Drew Maness: 0:19

Hi, I'm Drew Maness and welcome to the first episode of Hacking the Fat man. This podcast is my journey from 550 pounds to what I hope will be 175 pounds. I'm currently sitting at 233, having lost over 300 pounds over the last few years. Before I get started, I have a trigger warning. In this episode specifically, I'll be talking about my eating disorders, my depression and my suicidal ideation, which some may find distressing. If you're interested in none of that but want to know about the diet, please go to episode two. In episode two, I will be covering the diet in depth, so I look forward to seeing you there.

Drew Maness: 1:07

In August 2022, I walked into a motel room attached to my favorite dive bar from college with the full intention of taking my life. This presentation is how I went from sitting in that room weighing almost 500 pounds, about to end my life, to standing in front of you today, now down over 300 pounds and feeling great. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time in that room, but I will give us some background of how I got there. But before I get us out of that room, let me give you the background, just for context. So, hi, I'm Drew, I'm a hacker. 0x99 is my handle. I'm also an information security professional. I spent 25 years mostly in media and entertainment, first as part of Disney's first information security team, then on to Technicolor, universal Music and Activision Blizzard most recently, where I was their business information security officer. I'm currently now the senior director of SEARCH, which is a security engineering, architecture, risk compliance and human. It's a combined SECARC GRC function for a company called Avid Exchange.

Drew Maness: 2:06

I was also a former high school water polo player and swimmer and I'm giving you this as context. I didn't just play water polo and swim, I did it at the highest level of the sport. In the early 80s, when I was in high school, the center of US water polo was in California, specifically in Southern California and, I could probably argue, orange County and even down to my league that I played in. A number of the coaches in my league that I played against went on to coach the US men's and women's national team. A number of players went on to play for the team and there was a while there. I knew almost every single US national team member. I also coached for a few years, first at my alma mater in Costa Mesa. We won, they won. I had really nothing to do with it. In 87, they won the CIF championship and in 1990, I went to Laguna Hills High School where I took over the boys and girls swimming and water polo program and the boys team won CIF in 1990 and I was named Orange County Coach of the Year, swimming Coach of the Year by the Orange County Register. The next year, in 91, we followed up but we came a few points short and only made runner-up. But I was again named Orange County Coach of the Year, Swimming Coach of the Year by the Orange County Register.

Drew Maness: 3:24

Which leads me to the first question I usually get. How the hell does someone with that knowledge get to be 550 pounds? And I'm going to tell you it was because I did not recognize my depression. I did not recognize what I actually thought about myself and I'll get into that a little bit more. I really didn't know I had depression. If you'd asked me as I was walking into that room if I was depressed, I would tell you no, even though I probably did have a hint that I might have a little bit of depression. See, as an athlete and I'm also an elder Gen X. See as an athlete and I'm also an elder Gen X. We're taught to ignore our feelings. We're taught to tell our mind to shut up and move on, and that's what I was doing. So whatever was going on in my subconscious, I was just ignoring it.

Drew Maness: 4:14

During my swimming days I had some skill not a whole lot. I know that I'm not the prototypical water polo player, but I was really good at oxygen. Using oxygen, I could do underwater three laps, 75 yards. I also had. My endurance was off the chart. In fact, one time in college we had this get out swim where I had to do three laps underwater to get out of workout and I hit the 50, pushed off and proceeded to pass out underneath the water. Luckily, most water polo player and swimmers are lifeguards, so I had about 30 lifeguards jumping in trying to save me and I'm here now. Thank you guys, thank you.

Drew Maness: 5:01

I'm bringing this up because my subconscious this whole time, even though I played polo, I was good my subconscious hated me and told me I was weak, I was lazy, I was pathetic, I was a wimp, and a lot of it stemmed from the fact that I couldn't control my weight. I've struggled with my weight, even while I was a swimmer. I was always heavy through the years, and even though I was doing the same workout as the Greek Adonis is sitting next to me, I still had a couple of pounds. Let me show you. So I'm lucky that I haven't been overweight. My entire life I have been thin. There have been times I've been thin, but let's get to what's going on there. So kindergarten through second grade, I'm your normal average size kid. In third grade I couldn't find pictures for third and eighth grade, I think, because that was a period where I was really overweight and anyway. So I have Cartman there for third grade. Third grade is where when my weight started coming on when I started eighth grade, I've got Butterball there and my teammates are laughing right now.

