that’s what we’re doing here.
Nothing comes easy, but everything is possible.
When you emit positivity, you’ll start to see the world become more peaceful. You’re healthy and you’re happy, and positivity drives peace.
P-Peace!
For more stories like this, read: Here Are 4 Malaysians Who Overcame Body Shaming. These Are Their Stories and I Was a Smoker for 20 Years. Here are 5 Ways Which Helped Me Quit.
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