Hacking The Fat Man
What drives someone to contemplate ending their life at nearly 550 pounds, and what unexpected insight transforms that same person into someone who loses over 300 pounds? Drew Maness, an information security professional with 25 years of experience and former elite water polo player, takes you through his journey from rock bottom to remarkable transformation.
Drew opens his heart completely, revealing how he walked into a motel room in August 2022 with the intention of taking his life. Trapped in a body that caused constant, excruciating pain and believing he had exhausted every possible weight loss method, he had reached his breaking point. What happened next changed everything.
With raw honesty, Drew shares his breakthrough realization: what if he approached his body like a computer system to be hacked? This shift in perspective led to a revolutionary approach to weight management that finally worked after decades of struggling. His most powerful innovation? A cyclical diet framework that rotates different nutritional approaches throughout the week, preventing the metabolic adaptation that dooms most diets to failure.
The podcast delves into Drew's strategic use of supplements to combat inflammation, his experiences with GLP-1 medication, and the life-changing moment he realized his struggles weren't about willpower at all. This revelation freed him from the depression rooted in self-hatred that had plagued him for years.
Join Drew in his continued journey from 550 to see if he makes 175.
Hacking The Fat Man
Why Extreme Diets Fail: Lessons from a Former Fat Man
That extreme weight loss transformation you saw on The Biggest Loser? It wasn't sustainable—and Drew Maness knew it from the start. Fresh from his 40th high school reunion and recent birthday celebrations, Drew finds himself examining why dramatic weight loss approaches almost always fail long-term.
When news broke that Danny Cahill—the contestant who lost the most weight in Biggest Loser history—had regained everything, it confirmed what Drew had experienced firsthand through decades of yo-yo dieting. Contestants working out 6-8 hours daily while eating barely 800 calories weren't creating sustainable habits; they were setting themselves up for the devastating rebound that 13 out of 14 winners experienced.
Drew pulls back the curtain on his own sustainable approach that's allowed him to lose 320 pounds over three years. Rather than extreme measures, he embraces a cyclical framework: fasting early in the week, transitioning to moderate keto mid-week, and allowing more flexibility on weekends. This rotation prevents his body from fighting back with the hormonal and metabolic weapons it deploys against crash diets.
The proof? Even after three weeks vacationing in Portugal and Spain plus reunion festivities, Drew maintained his weight—something impossible during his previous diet attempts. The key difference is building a system that works with your biology rather than against it, creating habits that become second nature rather than exhausting your willpower.
Real weight loss isn't about punishment or shame—it's about progress and kindness to yourself. It's about creating a lifestyle that fits YOU, not one that makes for dramatic television. Ready to change your approach to weight loss? This episode will shift your perspective on what actually works for long-term success.
What weight loss methods have you tried that worked—or didn't—for keeping the pounds off? Share your experience and join the conversation about sustainable approaches to health.
Discover daily tips and updates on the Hacking Fat Man journey. Follow on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube for transformation deep dives and more insights.
Link to download the Hacking The Fat Man Diet, Schedule and Supplements
Hey folks, welcome back to Hacking the Fat man. This is episode 7. I'm Drew Maness, your host, aka the Fat man, so in podcast 6, I had left you. I was heading down to my hometown of Costa Mesa, california, for my 40th high school reunion, spent a great week down there with friends, longtime ex-swimmates, ex-teammates and people I literally haven't seen probably in 30 or 40 years. I was actually fairly good during the week, at least the earlier part of the week, as we started getting towards the festivities. I did let go a little bit, I did have quite a bit of alcohol, which never leads to good decisions, but overall I'm fairly pleased. I mean, over the last month and a half I've had three weeks of vacation in Portugal and Spain. I then went down and spent a week in my hometown and for the most part I stayed sort of on the diet, but I really wasn't trying, and the good news is I'm still in the high 230s, not the 233 I was back in early June, but I'm relatively pleased with it.
Speaker 1:The strange thing though, this last week, just to give everyone an update, I've been in kind of a funk. My wife doesn't like me using the term bad thoughts because she thinks it means something else. So I'll use negative thoughts. There's still some negative thought process going on with me and, funny enough, it came from how many people from my hometown that have actually listened to this podcast. It kind of rattled me a little bit in the sense of oh my God, drew, what makes you think that you have any right talking to people about this? You're not a dietician, you're not a this, you're not a that, and I have to keep reminding myself that again, I'm putting this out there if, if, if, this helps you. Um, but I'm really doing it for myself, to record, um, what I'm doing, what I'm struggling with, and right now I'm struggling with a bit of self-sabotage. Um, and I don't know why I'm in that mindset. Um, I think I kind of knocked myself out of it this morning.