Drew Maness: 6:11

I was four foot nine. I was four foot nine, 150 pounds at the start of eighth grade and this guy shows up and he tells us that he started starting a water polo club at the high school next door and if any of us wanted to go join the club we didn't have to do PE. I had no idea what water polo was, but if I didn't have to go into that hell, that is the middle school locker room and change, sign me up for it. So I went and signed up for water polo. The 8.5 there, that's the middle. That's the winter formal in eighth grade and I'll stand by that tuck selection any day of the week. That was rocking. That still is rocking. I'd still wear it today. At this point I'm now 5'2 and 150 pounds.

Drew Maness: 6:57

Fast forward a couple years into 10th grade. I'm 5'9 and 150 pounds. Sounds great. Drew, you've got it all in control. The problem is is I did all that with anorexia and bulimia. I went three weeks straight trying to do without eating. It's a fantastically horrible way to try to work out or to become a better player, but yet I did it and it was. You can't keep doing that, right, you can't keep doing. At least I couldn't keep doing the anorexia and the bulimia. Bulimia is horrible. So by the time I hit my senior year with the 12th grade which is those pictures up there I had gotten weight back, and so I graduated high school at about 225 pounds. The picture right there, the 1985 picture, is my own Chico's water polo team. We actually took that picture at the beginning of the season, even though it says we were the Pacific League champions. So I'm sitting there at 225.

Drew Maness: 8:00

I then start losing weight going back and doing things. This time in 87, I get down to 175 pounds. This is me standing with my younger brother having a conversation about why he's getting caught punching people and getting kicked out. Notice, I didn't tell him to stop doing it. I told him to stop getting caught doing it, but this is the last picture of me under 200 pounds. This is 1987. And this drew. Well, he's gotten a little smarter. Anorexia is not something I can continue to do. I do need to eat something. So I decide to eat somewhere between 500 and 1200 calories. Yes, I invented or discovered myself micro fasting back in 87. But by 1990, the weight starting to come back on. That's my swim team, my CIF championship swim team there. And by 93, I was over 250. That's me with my buddy Kurt. By the time I got married in 98, I'm over 300 pounds.

Drew Maness: 9:02

But in 2003, and I'll get to this in a second in 2003, before my kids were born, I started working out and this is the closest I came as an adult to actually solving my weight problem. The problem there with him is so he's micro fasting, he's using keto, he's using a bunch of other techniques that I'll talk about here later, but I was also working out quite a bit and I discovered that every time I stood up from my desk I was doing four miles a day walking and every time I stood up from my desk my knee would lock up, would lock up and I ended up having a torn meniscus and my diet just went out the window. And this was another profound lesson that I learned was you can't out-workout your diet. If you're working out to lose weight, you're doing it wrong. You should work out to it because you enjoy it. You could work out to become better, stronger, faster, do a sport better, but to specifically lose weight, because there'll be times that you become injured. And then what You've got to learn to control your diet and this was what I learned there. Fast forward 10 years. I'm now 375 in 2013.

Drew Maness: 10:16

The picture on the far right there is me with Brian Krutzkamp. He was coaching the Stanford club team at the time and he was one of my very first students teams that I coached for. Fast forward another 10 years, almost 10 years, july 2022. So I've mentioned that I came in in August 2022 to kill myself. This is the only picture I have of me at weight at peak weight, I'm estimating now I was over 500, close to 550 pounds, and you may ask why do I estimate? It's because there's no scales that really weigh anything over 450 pounds. They're just not, at least the ones I could afford. The next picture is November 2022. This is me after the incident and after the diet started working. At this point, I thought I had lost about 50 pounds, which I did, but I didn't realize how much weight I had gained during COVID, and I'll get to that in a second, and I'll get to the rest of the pictures in October 23. Through now, this is just me over the years, just showing you that it works and I actually did lose the weight.

Drew Maness: 11:37

Which leads me to the second question I always get what was it like to be over 500 pounds? Well, absolutely nothing like those stupid morning shows where they put on the weight, the samurai suit, and say, oh, I've gained 100 pounds. Oh, it's so hard to move. In fact, what it's like to be 500 pounds is you don't really feel the weight, it's more anaerobic, it's more. You're just tired, existing. I tell people, it's like mile 21 of a marathon, where you are about to die, you're about to puke, you're about to collapse. Yeah, that's what it's like to be 550 pounds and move.

