The Moment You Realize You Don’t Recognize Yourself Anymore

There’s a moment most men never talk about.
 It’s not a crisis. It’s not rock bottom.
 It’s quieter than that.

You’re standing in front of the mirror, adjusting your shirt, and for just a second, you flinch.
Not because of vanity. But because that man staring back at you… doesn’t feel like you anymore.

In this episode of Fitness by Design, Coach Spencer pulls back the curtain on the unspoken collapse happening behind high-achieving men’s lives. The burnout. The identity erosion. The quiet decay behind the titles and calendars.

This isn’t about six-packs. It’s about reclaiming the man you swore you’d become, before life buried him in deadlines, meetings, and weight that won’t move.

You’ll walk away with truth, direction, and the raw reminder that leadership starts in the mirror.

Your comeback starts now.
Subscribe and share this with a man who’s been silently slipping.

If this episode hit home, make sure you’re subscribed. This is Fitness by Design, the podcast for high-performing men ready to stop winging it and start leading with their body.

For more stories, strategies, and hard truths:

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Or shoot me a text, I read every single one.

Let’s keep building your edge, one episode at a time.

Transcript

0:00

There is a moment that most men never talk about, and I'm not being dramatic. There's no car crash, hospital bed, or life shattering diagnosis from your doctor, and it's because it's quieter than that. You're standing in the bathroom. Sink tie is half knotted. Your eyes are puffy, your shirt's tighter than it should be, and for just a half a second, you look up and catch your reflection and you don't recognize the man looking back at you and no one else sees it because you still show up, you still get the job done. You're still showing up for work, for family, everything. You're the one that your team is depending on in the office your wife is leaning on at home, and the one that your kids are running to when you walk through the door. But inside something's off and you feel it. And no matter how many checklists you crush, no matter how much caffeine you throw at your fatigue, you know this truth. You have lost your edge. Now this is Fitness by Design. I'm Coach Spencer, and today we're gonna break that silence because this story isn't just mine to tell it's yours, and it's time that we finally write a different ending for you because you've built what most men spend their entire lives chasing. You have a home full of people who absolutely love and cherish you. You have a career that pays you so well and demands even more from you, and you have the trust of your team in the office. You have the respect of your peers. and maybe you even have the envy of a couple of your friends who are wondering how the hell you keep all the plates spinning. I. You've got the early alarms, the late meetings, the kid drop off, status updates, deliverables, the constant hum of teams messages, inbox pings, everything, and those responsibilities that never really shut off. You answer all the calendars, the client calls, the colleagues. You run the show and every single room that you walk into and every single person knows that you're the man that people look to when shit hits the fan, the guy who can fix it, hold it down, figure it out. You've earned your seat at every single table and you wear that pressure like armor, and most days you don't even complain about it because that's just what men like you do. You show up no matter how much it costs you, but there is a cost and you're finally starting to feel it because somewhere in all that you're starting to fade. It didn't happen all at once. It never does. It happened in skipped workouts in those late night snacks. in the button, that just got a little harder to button every morning, It's in the mirror. You avoid after the shower and the body that once felt so strong and reliable, and now you just feel a little slow. And when you finally have those five minutes to yourself, you're brushing your teeth, you're scrolling in bed, you're walking the dog, and you catch your reflection. And for that moment, man, you just don't recognize who's staring back at you. And it's not because you're weak,'cause you've been carrying everyone else and everything else for so long That you forgot what it's like to actually carry and lead yourself. And that's what we're here to change today. Because even with all of it, there's this gnawing voice in the back of your mind that whispers, why don't I feel like the man that I thought I should be by now? Because you walk into rooms, people respect you, and they should. You've earned that. You've built your career, the credibility, the command. But behind those closed doors, when no one's looking, you're running on fumes. You catch your reflection in the window late at night or in the bathroom mirror, and there's the split second flinch. Not because you're vain, but'cause that version just simply doesn't match the man that you know you should be. Your kids light up when you walk into the door. You don't have the energy to play with'em. Your team looks at you for direction, but your own discipline is slipping and you're making decisions all day long, but you're avoiding the one decision that could change everything for you, and that is to finally take back control of your health. And no, this is not about having a fucking six pack. This is just simply about your identity, about that quiet erosion that happens when responsibility climbs and your body crumbles underneath it.'cause you still wanna walk into a room and feel undeniable. Feel like you belong there. Not because your business card says so, but'cause your body, your energy, your presence, say it, not a version of who you used to be, but the man fully present in the room. Sharp, grounded, even magnetic. Not a memory of strength, a living, breathing force of it. And maybe no one sees it. Maybe you're the only one who knows just how far off you've actually