The Holy Sh!t Moment: How Lasting Change Can Happen in an Instant by James Fell

Author:James Fell [Fell, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: self help
ISBN: 9781250186300
Google: 5apbDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07DQDTHPJ
Publisher: Harper Thorsons
Published: 2018-12-06T16:00:00+00:00

Staring Death in the Face

In 2009, while on tour in Eastern Europe, Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys made the same mistake I did in 1988, except in his case it was Russians. “I was partying every night and really depressed,” Nick told me. “I was trying to keep up with the local Russians in drinking games and I was feeling terrible.”

After a lackluster stage performance, he saw a physician who read him the riot act. Carter had alcohol-induced cardiomyopathy, which was weakening his heart, and if he didn’t change, the doctor said, he would die.

Carter was only twenty-eight years old.

“It was really life or death for me,” he said. “I just completely went extreme in the other direction.” He quit drinking and doing drugs, used exercise as a replacement, and lost sixty-five pounds.

“I wanted to fight for my life,” Carter said of the sudden change. When looking at the possibility of an early death, he decided he didn’t want it that way. I asked him to tell me why—

I’ll stop doing that now.

Phil Collen, guitarist for Def Leppard, has a physique that could grace the cover of a fitness magazine. This despite almost six decades on the planet. It was his sudden renunciation of alcohol that led to him becoming so fit.

“I was drinking to excess, and I started blacking out and not remembering what happened,” he told me. “I was doing really stupid things like driving and buying stuff and not remembering any of it.” It continued to get worse, and he tried to cut down, but it was futile. What started off as the “odd glass of wine” became “shots of Jack” by the weekend.

His epiphany arrived in Paris, April 1987. He was leaving for India the next day and out celebrating his girlfriend’s birthday. He was halfway through his first drink, a glass of champagne, and suddenly decided he was done. He pushed it away and said to her that he wasn’t going to drink anymore. Ever.

He has remained true to that promise over three decades now.

“It wasn’t fun anymore,” Collen said. “It was very black or white. I knew I had to go this way or that way.”

Professor William Miller, who has specialized in treatment of addictions for decades, refers to this as walking through a one-way door—you can’t go back through.

There was no struggle. From the moment Collen decided to quit, he lacked any doubt. The only problem was boredom. Drinking had been his hobby. Eventually, he replaced it with exercise and achieved a level of fitness most can only dream of.

Brent Smith, lead singer for Shinedown, was addicted to cocaine, oxycodone, and alcohol. The cocaine kept his weight down, but when he quit that, he packed on seventy pounds. He still drank a lot.

On November 1, 2012, his girlfriend, Teresa, sat him down and said his lifestyle was “not going to work.” His girlfriend’s approach was to find him a personal trainer. He met with the trainer for the first time five days later.

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