Drew Maness: 12:20

The other thing is pinching. I remember a lot of pinching, mostly because your balloon's all over your body. So whether you're wearing socks, it would have to pinch your legs. If you're wearing a belt, it has to pinch your stomach and your arms, and it was just pinching all over the place. My knees hurt and I had really bad gout. And if you never had gout, imagine taking a big, large roof nail or spike and putting it underneath your heel or your big toe and have it jammed in every time you moved. Yeah, it's not good, it feels bad. So if you do want to know what it's like to be over 550 pounds, go run a marathon wearing clothes two sizes too small for you At mile 21,.

Drew Maness: 12:59

Start pinching yourself all over your body and place a nail underneath your foot. That is what I was experiencing. That was just waking up. God forbid if I had to move. So a little bit of context and background of where I am. I've estimated I've lost.

Drew Maness: 13:21

Prior to starting the diet in August 2022, I had lost over a thousand pounds. My problem is I gained 1250. And every time at that point, in 22, everything I tried any diet I used to try. Keto was my favorite. The second I thought about losing weight. My gout would flare up and it would go from foot to foot. One week it'd be this foot. I'd have maybe a week off. Next week it'd be the other foot.

Drew Maness: 13:49

The third question I usually get, though, is what would I say to Drew sitting in that room? And this is a little bit hard for me to answer, because I've got to answer it in two different ways. I knew, and I've known all my entire life, that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. But what happens if you don't think it's temporary anymore? I literally had gotten to the point where I thought I could no longer lose weight, that I was just going to continue to get fatter, continue to have pain, and the pain from opening my eyes.

Drew Maness: 14:25

The second that mile 21 hit. That was level five on that pain scale you see at the hospital, and the more I moved throughout the day, it would go to level 10. And it really just became for me sorry, I'm getting a bit emotional it became too much. I couldn't. My life was just pain, that's all I had, and I couldn't take the pain anymore.

Drew Maness: 14:53

So, as I mentioned, I walked into that hotel room in August 2022. I had spent the whole entire day drinking with my good college and high school friends. I actually helped set it up. I spent months setting this up. It was the end of lockdowns, covid, and we were going to have a party to celebrate all the parties that we missed over the lockdown.

Drew Maness: 15:50

So I get done. I walk in they drop me off. I walk in the hotel room. I walk in, they drop me off. I walk in the hotel room and I remember sitting on the bed, much like I am now, with my hands crossed and my arms resting on my knees, and thinking about what I was just about to do, and I paused for a second to think about my kids and my family and what I was going to do to them. And then I remember okay, and I'm not making up this next part, this is what I remember right after that. So I remember thinking about my kids. I remember saying okay, and the next thing I know I'm laying down with my back on the bed, my feet in exactly the same spot they were, my hands clasped exactly as they were, like I just fell straight back. It was morning and the sun was coming up, and it was that deep sleep where you don't really know who you are or where you are or what you are. And I remember opening my eyes and instantly mile 21, pinching pain, level five and I'm pissed. What the hell just happened? How am I still here? This was not the deal. I had spent all this time doing it. Now I'm going to pause for a second there, and I've thought about this over the years is if I was so set on doing it, why didn't I just do it at that point after I woke up? I don't have an answer to that. All I know is at that time, when I woke up, I needed to get out of that room, so I grabbed everything, got in my car and drove home. The drive home.

Drew Maness: 17:41

My subconscious is having a field day with me, and this happens over the next two weeks. This is where I start realizing my subconscious wants to kill me. My subconscious hates me, and if you ever want to know what my subconscious actually, I'm going to scroll back here for a second. Come on, drew, if you ever want to know what my subconscious thought about me, take a look at that picture. That is exactly what my subconscious felt. I was, I was fat, I was lazy, I was a wimp. I was you name it. I was a wimp, I was you name it. My subconscious was telling me it. So I'm starting to listen to what my subconscious is actually saying. And it's sitting there and it's it's just pounding me. You are, you are so pathetic, drew, you can't even kill yourself. You are such a wimp, you are such an. You're a fucking joke. Pardon my language, but that's really what was going on in my head.