drifted from the man you said you were gonna be by now. But you feel that. You feel it in your sleep when you're putting on your shirts in those silent glances in the mirror. But yet you still will sit there and just say, you're fine. It's just a busy season. But if we're being honest, that season realistically has been the last decade, and you convince yourself that you can just white knuckle through all the chaos just a little bit longer. If you grind just a little bit harder, push it little bit further. You'll eventually just earn your way back to feeling like yourself again. But let's call this what it is. You can't out discipline a broken system. I. And the one that you're operating in right now, it's not broken by accident. It was designed, built from the ground up to keep high performing men just like you and me, just functional enough to perform, but way too worn out to question the toll that it's actually taking on our lives. Because if you're exhausted, if your body is giving out, if your clarity is gone, guess what? You are easier to sell to, you're easier to manipulate. You don't rise, you consume. And that's not failure. That's a business model, and your health is becoming the collateral of that. All those gaps in your calendar that fill up with back-to-back meetings, the skipped meals start to be replaced with stress, snacks, or just not eating because fasting is good for you. Your workouts get bumped by the smallest email that needs a response yesterday, and you just keep pushing those workouts to the next day. Every day, your phone is always buzzing and slowly, the man that you used to be slowly drifts away into a shell of yourself. and you're watching this happen every single day in real time, but you keep telling yourself, next week's gonna be different. But different doesn't happen without a decision. And deep down you already know that. But if you've made the decision before, you've tried to get the weight off, you tried to get your body back. You did the keto, the fasting, hell, you maybe even thought about doing 75 hard and or failed 75 hard. 75 times you tracked until your head spun, then crashed. Faced first into takeout and guilt, wondering how it happened again. You bought all the books, you listened to the podcast, you download the PDFs from every influencer online. You join the free groups. You've tried willpower, you've tried all of it. Just to go through another, I'll start on Monday. You've done every single thing, right? You've checked every box, you followed every step, and still something doesn't feel right, something is still broken, and you sit there thinking to yourself like, how the hell am I a leader at work? I'm a leader in my house. I'm a leader everywhere. I solve all these complex problems for a living. Why can't I figure out how to lose a couple pounds and keep it off? But here's the truth that no one is actually telling you. Leaders fall hardest when they try to go it alone. You've been Frodo carrying the ring solo. What you needed was a Gandalf. You needed a guide, and that's exactly where I can come in, not because I'm better than you, but because I am you. I've done the two a day workouts, chasing after abs and looking shredded, ignoring the negative effects that was leaving behind. As the entire time I was wrecking my hormones and my gut health, I've had the mornings and late nights where I looked in the mirror and hated who I saw. I've tried on multiple shirts in the morning to see which one felt the least snug on my body. I've thrown on my fair share of quarter zips to hide my gut pushing through a polo shirt, but I finally realized a pretty hard truth after ending up in the er, dehydrated, malnourished, and weighing 40 pounds lighter than I ever should have been. I couldn't keep guessing. So I stopped winging it. I stopped borrowing the blueprints from influencers who'd never worked a real job. I stopped pretending I could just push through the pain. Instead, I started building. I looked at my life exactly like the engineer that I am, not just tracking steps or calories, but actually studying the system itself. I mapped my time, my stress patterns, the flare up triggers from my uc, my sleep debt, the exact hours I lost every single week to the chaos that was my life, and I asked myself. What would it actually take to win at this forever? not just surviving this week or this month, but feeling like I actually owned it and could do it forever. And that's ultimately why I got certified as a personal trainer. I. But I also hired three different fitness coaches myself over the last six years. Not because I didn't know enough, but because I finally stopped believing the lie that smart men don't need help. Each coach showed me something extremely valuable. Each coach also showed me what I never wanted to do with my clients. One of'em used Google Sheets and no disrespect, I'm a technology guy. I knew I needed something more, 21st century, so that's why I coach inside of a VIP app. One of'em sent their check-ins over Instagram dms. I don't know about you, but that just didn't sit right. My dms are already flooded and it got so disorganized and disconnected, and I would've loved to just have a single point of communication. And then my last coach had a roster of 150 clients for one person. My basic engineering math, you know, as dumb as we are, told me that I had approximately 16 minutes of his time. Every week, and that's when I made myself a promise. I will never have a roster so big that my clients don't feel seen, heard and appreciated. Inside of this program, I am not just coaching numbers, I am coaching men. And in between all of those coaches. In between all of my education, I was constantly evolving my business. I was increasing my own knowledge, becoming certified in deeper levels of nutrition, getting certified in functional nutrition and metabolism, and being able to offer labs to my clients because when your doctor says your labs look fine, but you still feel like shit. They're probably not fine. They're just fine by the