Speaker 1:Up until about 48 hours ago, I wasn't even sure I would be doing this podcast. I didn't have a topic. Hey, it's true, I'm still pretty much the same weight I am. What a great podcast. Please listen to me more.
Speaker 1:These are the thoughts that are going on in my head, and originally I was going to talk a little bit about self-sabotage, but I think I have more work personally to do with this kind of understanding, what, where, where this all is coming from. Excuse me, I don't know why I've got a cough, but I do. I'll try to keep it to a minimum because I know that's annoying. But yeah, I, I I'm not really sure where this, this self-sabotage thought is, is coming from. But so my birthday this last Thursday and no, it's not coming from the fact that I hit 58. I'm perfectly fine with my age and getting old, and at least I think I am, but no, it wasn't the birthday, wasn't that? I really do think it was a little bit of that shock of how many people have actually started listening to it, how many of my friends have started listening to it. I knew my family would, or at least the first couple episodes, but they were like reciting things from it. Anyway, there's more for me to pull on that, but I'm just not quite sure what that's all about. But I did so.
Speaker 1:My birthday was Thursday went out to a nice steak dinner. My son's a chef at a restaurant, the Old Oaks Steakhouse in Thousand Oaks. It's a fantastic place. I'm not getting any endorsement from him, except my son works there, but no, I had a really good time there. He introduced us to the chef and all his coworkers and they made the fantastic. Introduced us to the chef and and all his co-workers, and they made the fantastic. I had a wagyu steak. That was pretty good.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, like I said, up until friday I wasn't sure I was actually doing a podcast and then I saw this article it came across my news feed about one of the the biggest losers, the the. I think danny cahill is his name. He was the gentleman that lost the most weight in Biggest Loser history and I watched Biggest Loser from the first moment it aired. I watched almost every episode. I think some of the last seasons I kind of stopped watching it. He had gained all his weight back, and so it was kind of a gut punch for me when I read the article, because here I am kind of wallowing and I'm telling you for a fact right now I will not be going back to a higher weight.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, I want to talk about this a little bit, about the Biggest Loser. Now, if you don't know what the Biggest Loser was, it was a reality TV show back in the early 2010s. I think it ran for like 15, 16 seasons. They bring in these contestants sweating through brutal workouts, dropping huge numbers on the scale every week, and they had these big confetti-filled final finales. And it was inspiring on the surface. But, as the docuseries shows and and I'm going to be honest, even while I was watching this, I I could see some of this happening. While it may have been inspiring on the surface, it shows us that the reality of what they were doing, um, wasn't pretty. And in fact, the punchline is that I think they talked to 14 former contestants, or 14 former winners, and all but one had gained their weight back or more.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you right up front the first time I saw the Biggest Loser years ago, I already knew most of these contestants were going to gain their weight back, and I knew it because I had lived it right. I had done it right. I had done the crash diet, I'd done the starvation diet, the micro fast or the fasting that turned into sumo diets. I had lost over a thousand pounds but then gained 1200 or, yeah, 1200. So when I saw them being pushed that hard and eating so little and burning so much, I thought that hard and eating so little and burning so much, I thought, yeah, this isn't going to last and sadly, I was right, but here's what this Fit for TV.
Speaker 1:The reality of the biggest loser kind of showed is the contestants were working out six to eight hours a day and that's not a typo eight hours a day and they were eating ridiculously low calories. Some were talking you know, actually not too far from me um, 1200 to 800 calories. The only difference is I do it for a couple of days. They were doing it for weeks on end and I actually suspect some of them were way under 800 calories that they, they were literally doing the same thing I had done is I can go two weeks without food, um, and I think some of them to win, we're actually doing that to themselves. And the other thing and this is something I never really liked about it actually being a former water polo player and swimmer Um, while I love Jillian and Bob, um, um, they use shame like a weapon.
Speaker 1:If you couldn't keep up, you were lazy and weak and unworthy. And I've already talked about my subconscious. I don't need some. I didn't need someone from the outside telling me this. My subconscious was already telling me the same things, and I got it from my coaches, from the other people that I worked out with, because that's what we're taught If you wanted to be an athlete. But here's the thing I was an athlete. I had worked up. I didn't start off in eighth grade doing 68 hours a day.
Speaker 1:Some of these people never had worked out a day in their life and yet they were being yelled at and forced to do it and they would go and throw up. They needed that scene of someone throwing up off the treadmill, or or Jillian would get to someone who you know would. She'd break them down so much that they would start crying and thinking about leaving, and then she would bring them back in it. It all looked good, but we don't really need. I already knew that that wasn't going to work right.