Drew Maness: 18:48

So, two weeks later, I'm sitting on the couch and I'm debating on whether I'm going to make another run at this Again. I'm still in pain, I'm still hurting. I can't take this anymore. I literally cannot take the pain anymore. And just at that moment, my youngest son starts walking down the stairs and I get this thought from the other side of my head, who'd been silent all these years? But this thought on the other side of my head goes you've saved, you've done good, you've saved him a lot of pain. And that's when brain bias or cognitive dissonance, whatever you want to call it kind of kicks into place, because I remember when my kids were born for the first time in my life, I knew for 100%, absolute fact that I'd run into fire to save them. I would jump in and take a bullet, not saying I wouldn't do that for you. I more than likely would do that for you, but for my kids I knew absolutely I would do it. And this thought goes on more and says well, isn't it your job as a father to save them from pain? And that if that meant you sticking to your pain or taking the pain to save them pain, isn't that what you're supposed to do? And that was like someone punched me in the gut. So at that point I make a decision okay, I'm going to stick around. I obviously cannot keep doing what I'm doing. I'm going to make my life just slightly, a little bit better every day. Well, okay, now what do I do? As I'm coming to this thought of okay, I'm going to stay here, I'm going to make my life a little bit better.

Drew Maness: 20:29

As my friends know, I love watching random documentaries. I have CuriosityStream on all the time and at this particular time I was watching this episode of the show called Dynamic Genomes and Dynamic Genomes. What it was about was that you know, when I was a kid, we were taught that we only use 2% of our DNA, that the other 98% was what they called junk DNA. Well, dynamic genome was showing us that that's no longer the case, that we know that this other 98% is what they call non-coding DNA, which means it doesn't do this stuff, but it helps turn gene expression or epigenome on or off, and specifically it was talking about at this.

Drew Maness: 21:15

Second, if your father, basically, was a glutton when you were born, he passed on one of these toggle switches that made you 20% more likely to gain weight on less food. And that surprised me, because I used to joke that I just stared at a peanut butter and jelly sandwich I'd gain weight. I'm not lying. Yes, I was a fat swimmer. I was eating less than them, the Greek Adonises, but yet I was still heavy. And so suddenly I have this thing where I bet you that's turned on. I bet you I have that. And then, looking at it, I was like, oh, toggle switches, zeros and one that looks familiar.

Drew Maness: 22:01

And I remember making a joke that well, too bad, the human body isn't a computer, because I have yet to find a computer problem I couldn't solve. And I stopped for a second and went yeah, you know what? You've never really approached this as a computer problem. You've never really unleashed your computer mind on your body, on your weight problem. So I at that moment I decided, yeah, I'm going to start doing it. I mean, it was obviously I had no idea how to operate this thing. But it gets me to my next question is why do I call it hacking the fat man? And it's really hacking the fat man because I unleashed my hacking thought process on my body and have found success with it.

Drew Maness: 22:50

As I mentioned, it's obvious I did not know how to operate this machine. I realized I had no idea what it is or what it's supposed to be doing. So the first thing of hacking is you gather information right, and information isn't about just what it is, it's about what's it telling you. So error messages are valuable or could be valuable. So what do I think this is going on and why do I think it's going on? So the first hack I had, looking at the error messages in my body, was I knew that gout.

Drew Maness: 23:22

Gout was a serious problem, but gout wasn't just by itself. I had inflammation problems, I had allergies. So I really went after inflammation and I started with three supplements for the inflammation Beets, good for inflammation. Cinnamon, good for inflammation. And then my younger brother told me about tart cherry, which is great for gout. Now, this was not a miracle cure. I didn't take the first couple of supplements and it all went away. But what I noticed was, after a period of a couple of weeks or a month, was my gout attacks and the inflammation were getting less, maybe less severe. They weren't lasting as long and the period between them started growing, and it's progressed to the point now where I can't even remember the last time I actually had a gout attack. The other thing I noticed after this was starting was that my clothes were fitting a little looser, that I had started losing. I hadn't even started a diet. The only thing I've added was those three supplements, and it's entirely attributed to the fact that I was moving better. I could get up and move, I was in less pain.

Drew Maness: 24:43

So I'm going to stop here and I've got a question for all of you. I'm assuming some of you have worked out, some of you have most everyone has worked out. Do you do the same workouts every single day? No, you don't do the same workouts every single day, and the reason is if you try to do the same workout every single day, your body gets used to it, so the benefit of doing it starts to be less and less and less. The body just starts going yep, yep, I'm used to that and doesn't give a real benefit of it. You need to change it up. Keep the body guessing. So why do we diet the same way every day? Why do we I'm on keto, I'm on Mediterranean, I'm on the Miami diet. You pick it, weight watchers why do we try to diet the same way every single day? It's crazy.

