Back in 2001, actor Ethan Suplee was standing on a freight scale typically used to weigh trucks.
It was an eye-opening moment before he checked into a treatment center for drug and alcohol addiction at 24 years old, where his weight was required for intake.
The “My Name is Earl” star had to specially order the scale, which is how he discovered he had shot up to 536 pounds — a fact he had avoided for a long time.
“I spent years going to the doctors and telling them their scale couldn’t weigh me,” Suplee, now 49, told The Post. “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.”
After trying to lose weight his entire life while cycling in and out of rehab, he had finally hit a breaking point.
Today, the actor known for his role in “Remember the Titans” has lost nearly half his body weight, and even shredded down to 11% body fat back in 2021.
It wasn’t until he started dating his now-wife, though, that he realized sobriety wasn’t his only issue. He would have to address his weight head-on if he wanted to live a full life with her.
“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,” he said. “I have to also confront my weight, and I have more problems to fix.”
Between trial and error with diets, landing on a keto diet and consistent trainer-led workouts, he eventually dropped a staggering 250 pounds by 2005 — nearly half his weight.
“I still look in the mirror in the mornings and often have to convince myself that I’m not a piece of garbage.”
Ethan Suplee
And he hoped that getting rid of the excess weight would heal his sense of shame, low confidence and eventually help him accept himself.
But the “Boy Meets World” alum soon learned the scale could only provide so much satisfaction.
“Once I’d lost some weight, I didn’t feel any better about myself,” he said. “I would get on the scale and see I’ve lost 100 pounds.
“And then the next day I’d still feel shitty… and my sense of shame would come back and my low self-confidence,” he added.
Even setting and meeting several physical goals didn’t quiet the negative voices in his head.
“I wanted to be able to ride my bicycle 200 miles in a day, and I did that,” he stated. “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 went on. “And that’s just my condition that I have to manage day to day.”
These achievements were merely the first steps toward discovering a much larger target of improvement every single day across all aspects of his life.
“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,” he explained. “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.”
Talking to his kids as well as spending time with his wife every day, even if it’s a FaceTime call when he’s out of town for work, are both goals of his.
He also has regular check-ins with himself, asking if he’s living up to the best version that he can imagine and putting effort into improving his relationships.
But this goal of self-improvement hasn’t come without its own difficulties, as he noted that if one area is out of balance, everything else in his life could be affected.
“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,” the father of four said. “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.”
Throughout his journey, Suplee also learned he needed to rewire his relationship with food.
Even after he got out of treatment, he still struggled with food, having been put on his first diet at 5 years old. Weighing more than 200 pounds by age 10, he used food, alcohol and drugs to “numb” himself throughout his teenage years.
“I learned how to sneak food and eat my way around the diets,” he recalled. “I was never super successful on any of these diets because I cheated every chance I got… and I got a lot heavier.”
At the beginning of his journey, he tried identifying singular foods as the issue, whether the culprit was carbohydrates, nightshades or processed foods.
“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,” Suplee explained.
But he soon realized he couldn’t apply the same abstinence methods he learned in rehab to his relationship with food.
“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,” Suplee said. “I had to think about the condition as a chronic condition versus an acute condition, because all of these diets were acute solutions.”
Introducing carbs back into his diet and counting calories for what his body needed, the actor finally figured out a method that worked for him.
“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,” he added.
At the end of the day, Suplee knows his weight loss and health journey certainly didn’t come about easily — and they’re both far from over.
“I had been looking for solutions that didn’t feel like they required a lot of effort,” he said. “When 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.”