ranges that LabCorp gives you. That has been an absolute game changer in my own health and fitness journey, and I wanted to be able to give that to my clients. Because the system that came out of this was not glamorous or sexy, but God damnit, it worked. It made room for the reality of 12 to 14 hour work days, the high pressure days and weeks where it feels like nothing is going right. The last minute, Hey, do you think you can fly to X City on Wednesday from your boss? And honestly, man, it was built to withstand the shit storm that simply is trying to be a man In today's world, it's not built around perfection, because frankly, that doesn't exist. And if somebody ever tells you that it's required politely, tell them fuck off. That system became the blueprint that I now live by, the one that was forged from the trials, failures, and frankly, the raw truths and shitty looks in the mirror of what it actually takes to change when the world expects you to stay the same. And it's now what I teach. it's not because it's trendy. It's not because it sell. It's not because it's emotionally driven, but because I had to build it for myself to survive.'cause this was never about just building a better body. This was about rebuilding a man who was underneath all of it. The one who got buried under his deadlines, his family schedules, the leadership pressures. The man I swore to myself, I would not lose, but I lost along the way and the man I finally chose to fight for because now that's exactly what I help other men do. Not through hype or hustle, but through a system rooted in ownership, honesty, and execution. This isn't just about macros and protein, it's about identity, integrity, And alignment. The man who still wants more. The man who's tired of being tired, tired of winging it, tired of feeling like life is just leading him along instead of actually leading his life how he wants to. And if that's you, man, I got you. Let me show you the way out without all, all the hoops and the decade of trial and error that I had to go through. what does victory actually look like for you? That imaginary thing you've been trying to achieve since you first noticed your gut hanging over your belt loops? It's pretty simple if you take action, so lemme explain this. First, you stop chasing intensity. Start stacking consistency. Consistency isn't glamorous. It's not sexy. It doesn't fucking sell, but it builds something that intensity never can, and that is a foundation that you can trust on. Even your worst days. You only need to train three days a week to start to see results. Stop trying to force a six day split into your calendar when you barely have time to spend time with your kids. Six days a week. Just hit smart, intentional movements tailored to your equipment and your schedule. You don't have to chase soreness. You don't have to chase a sweaty shirt. You just have to build strength, resilience, and rhythm. You don't need to follow a meal plan because listen, I'll be the first person to say this, meal plans fucking suck. You're a grown ass man. You don't need somebody to tell you what to eat, every single meal, every single day for the rest of your life. You need to learn how to fuel like a man who respects his body, his friends, his family, his life, because finding a rhythm that works not through restriction, but leaving room for things like date nights, business travel, and your real life without guilt is gonna be able to help you way more and actually stick to it. Figure out how to create wind down rituals. I'm not talking hippie dippy shit like meditating for 30 minutes, journaling, wearing an eye mask, none of that crap. But you do have to realize that you can't perform at work or at home if you're wide awake scrolling Instagram until 2:00 AM. So keep it simple. Shut off screens 30 to 60 minutes before bed. Start to downshift your nervous system and let your body actually recover like it needs to, and it deserves to. And then just walk daily. This isn't about calorie burning, it's about clearing your head, regulating your stress, and building your stamina back. Because if you're not lifting right now, you're not moving very much a day. Just getting out and walking for 10 minutes a couple times a day is gonna do wonders for you. And lastly, but honestly, potentially the most important thing, stop giving the best of you. To your job. Your company will literally replace you tomorrow, but your family can never replace you, so the majority of your energy should not be going to the office. It should be reserved for being present with your family and making sure that you're around for the long run because slowly. Your posture is gonna change. Your voice is gonna get stronger, your energy's gonna return. Your eyes won't look so tired, and people are gonna notice it. Your team, your wife, your kids, hell, even yourself when you look in the mirror. Now granted you will be the last person to see that difference, but you stop just surviving your life and you start leading it again, not just projects, but in your life. That's what this podcast exists to help you do.'cause we're building a brotherhood here for men who have lost that edge and are ready to earn it back. The leaders who are ready to reclaim themselves, or the fathers who want to raise strong sons and daughters because they too are strong. This isn't about six packs. It's about being present, having longevity and reclaiming your power as a man. You don't need more motivation. You need a system that actually works for your life. And maybe you're not ready to work with me as your coach, and that's totally fine, but if you're listening to this podcast and your gut says, this guy gets it, I want you to know. I do. So don't just listen. It's time to lead yourself. Subscribe to the show. Share this episode with another guy who's been grinding, but maybe feels like he's disappearing a little bit. And stay tuned, because this movement is just getting started. Your comeback starts now. This is Fitness by Design, and I'll catch you in the next episode.