Drew Maness: 25:38

This talk started both from the fact that I wanted to understand how I got out of that room, but also to make sure I understood why the diet was actually working and continuing to work. The idea of the diet, the full diet, started from what I have learned from previous failures. As I mentioned, at this point I had lost over a thousand pounds. I had tried every single diet under the sun. Once you look at that, though, most diets are pretty much the same. It's a ratio between fat, protein and carbs, and whether it's keto, which is heavy protein, zero carbs, some fat, or the Mediterranean, which is high carbs, a little bit of protein, very little fat, you can put them together by this ratio. So diets I've tried. I know you can't read that, it's small on my screen too. The first one was low fat, nonfat Stupidest diet ever in the entire world. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on it, you're just replacing fat with sugar Completely asinine. First diet I actually did. I started this at the Atkins. It was called Atkins when I was in the 80s, but it's effectively keto and I did that in my teens. A lot of that in 87, that picture I showed you where I was micro-fasting. It was pretty much a Atkins-heavy kind of diet.

Drew Maness: 27:17

The Zone Diet I discovered out of Stanford Swimming back in the mid-80s they were using it. This is your 40% carbs, 30% fat, 30% protein, and then modify the ratios. Yeah, that's right. I've also tried the Mediterranean diet. Love it, it's good. I actually consider the Mediterranean I call that a modified zone to have more protein. So instead of being carb heavy, the zone is initially carb heavy. Switch that around and have it protein heavy.

Drew Maness: 27:55

Doctors, health Care, great diet. I felt awesome on it, almost impossible to stay on. So Dr Sears developed this diet and it's hardcore vegan, no animal protein at all, and the worst part was no oil. Do you know how many things have oil in them Salsa bread, there's a bunch of things that have oil in it and it made that diet absolutely impossible. But the good thing I learned out of that diet was it's physically impossible to eat 2,000 calories of raw green vegetables a day. You have to start in the morning and you would never get even close to 2,000 calories.

Drew Maness: 28:38

The other one I call it the sumo diet, but so sumo wrestlers. So micro fasting good right, but if you go micro fasting and you eat 7,000 calories, you're going to look like a sumo wrestler. Now I hated breakfast. Every time I ate I got sleepy. So that micro fasting that I was doing to lose weight ended up being the sumo wrestler diet, and you could tell from the pictures. That's exactly what I did to myself. I would eat seven, not seven. I'd eat about five to 6,000 calories at night just before I went to bed. Remember, eating makes me go to sleep and I ended up looking like a sumo wrestler.

Drew Maness: 29:17

The other one I'm going to add here is the juice cleanse. This was something in the early aughts that became popular. I actually really enjoyed the juice cleanse because it's really just add citric acid or juice to your water and vitamin C is a very my body operates on vitamin C, so I actually did well on this and I'll talk a little bit about how I use the juice cleanse coming up. So from these past experiences, I started developing the diet. So I'm taking the three supplements. I'm going to start implementing the diet and I had a couple of issues.

Drew Maness: 30:02

Still right, if I took keto too, if I stayed in ketosis too long, my gut would flare up, so I couldn't do keto all the time If I wanted to. You know, lose weight, fasting is good, but fasting is technically keto and you can only do that so long as well. And I also got into reasons why my diet failed. One was sticking to the same thing over and over, even in keto diet. I got tired of bacon. How do you get tired of bacon? But by eating the same thing over and over again it gets boring. The other one that hit me a lot failure was travel. Especially with the Dr Sears diet, when you travel, getting access to the food can be problematic, and traveling almost always caused me problems. So I came up with some ideas around what this diet framework should look like.

Drew Maness: 31:03

First thing is it's not really a diet, it's a life cycle change. I have to. Not only can do it, I need to want to do it. It needs to bring me joy, which means I need to eat things that bring me joy. It should be as simple as breathing, if it's, if it gives you joy.

Drew Maness: 31:22

It's pretty simple, right, and I don't want to plan. I don't want to do any real planning. Right, and I don't want to plan. I don't want to do any real planning. I have no idea what I want today or when I wake up, I have no idea what I'm going to have for dinner. Right now. I won't know until I get up to make dinner what I'll eat. There's no meal prepping. I hate meal prepping. I know some of you love it. Good on you. I'm not meal prepping.

