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Ethan Suplee on Losing 250 Pounds and Getting Jacked | Train Like A Celebrity

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Ethan Suplee spent decades gaining and losing what amounts to half a ton — and Men’s Health just filmed him lifting his way out of it for good.

Ethan Suplee — the guy audiences know as Louie from “My Name Is Earl,” the assistant coach in “Remember the Titans,” and Frankie from “Boy Meets World” — sat down with Men’s Health for its “Train Like A Celebrity” series to walk through the chest-day routine that’s rebuilt his body after a lifetime of yo-yo dieting. The January 30, 2020 video feature lands weeks after Suplee’s transformation photos went viral in early January, reintroducing a lot of people to an actor most remembered as heavyset.

• Suplee topped out around 530 to 550 pounds at his heaviest and has since dropped more than 250 pounds.
• Across decades of dieting cycles, he estimates he’s gained and lost a cumulative 1,000 pounds before finding a sustainable approach.
• His current split: weightlifting six days a week for about an hour a session, paired with only roughly 20 minutes of moderate cardio.

The Chest-Day Session

In the video, Suplee walks Men’s Health through his go-to muscle-building session, leaning almost entirely on weightlifting rather than the extreme cardio that once defined his weight-loss attempts. It’s the same logic behind pieces like 10+ Best Exercises to Get Rid of Chest Fat — resistance training, not just calorie-torching cardio, is what reshapes the torso. Suplee’s structure keeps the volume high but the cardio minimal, treating strength work as the primary tool for both building muscle and holding his weight down.

From 1,000 Pounds Cycled to a Calorie Count

Suplee’s road here wasn’t linear. He’s cycled through extreme keto, low-calorie crash plans, and stretches of cycling 100 miles a week, all before landing, around 2018, on a simpler formula: tracking his caloric intake and balancing macronutrients with moderate carbohydrates instead of cutting them out entirely. That shift is the throughline of his podcast, “American Glutton,” where he digs into his own history of binge eating and food addiction alongside the broader obesity epidemic.

Suplee estimates he’s gained and lost an estimated 1,000 pounds cumulatively over the years before settling on a plan built around tracking calories and macros rather than extreme restriction.

New Targets: Abs and a Double-Bodyweight Deadlift

With the weight off, Suplee’s goals have moved from survival mode to performance mode. By January 2020 he was chasing visible abs and a deadlift at twice his body weight — benchmarks that put him in the same conversation as other celebrity transformation pieces in the Men’s Health series, like Sterling K. Brown Explains His “No Gym” Workout. The emphasis on strength numbers rather than just a scale reading tracks with what body-recomposition coaches describe in How to Build Muscle And Lose Fat At The Same Time — losing fat and adding functional strength at once, rather than chasing one at the expense of the other.

“American Glutton” is still fresh off its launch, and Suplee’s viral photos from early January suggest there’s an audience hungry for the unfiltered version of this story — not just the after picture, but the 1,000 pounds of false starts that came before it. Six days a week in the weight room, twenty minutes of cardio, and a deadlift chasing 1,000-plus pounds total load is where he’s at right now, and it’s a long way from the crash diets that got him nowhere for decades.