“I felt the only thing I had control of was what I ate,” says Baldric Shyer, a 33-year-old screenwriter from Los Angeles, CA. He’s struggled with weight most of his life, coming from an obese families; like a lot of people, he’s had ups and downs. At one point he was down to 170 pounds, but he didn’t like himself or his relationship, and so he’d stay up late gorging: a half-gallon of ice cream, pizza, or fast food. He’d write screenplays and eat.
“At my heaviest, I felt so defeated, lost, and hopeless,” he says. He remembers waiting an hour to make it to the top of a water slide, only to be turned away after they put him on a scale. “Walking back down past everyone in line was the worst walk of shame I’ve ever done,” he says. He hit 275 pounds.
Shyer decided he needed a radical change. He left his relationship behind and moved to Vietnam. Being alone in a new country let him focus on himself; it was hard, but he felt he needed it to survive. “Even in the smog of Ho Chi Minh City,” he says. “I started to breathe again.”
Of course, he wanted to try all the food. That led to gaining 15 pounds. Ready to lose weight, he instead wrecked his kneecap in a motorbike accident. He didn’t give up, though; he used his rehab time to walk the city, listening to self-improvement podcasts and soaking up the visual novelty of his new home. “It wasn’t much exercise, but for someone as overweight as me, it was a start and the weight started melting off.
He aimed to hit 200 pounds, then began eating like someone who weighed that much. As extreme as it sounds, his move to Vietnam meant he could no longer eat a half-gallon of ice cream a night. With generally healthier food (think soups and tuna onigiris) and regular walks, he quickly lost 50 pounds in the first four months. “The cost of living is so cheap that the only thing I had to worry about was loving and being healthy with myself,” he says. “I had all the time and money I needed to really focus on myself for the first time in my life.”
When he’d advanced beyond walks for exercising, he started playing basketball twice a week, with a group of local Vietnamese on a full-sized court with no circulation. Within a couple months his weight plateaued around 200 pounds.
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Then he turned to intermittent fasting, which he’d heard about on his podcasts. He started in May 2019, fasting 16:8 (16 hours of fasting, with an 8 hour window in which to eat). He’s now down to 155 pounds, which he’s held for the past three months. “I feel amazing,” he says. “I’m back in Los Angeles with a newfound love, gratitude, and confidence.” He still plays basketball, albeit at a lower intensity, and he’s taken up indoor bouldering. He still walks every day.
For him, getting healthy meant his had to make himself a priority—even if that meant moving to a new country, alone. But in some ways, that move made things easier. In a foreign country, he had nothing to do but lose weight. “My advice for someone getting started,” he says, “would be to make things easy as possible to get started, and then start.”