Drew Maness: 31:48

Again, coming back to the fact that I don't really know what I'm going to eat, so why am I meal prepping? There's also no tracking of calories. I do it all kind of on guessing a little bit, but I build in buffers for it. So I start with 1,800 calories as my max instead of 2,000. Gives me a little bit of buffer there, and then I just kind of judge from the meal. I've been doing this a lot. I can know that that meal was about 500, 600 calories, which is the perfect spot for me that I try to hit on. Every meal is about 500 to 600 calories. The other thing and this goes back to the anorexia side was that I can only do one day of true fasting. That means not eating anything and maybe one or two days of micro fasting. I'm not going to keep trying to push myself longer than that, even though I may feel like it.

Drew Maness: 32:53

Vegetables are free, but it's important to understand what a vegetable is. Tomatoes are a fruit, corn is a seed. When in doubt, stay with your green leafy vegetables. And also that from a pure dietician standpoint, 1,800 calories or whatever your expenditure is for the day. Do less than that and you'll lose weight. It gets better if you spread the calories that you have out over the day and including breakfast. Well, I've told you I hate breakfast. I've actually added in the juice diet because it's about five to 10 calories per drink in the morning to help me get started, not only with the breakfast getting calories in my system. Also, my supplements have calories in and of themselves and I have morning supplements and evening supplements and I'll get to those in a bit, but it helps me spread out the calories, helps me keep the body, even on fast days doing the juice, fast the body from totally trying to save every calorie right Again, keeping my body guessing.

Drew Maness: 34:03

And then the final point I really need to stress is we're going to slip, we're going to mess up, we're going to eat too much, we're going to do something, forgive yourself. There's no reason to beat yourself up. The only thing that matters is you in the next second. You can't change anything in the past, but you can change what you're about to do and that's where you need to stay and keep your mind there. So if you messed up in the past, just move forward.

Drew Maness: 34:30

The real thing and this is where the schedule comes in and the real change is I schedule my types of diet throughout the week On Mondays and I start on Monday. Mondays are fast days for me. I'm just not going to eat. I'll do the juice cleanse, I'll take my supplements, but I try to start the week off with yes, I should be losing weight now. The next Tuesday and maybe into Wednesday, depending on how I'm feeling. I go into micro fasting Tuesday, definitely micro fasting Wednesday, if I'm not really hungry. I'll probably micro-fast Wednesday and Thursday or later in the week into Friday, I go into a keto diet, so protein-heavy, very little, carbs very little and some fat. Further on in the week, as Friday, saturday, as we're getting into it, I, I go into a zone diet, a modified zone. So I'm protein heavy in the modified zone again, kind of still keto, but I can add if I get rice or fries with my steak, I'm fine.

Drew Maness: 35:40

Uh, and I and I did this on purpose, because fridays, saturdays, even thursdays, to some extent sund Sundays, are the days we have family events, we have go out for work events, so I wanted to be able to enjoy them without feeling like, hey, you know what I'm, you know I'm on a diet, I can't, I can't go that. Oh, it's going to be hard because everyone else is eating, I don't have to worry about that. I can enjoy myself as long as I stay under 1800 calories and be good to go. And then Sunday it really I use Sunday as a what happened in the week. So if I was good, sunday may be a normal day. If I feel like I was bad during the week not bad, but maybe ate a little bit more than I wanted to, I may do a lighter Sunday as well.

Drew Maness: 36:28

Again, the whole point of this schedule is to give you flexibility in your diet, and I'm not specifically sticking to one type of diet. I may wake up on a Tuesday morning micro fasting, but for some reason I'm craving. I have some craving of something right. So micro fasting to me is between 500 and 1200 calories, and whatever the craving is. You want donuts? Have 500 calories of donuts, you're fine. You're going to feel like crap, but you're fine.

Drew Maness: 36:59

Most of my cravings usually are something else. I'll get a craving for lasagna or spaghetti or something like that, but as long as I stay between 500 and 1,200 calories, I'm micro-fasting. I'm good to go, and the same is true for the rest of the time. If it's Wednesday or Thursday and I'm supposed to be doing keto but I want the steak and fries, I'll have the steak and fries. That's not keto, that's the modified zone, but I'll go ahead and have them because I felt like having them. The point is it's got to bring me joy and it's cannot feel like work. The other big hack I did was I've talked a little bit about the first three tart, cherry, cinnamon and beets. Those were the first three supplements I've done, but I've since added a bunch of them and if you you read through this list and I'm going to put this in the supplement list in an attachment that you can download, but the first three and if you read through all of these, they're almost all going for inflammation, because I still, even to this day, struggle with inflammation. Gout's gone but I still struggle with swelling in my legs and some other places.

