How Living the Blue Zones Lifestyle Led to One Man’s 130 Lb Weight Loss and Personal Transformation

After years of struggling with his weight and experiencing tremendous stress while running his own music management company in Los Angeles, Ethan Schiff began an experiment in 2017 that would ultimately transform his body, his career, and his life.

On this incredible journey, he lost 130 pounds over two and half years, changed careers, reconnected with loved ones, and shifted to a more balanced lifestyle. In the end, Schiff got more than his health back–he rediscovered who he really is and what matters most to him.

How did he achieve this incredible transformation? Schiff found that making small, incremental changes helped him form lasting habits that compounded over time.

During this period of his life, Schiff discovered Blue Zones, and he was positively influenced by the lessons of the Power 9® principles, which nudged people in the original blue zones regions to make healthier choices in their daily lives without even thinking about it. These principles, based on research on the world’s longest-living people, seemed similar to what he was already doing and strengthened Schiff’s resolve to continue.

Today, Schiff works for Blue Zones Project in Petaluma, California, where he and his wife Laura moved to get away from the hustle and bustle of L.A. At Blue Zones Project Petaluma, he has been the Community Engagement and Marketing Lead, an integral part of the initiative’s five-member team. He began his role at the Blue Zones Project Petaluma Kick-Off event in April of 2024.

In addition to working full-time for Blue Zones Project Petaluma, Schiff is a certified integrated health coach and the host of The True Health Podcast.

The Month-Long Experiment That Began His Transformation

At over 300 pounds while still in his twenties, Schiff was tired of yo-yo dieting and feeling like a failure when he lost motivation and couldn’t stick with a plan.

“Essentially I had spent my whole adult life trying to diet and lose weight, and I was repeatedly finding myself in the pattern that I think most people in the American mainstream culture find themselves in, which is getting really motivated, setting really ambitious goals, and then sort of going after it,” he said. “Then when real life set in, and I was not able to meet those ambitious goals I set when I was extremely motivated, I would feel like a failure. Then I would stop, derail, and tell myself I’d start again the next week.”

In hindsight, Schiff says dieting wasn’t working for him because he was approaching it “from a place of extremes, with an all-or-nothing mindset. I was either all in and crushing it, or I would fall off track, throw in the towel, and stop everything.”

What was different this last time?

“I committed myself to unlearning all the extreme diet culture messaging that I had been taught,” he said. “I shifted the focus from extreme, obsessive weight loss and asked myself, ‘What can I do on a day-to-day basis that feels really small and achievable but will add up to something larger over time?’ And so, the method that I used was focused less on the long-term result and trying to get to that result as quick as possible, and more on very small daily lifestyle and habit changes across a variety of pillars.”

It All Began With Two Simple Habits

Schiff’s complete lifestyle shift began as an experiment, a game of sorts, as he set out to see what would happen if he tried two very small and achievable new habits for a short period of just one month. He said he never set out to lose 130 pounds, but just focused on small changes that could potentially improve his health.

“I remember my first habit was going on a walk every morning and the next habit was picking one recipe that I would cook at least once a week,” he explained. The practice of cooking his own food would give him more control over the ingredients in his food and reduce the take-out and fast food he was consuming, while walking would add more movement into his life.

Schiff limited himself to no more than two habits a month, and at the end of each month, he would audit how things went. If the two new habits for the month were well established, he would incorporate two new habits the following month, while still performing the habits he’d already mastered.

Almost immediately, Schiff began to see and feel the results. It was slow but consistent. He was losing about a pound a week.

He now believes the lack of pressure was key to his initial success. For example, he said, “There was no pressure on the distance for that walk. There was no pressure on the pace of the walk. I wasn’t tracking it. I wasn’t putting pressure on myself around it. I was just putting on shoes and going outside.”

What happened next surprised him. “Instead of focusing so much on the stats and metrics, and whether I moved enough, got enough steps, or whatever it was, I just began building the habit of moving…I realized that I actually enjoyed it when I took the pressure off myself.”

What began as a slow walk for a couple of blocks eventually turned into an hour-long walk. A few years later, Schiff was running half-marathons.

Gaining Momentum And Becoming A Superhero

While many of the small changes Schiff began making initially focused on diet and movement, he later started incorporating habits reflecting other aspects of his life.

Regaining connections that were important to him became a crucial part of Schiff’s overall well-being journey. “A huge part of what I think was really beneficial to my health was I was starting to prioritize things like friendships, more socializing, more family, and my own sort of meaning in my life. Self-esteem and emotional health are often ignored when people are focusing on their health because in our culture, a lot of times focusing on your ‘health’ means eating fewer calories and exercising as much as possible. And there was this awareness that my stress and emotions and friendships and belonging and connection were just as important as every other part of it.”