Speaker 1:And when the show ended up for these contestants, surprise, surprise, most of them regained their weight. Some the show ended up for these contestants surprise, surprise, most of them regained their weight. Some even ended up heavier than before, not because they were weak and not because they didn't want it enough, but because the human body just doesn't like being starved and tortured. It will fight back with every biological weapons it's got hormones, craving and metabolic slowdown. So by forcing yourself to do this, your body is going to fight against it. And what I've been trying to show and what I've done losing my 320 pounds over three years, not 60 days or 80 days, whatever it was for them was I'm trying to get my body to help me lose the weight. I'm trying to be a partner with it and not just force it to do something. And I'll tell you, as I was watching, part of me was nodding and thinking, yep, I've seen that, done that, got that. I got the gap flare up as I was listening to these contestants talk about their experience. I had already lived that. So let's break it down a little bit.
Speaker 1:Why do these extreme approaches fail? You can drop the weight Like right now. Literally I'm at the high 230s. My goal is to get under 200 by the end of the year. I know for a fact I could go and drop 30 pounds in the next 30 days. A pound a day, seven pounds a week, maybe even faster. The reason I'm not doing that is because it will just bounce back and it may even come back even worse, and it's just not. It's not good for my and that's not what I want. My goal is I want to wake up in the morning. I want to be happy. I want to go do what I do, eat what I eat and be 170 morning. I want to be happy. I want to go do what I do, eat what I eat and be 170 pounds. I want my life to enable me and I've said this before my life to enable me to be 170 pounds.
Speaker 1:When you try to force yourself to lose that weight, your body will, as I mentioned before, your body will start to fight you against it. Your metabolism will slow down, your cravings will go up, the psychological effects, and that's the problem. Number two is the mental toll. Right, is taking that, that extreme approach to you? Know, that's all willpower and you can not out willpower your diet, right? Well, this shows it, I've showed, I've said it, and, and you can't and, and and how am I going to describe the, the depression that comes with it, right? So you drop the weight down and you go yeah, I'm a stud, I've dropped 30, 60, 120 pounds, 320 pounds, um, and then, when that scale starts to tick up, the depression starts to sit in. And they talked about this. How they were embarrassed because, hey, I won, biggest loser, and now they're heavier than they were. And I had lived that mindset for decades. Every failed diet wasn't just a failed experiment. It was another reason for my subconscious to tell me I was lazy and pathetic. And then the physical damage.
Speaker 1:I've made it a point so far in this diet to not do a single workout or add exercise to my diet. That doesn't mean I'm not moving. It means when I am moving, like scuba diving, I'm doing it for joy. That's not a workout for the sake of working out. And when you overtrain, my knees are shot, my shoulders are shot from overtraining over the years. But yet I'll get up and go do gardening, I'll go do things that I like. But when you're extreme, fasting and your hormones and your starving starts to get into your mind, it will take a toll on your body and again your body will literally start fighting you again for survival mode. It's just it's doing what it knows to do. And so we've got to. We've got to work together with our bodies, with our mind. It's all everything coming together to enable these diets. And again, I'm talking a lot to myself right now to get myself out of the funk when I'm going over some of these things.
Speaker 1:So, as I mentioned before, when I watched the Biggest Loser. Even before this Netflix docuseries came out, I knew how it would play out. You can't bully your body into long-term health and you can't white knuckle it for a season, or you could white knuckle it for a short period of time, but eventually your biology and mindset catches up with you. And I remember telling myself if the cameras weren't rolling, if the trainers weren't screaming, these folks would do what I always did they go home, they'd order their two double quarter powders with cheese or whatever their meals were, and they'd regain. They'd hate themselves even more for it. And that's exactly what this docuseries showed about the contestants, because while they gave them there are good things that I've learned from the Biggest Loser but they never really gave them the tools to actually lose the weight and keep it off by tying your whole self-worth to a scale number and then that number creeps back up.
Speaker 1:I know that feeling they're losers. They feel horrible and I can only I mean I wasn't a biggest loser winner. I can only imagine hey, you won $250,000 and now you're back up to 300, 400 pounds. That feeling, I have sympathy there for them on that. Let's talk about the alternative. What's the opposite of biggest loser?
Speaker 1:And for me it was building a framework again. That needs to be as easy as breathing. It needs to be second nature. I don't want to willpower it, I'm not going to outwork it and I'm not going to binge in my way or purge my way out of it as well. So I developed this cycle to help combat things that I saw right so early in the week I go lower calories. Mondays are fasting, tuesdays maybe a micro fast. Wednesdays I start getting in. Wednesdays and Thursdays I start getting into keto, but I still keep the calories about 1200-1300. And Fridays and weekends I allow myself to eat a little bit more, but no more than 1800 calories, and so that gives my body time to adapt and, uh, just just stay with me, with it and not stay with me, but just it helps the body work with me. That's what I'm trying to say, and this rotation helped my body from adapting and it also stopped me from hating food, because I started learning how and what to eat.