Drew Maness: 38:11

The hydroxy methylbutyrate, which I hadn't talked about before, hmb that's a rock star drug or not drug, but supplement. So what HMB does is it protects muscle, regardless of whether you're losing weight or gaining weight, and what I mean by that is normally when we lose weight, our body will burn on average about the same amount of muscle to fat, right? So 50% of your weight loss is fat, 50% is muscle. The problem with losing muscle is muscle burns calories. So if you're losing weight, they're losing muscles. That means tomorrow you're going to just existing, spend less calories. H and B will protect the muscle, keep you from burning it as part if you're losing weight and make you burn more fat. That's awesome. If you overeat, if you over consume H andMB instead of your body, again it's about 50-50, maybe a little bit more fat, for me specifically. So if you overeat, hmb makes you have create more muscle right and have less of that calories go into fat. So it's a dual-sided thing. Rockstar, I highly recommend it.

Drew Maness: 39:30

I'm doing well Again with all these supplements. I am not a doctor. I am not even a medical professional. I am someone who's hacking his body. So take it for what it is. Make sure you talk to your doctor or pharmacist with any of the supplements that you take.

Drew Maness: 39:47

K2 and D3, those are just. I discovered K2 from taking antihistamines. I couldn't take more than one antihistamine a day or every other day, because if I took it for two days in a row, I would get restless leg syndrome. And K2, or, yeah, k2, d3, and a couple other ones I'll highlight them, and turmeric is one of them are good for helping solving the restless leg syndrome problem. And if what restless leg is is especially when you're going to sleep, your legs twitch like that. Now, imagine gout and you're going to sleep. Your legs twitch like that. Now imagine gout and you're trying to go to sleep and I couldn't keep taking the antihistamines because it would cause it. So K2, d3, good solid stuff Again, they help with inflammation.

Drew Maness: 40:43

Omega-369 is your fish oils Good there? Turmeric I talked to a little bit. Vitamin C absolutely love vitamin C and magnesium glyconate is also on the list and again, it does really help with improved sleep and anxiety reduction. In addition, I've added glucosamine, chondroitin I should learn to say these things right which is for my knees my knees are bad and as well as the collagen, the same. The lactobacillus planetarium was part of that restless leg syndrome solution. I've since also added carotene, philostin and nicotinamide ribenside, and I've also TMG, beta carotene, hydraulic acid and Zyrtec.

Drew Maness: 41:49

Now that I've solved my restless leg syndrome, I can now take an antihistamine daily. So I take Zyrtec daily. So that's the diet and the hacks with the supplements. So I've covered the diet. I've covered the diet, I've covered the schedule, covered what got me into the room, what got me out of the room, um, but there's one item, one more hack, I need to address. So, before I got into the specifics of the diet, we I had taken you up to about me in november 2022, which is that picture there that drew? He's lost 50 pounds. He's feeling good. In fact, he's feeling so good he went and got a haircut for the first time in three years, bought new clothes and actually went out to a work dinner.

Drew Maness: 42:41

I continue to lose weight over the next few months and I'm feeling so good that I decided to go in and get my physical that I hadn't had in three years. The last time I had a physical was January 2020. And I had weighed 425 pounds. I was so confident I was pretty sure I already lost all my COVID weight. I'm good. I was expecting to weigh 425 pounds.

Drew Maness: 43:06

I walk into the doctor's office, I stand on the scale and I'm 479. And it hits me, I had been well over 500, closer to 550, maybe even over 550 pounds. If I think, I've lost 50 to 75 pounds and I'm now sitting at 479,. That was bad. And then the news got worse. The doc looks at me and tells me I've gotten an abdominal hernia and I need to get it operated or else it's going to cause me a lot of problems. And he sends me to a surgeon who tells me I'm too fat to operate on. She recommends putting me on Zepband and Manjaro, or Manjaro, which is now called Zepband. So this is March 2023. This is actually me on the way to the surgeon and I weighed 469 pounds at the surgeon's office. So even between the January the end of January physical to the early March surgical appointment, I had lost an additional 10 pounds. I had lost an additional 10 pounds.

