Episode 28: Fit to Fat to Fit at 40 with Drew Manning

Drew Manning is back! On this week’s episode of the Health Ignited Podcast, Drs. Nick and Sonya Jensen welcome Drew Manning back to discuss the final outcomes of his incredible weight gain and loss experiment and ask him to share some of the important lessons he learned this time around.

Over the course of four months, Drew adopted a diet full of processed foods (eating up to 7,500 calories a day) and also stopped exercising, all in an effort to see how much weight he’d put on with this lifestyle. With this approach, Drew gained over 60 pounds and saw a drastic change in his overall health and wellbeing. He then spent the next four months experimenting with different dietary approaches and resuming a regular exercise routine, losing all of the weight he’d gained and achieving 4.5% body fat by the end of his program. Why would he do this on purpose? Empathy - Drew wanted to gain the lived experience necessary to properly understand the challenges faced by some of his clients.

The first time he put himself through this experiment, he was 31 years old. This time around, Drew had a better understanding of his body, leaning into the dietary and exercise practices that worked well for him; however, he stresses the importance of listening to your body and investing in recovery, having experienced more difficulty with this during his most recent fitness journey almost 10 years following the initial experiment.

In this episode, we discuss the complexities of emotional eating and why so many people become addicted to food, goal setting and the importance of learning how to fall in love with the process rather than being attached to the outcomes, practices that support healthy lifestyle changes and training ourselves to become more resilient, and the medical impact that unhealthy eating can have on the body even over very short time periods.

Tune in to this episode to gain some insight on the emotional and physiological impacts of gaining and losing weight, and the importance of self love and empathy while moving through challenging experiences.

 

Learn more about Drew’s journey from fit to fat to fit at 40 and sign up for the exact fitness program he used to lose the weight and restore his health: https://fit2fat2fit.com/