Well into his new way of life, Schiff discovered Blue Zones and began reading the organization’s books, articles, and interviews, which solidified to him that he was on the right track. “I was fully entrenched in this sort of philosophy,” he said, finding that what he was already doing aligned closely with the Blue Zones Power 9 principles.

“I began touching on all these different pillars, and my whole life started to change without feeling like anything extreme, drastic, or high pressure was happening.”

One of the nutrition-based habits he incorporated was eating more vegetables, which aligns with the Power 9 Plant Slant principle “Just increasing my veggies without putting pressure on myself to cut out a bunch of foods in this extreme diet way worked because if I’m increasing my vegetables, then I must be getting full on those and decreasing something else,” Schiff said.

Another habit that made a big difference was decreasing his alcohol intake. “At the time, I was drinking a lot of alcohol. I worked in the music industry, and there were a lot of events and parties, and I was at concerts and traveling a lot.”

Schiff recalls losing his first 70 pounds before ever setting foot in a gym or doing an intense workout. “It was like ‘I lost a pound again this week’ and that forward momentum helped sort of catapult further momentum. And it became this exciting challenge, game, journey, process.”

 “We overestimate what we can do in one month and underestimate what we can do in one year” is a phrase that Schiff said was his mantra and driving force during his transformation.

He explained, “In month one, it didn’t feel like I was doing very much, and in comparison with every diet I’ve ever done in my life, it felt like nothing. But if you look at it over the course of a year, two habits a month become 24 new habits. And at that point, you’re like a superhero.”

Even he was stunned by some of the changes he was making; for instance, when he took the stairs instead of the elevator or parked far away from a building so he could walk. “I remember surprising myself with the person I was becoming. I was the same person. I was just making slightly different choices,” he said.

A Newfound Passion To Help Others

After achieving tremendous weight loss, Schiff became passionate about helping others improve their health, making the difficult decision to dissolve his successful music management company.

He had owned the company, which he’d started in college, for nine years. “I was representing artists, and we were booking tours and traveling all over the world. It was glamorous. Looking back on it. I did not recognize how much stress was playing into my overall health. I think my head viewed work as something to sort of conquer in this workaholic kind of way.”

When shuttering his company, he said, “Everybody thought I was crazy.” But he had come to the realization that his work, the lifestyle that accompanied it, and the stress it caused weren’t good for his physical or emotional health. “The stress I was putting myself under was simultaneously cutting down on my sense of connection and friendships and kind of community. It was also influencing the need for some sort of stress release, which became food and alcohol,” he said.

“I had a lot of status and money and was doing all these glamorous things, and I was completely unhappy,” he said. Simultaneously as he came to this conclusion, he was finding a new purpose – helping others.

Schiff completed a program to become a certified integrative health coach which he said “is focused on helping people connect the dots between nutrition, movement, stress, emotional health, sleep, hydration, and habit development, and how all these things work together in an integrative way.”

Initially, he began coaching friends and family for free. His mother-in-law was his first client. “They would see results, tell their friends, and that would lead to more clients,” he explained. He ran the private practice for four years, but now focuses on impacting people’s lives on a greater scale through Blue Zones Project.

He was living in Petaluma when Blue Zones announced it would be working in the city last year, and he decided to apply for a job with the organization even though he wasn’t then actively seeking work. “I had been following Blue Zones for years. It was an influence in my personal health journey, and I thought it could provide an opportunity to help people on a much larger scale than I could ever reach within the confines of a private practice.”

In his role with Blue Zones Project, Schiff collaborates on and helps create “amazing programs that can be accessible to everybody in the community,” he said.

In addition to working full-time for Blue Zones Project, Schiff has been hosting his podcast for about two years. Half of the episodes feature Schiff discussing specific topics solo, and the other half feature Schiff with guests that range from nutritionists, therapists, and authors to everyday people sharing their own transformation stories. “The goal of the podcast is to try to help people broaden their definition of health and wellness.”

Every day, Schiff serves as a living example of how to make lasting changes for the better. “I think one of the things that’s really beautiful about improving your own health is seeing the ripple effect it has on all the people around you.”

Lisa Oliver Monroe is a journalist and author of a travel book about America’s Historic Triangle (Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown). Her writing has been published by Virginia Living, Boomer Magazine, Kirkus Media, Advance for Nurses, and Colonial Williamsburg,  among many others.