Drew Maness: 44:10

So in March 23, I start taking Majaro Zetbound. Now I'm going to stop here for a second because it's not on the slides. I didn't bring up that I've been taking Zetbound. I'm going to sit here and tell you that Zetbound is the greatest drug mankind's ever made and I'm going to get into why here in a second, because I don't want people just dismissing the diet because, oh, you took Zetbound. Of course the diet worked. That's not it. I've just finished describing that I had lost almost the initial 100 pounds off the diet without the Zetbound. Zetbound helps it helps fantastically, but I have tried every diet, pill or substance that you can imagine and you can blow through it. I've seen people blow through gastric bypass where they continue to eat and gain their weight back, even though they've cut out half their intestine. So in March 2023, I started taking Manjaro and Zetbound.

Drew Maness: 45:06

I noticed that my appetite was less and I start to lose weight or continue to lose weight over the next couple of weeks and months. But I ended up down in San Diego for a company event and I've mentioned in the past that travel can sometimes knock me off my diet. But also work stress or personal stress is another reason diet fail, and I got both down in San Diego. I'm having some problems at work, I'm frustrated and I'm traveling and I just decided to order my meal.

Drew Maness: 45:37

Now, my meal, my comfort meal, my my go-to just screw it, I'm going to eat whatever I want meal was a McDonald's double two double quarter pounders with cheese, two large fries and two Diet Cokes. I order this meal, I get it sent to my room and I take the first two, three bites of the first quarter pounder and then, for the first time in my entire life, my body says, hey, you know what, you're good, you don't need to eat anymore. And I'm shocked. I am literally sitting there going what the heck is this? I had never been satisfied eating something before, never. I had been full right where literally I could not put something else in there, but that sense of satisfaction okay, you're done, you don't need to eat anymore. It was shocking.

Drew Maness: 46:28

And I've talked to others who have struggled with weight their whole life, who've been on an Ozempic or other GLP-1, 2 drugs, and they've all said the same thing, that they never had a sense of satisfaction eating. And this is important. Well, actually. And this is important, well, actually. I'll get to why it's important here.

Drew Maness: 46:50

Coming up so let me pause for a second here and old, little old school slouch trap or flame war here, that sense of satisfaction is important because if you're a thin person and you're making recommendations on what a overweight person should do, like oh I don't know, oh, you know, what you need to do is just eat a little bit and wait 20 minutes to see if you're still hungry. I've just told you that I've never had a feeling of satisfaction, so I'm always hungry, I was always hungry, so that advice doesn't work. So I want you all to know, if you've thinned and never struggled with your, with your weight, you don't get to give advice to to us anymore, because you're literally a genetically advanced creature. You're a chimpanzee trying to explain to a frog or a salamander how to climb a tree. It's not the same, we're not the same. Just support me in my weight loss, support others in their weight loss, but you don't need to give advice because what you experience is not what we experience.

Drew Maness: 47:53

At this point I'll stop my get off my soapbox and let's get back to the talk. So what is this feeling of satisfaction? I literally took the whole bag of food and I threw it in the trash can. And this is where it suddenly hit me was it had nothing to do with my willpower. It had nothing. I actually had strong willpower. The fact that I had was able to fluctuate my weight If I got the sense of satisfaction. It made dieting so much easier and it allowed me to forgive myself. I realized it was a chemical imbalance. Some doctor may argue with me that it's not chemical, but it doesn't matter.

Drew Maness: 48:40

Whatever this drug is doing to give me that sense of satisfaction helped solve my depression, because my depression was directly rooted in the fact that I could not control my weight, that I did not have the willpower to control my weight. And then I found out that it had nothing to do with willpower. I would hate myself. I hated myself so much for that lack of willpower or control that I just detested myself. You can see from that picture that I showed you on the driver's license one I would derive all of my self-worth from external things, from being a water polo player or a swimmer or being really good in computers or the friends that I kept and talked with. But discovering this, my depression just melted away because I know I could forgive myself. It was a disease. It was outside of my control myself. It was a disease. It was outside of my control.

Drew Maness: 49:50

So this brings us to today. Now, actually, today is June 1st 2025. That's the picture of me last month that I took there no-transcript. I hope to again. My goal is to reach 175. I'm hoping that you stick around and join me on this journey as I continue to lose weight and get it all down. And that completes the first episode of Hacking the Fat man. Thank you for joining me and I hope to see you in episode two and further on down the.