Speaker 1:Again, you know I've talked about the food I eat needs to bring me joy and by doing this cyclical diet we don't work out the same way. Why do we try to diet the same way? It's enabled me to lose the weight that I've lost so far. And then you know, I actually don't remember biggest loser ever once talking about vitamins or supplements. Again, it's been the better part of a decade and a half, two decades, since I've watched any of them. But I also don't remember. I do remember them talking about water and getting water in there.
Speaker 1:But you know, when I started, you know I went specifically out of pain in my life, pain in my body, inflammation. I had bad gout and I brought things in the supplements that helped with the diet and helped me start to lose the weight. And then, when I started taking Zetbound, that actually helped complete the cycle. So I had my body, I got my body to start working with me, stop fighting the diet. It was something I could do without really thinking much about it. And then with the ZetBound, it taught me to forgive myself, right, because I realized, you know, I had that first feeling of being satisfied after eating and and that right there just sealed the deal of that it had nothing to do with willpower, it was all about the diet and it was all about the hormones and the changes in my body and that I didn't need to white knuckle it to lose weight, because if you're white knuckling it to lose weight, if you're exercising, something's going to happen that's going to set you sideways If you bake it into your life and you bake it into your natural DNA, much like this.
Speaker 1:Last month and a half I haven't really thought about the diet that much. A little bit. Here and there. I did, like I said last week. I got in a couple of good fast days, but that had been the first fast days for a month. I did not get any fast days on my vacation. So while I do have a little bit of this self-sabotage and I think it's just the fact that I haven't really lost a lot of weight recently and so I think I'm getting hungry pun intended to lose weight a little bit more, lose weight a little bit more, but yeah, having it baked in and not gaining a single pound. When I stopped trying to lose weight in the past, I would have gained over that month and a half easily 30 to 50 pounds, and not to have the scale not go up, that's a win. So I don't really know why my subconscious is beating me right now, cause I know it's. It's a win. So I don't really know why my subconscious is beating me right now, because I know it's a win and it's showing me that the system is actually still working for me, even when I didn't have my foot on the pedal. So, yeah, I forgive myself, I'm not blaming myself, it's all good.
Speaker 1:So here's the big takeaway from the Netflix docuseries right? Biggest Loser actually taught us what doesn't work. Shame doesn't work, barvation doesn't work. Eight hours in the gym doesn't work. The systems I have built after again, I have lived through everything Biggest Loser has done and I knew it wouldn't work. Wouldn't work. But building a system that allows me to adapt or adapt with you adapt with me, rotating the diets instead of cleaning just to one. I've got to just eat this 300 calories and that's it. And then going after pain what's giving you pain but also making joy non-negotiable. It's the whole package, right. So it's the mental, it's the physical and it's the habitual right, and that works. I've lost my 320 pounds over three years. I didn't do it over 60 or 90 days, because doing it over that short time period just doesn't work.
Speaker 1:If you watched the Biggest Loser back then and thought, man, I'm such a failure because I can't drop 15 pounds in a week, please hear me it wasn't real, it was television. They asked Bob about the yelling and the screaming. Well, yeah, anyone can come in and lose weight, but the drama of that makes for good television. They were there to make good television and I think that's the most honest thing that I've heard, because Biggest Loser was just television. Again, there were some good things that came out of it.
Speaker 1:They had this episode on the fish, and if you want to find the healthiest thing in a restaurant, it's always the fish. Always go for the fish. If you don't like fish, go for the soup. That's the second healthiest, usually the second healthiest thing in a restaurant, it's always the fish. Always go for the fish. If you don't like fish, go for the soup. That's the second healthiest, usually the second healthiest. The worst things that look healthy are salads. Stay away from salads because those are usually like 3,000 calories. So, yeah, real life is about the small choices, repeated with kindness to yourself. It's about progress and not punishment. It's about creating a lifestyle that fits you, not good television. So, anyway, that was this week's Hacking the Fat man.
Speaker 1:Next week I will start. I'll do a little bit more on the self-sabotage because I'm now interested in it and why I am in a funk, even though technically I'm still doing well, but I'll figure it out, it'll come around. To my older brother, who started listening again keep up at it. To my ex-coworker, steven, who asked about plateauing just keep at it, man. Let your body reset. Keep doing what you're doing. You're going to plateau. Your body is just going. It just happens. And so, anyway, to everyone else that's listening I wish you the best of luck this week and keep at it. Bring joy into your life. Do not beat yourself up, just like I need to tell myself that. Stop beating myself up. And we got this. We'll figure it out. Anyway, you guys have a great, great week and I'll see you next week. Cheers, bye.