VIRAL Gym HERO： Body Positivity Is A Lie ｜ Dave Danna
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
198.91798
Summary
Dave Dana is an accountant and grad student in South Carolina and aspiring supermodel. In this episode, we talk about his weight loss journey and how social media has played a major role in his journey. He also talks about the challenges he faced in college and how he was able to overcome them in order to become a better version of himself.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
I want to talk to my guest, who's a real inspiration, Dave Dana, an accountant and
00:00:05.500
grad student in South Carolina and an aspiring supermodel. Dave, thank you for coming on the
00:00:11.660
show. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure to be here. Who has reached out to you thus far
00:00:18.840
to encourage you on your journey to lose weight? This week, the biggest one was Arnold Schwarzenegger
00:00:24.940
who retweeted me and also wrote a tweet thread and replied to one of my comments, giving me some
00:00:31.380
lifting tips and some tips in the gym. But there have been numerous other accounts,
00:00:36.760
Zuby as well as others. But honestly, more touching to me and having more of an impact on me have been
00:00:42.840
just the hundreds of normal people who have reached out on social media, Instagram, Twitter,
00:00:48.580
Facebook, and just shared their stories, shared how I'm helping them, which is truly humbling.
00:00:53.740
It keeps me going. It motivates me. And we're all fighting those inner demons. We're all trying
00:00:59.820
to get through this crazy world and just hearing people, what they're dealing with, how I'm helping
00:01:04.920
them, how they're helping me. I mean, I can't keep up with the DMs. So to be honest, it was amazing to
00:01:09.600
have someone like Terminator reach out. And I mean, blew me away that day. I definitely didn't get much
00:01:15.620
sleep. But beyond just sort of the celebrity endorsements, I've been blown away by just the
00:01:20.120
hundreds and thousands of people who have come out of the woodwork and out of social media and just
00:01:24.520
been incredibly supportive, especially given the, you know, incredibly toxic nature of a place like
00:01:29.660
Twitter or social media in general, especially because I'm just mostly posting gym selfies at
00:01:35.120
a Planet Fitness. And I don't really know what I'm doing. You know, I'm not an expert. I'm still
00:01:39.680
learning. You know, I have lost a lot of weight, but I've got a lot more to go. And I hadn't set foot
00:01:43.960
in the gym, you know, until last year. So a long way to go and a lot to learn, but it's been
00:01:49.060
incredible so far. What motivated you to say, okay, today's the day or tomorrow's the day that
00:01:57.180
I'm going to go to the gym? So last year, I turned 30 years old, started thinking a little bit more
00:02:03.440
about becoming a husband one day, a father, having kids. And I got on my scale one day and it gave me
00:02:08.640
an error message because it only went up to 400 pounds. And so I was over that amount. And just
00:02:14.880
thinking about being a role model for my future kids, wanting to see them grow up, just being a,
00:02:21.000
you know, being around for the future. I didn't want to have to have my parents bury me, you know,
00:02:26.700
nobody wants that. And it was sort of a wake up call just to not, not even be able to see a number
00:02:33.180
on your scale, right? Like how fat do you have to be for the scale not to work? Well, over 400,
00:02:37.440
right. Cause that's, I didn't know it had a limit. I just, you know, it sat on the bottom
00:02:40.420
that had a limit. So that was my wake up call. And then ever since then, you know, I, uh, I don't
00:02:45.820
know what I'm doing, but I've just tried things when I didn't work, tried new things and just always
00:02:50.240
kept in the back of my mind that like, this is, you know, so I can be a good husband, a good father,
00:02:56.560
you know, a good member of society and so that I can be around, you know, for a long time. And I really
00:03:01.160
didn't think I could do that getting an error message on my scale. And that was, that was June of 2022.
00:03:05.440
And that was my wake up call. What do you think motivated you to become so large?
00:03:12.640
I think there's a number of factors that come together. I think a lot of it had to do with
00:03:17.140
mental health, which we don't speak about enough, especially as men. Um, I think a lot of it had to
00:03:22.000
do with sort of the constant consumerism, the constant consumption of the society we live in.
00:03:27.800
I think a lot of it had to do with probably a little bit of workaholism. You know, I got out of
00:03:32.200
college, my career went well, and I found myself working more and more, a lot more stress, a lot
00:03:36.900
more anxiety, but also, you know, a lot more money than I've had before, not rich by any means, but
00:03:42.240
you know, fast food when, with a salary is a dangerous combination, especially in a society
00:03:47.240
that rewards constant consumption, that rewards more, more, more. And I also think we live in a time
00:03:53.960
where we have a lot of big companies working with big government to not necessarily be promoting
00:03:59.720
things that are healthy, but that may make more taxpayers and more consumers. And, you know,
00:04:05.140
a lot of what I've done to lose the weight has been sort of take a step back and try to figure out
00:04:10.700
what really is truly important, you know, and that's working on not just my physical health,
00:04:15.200
but working on my mental health as well, making sure I'm making time for family, for friends,
00:04:19.760
for faith, for community, not just for work, which reduces my stress, reduces my stress eating,
00:04:25.360
stepping back from some of the constant consumption, and trying to make sure that I'm
00:04:29.760
getting outside, you know, engaging a little bit more with my faith, engaging a little bit more
00:04:34.200
with nature. And that really, I think, has put me in a much stronger position mentally, which then
00:04:40.000
feeds into your financial health and your spiritual health and, you know, everything else that goes
00:04:44.380
along with it, and physical health, of course, as well.
00:04:46.320
Such an important point that the consumption, it's not just about the food, it's about a culture that
00:04:50.860
encourages constant consumption of everything. I had this thought, it was around the beginning
00:04:55.680
of COVID, when no one knew what to do with their time, because we were all locked up. And I thought,
00:05:01.180
okay, my bars are closed. Some of my cigar shops are closed. Some of them are still open at
00:05:05.960
speakeasies, but that's, I don't want to out anybody. But I thought, well, hold on, that's,
00:05:10.800
those are my hobbies. My hobby is that I go to cigar bars, and I have conversation, and, you know,
00:05:17.220
there's a little bit more to it than that. But it's a hobby centered around consuming something,
00:05:21.180
consuming the cigar, or consuming the drink. And I thought, do I have hobbies that are not
00:05:27.000
about consumption? Do I play music every now and again? But I realized, I didn't really have very
00:05:32.680
many. Our culture seems to have replaced hobbies and leisure activities that don't necessarily
00:05:39.860
need to involve your buying things with just consumption. And society has entirely turned
00:05:48.800
away from the spiritual life, which obviously does not, religious practice does not require you
00:05:54.520
to consume things. And in fact, much religious practice is aimed at turning your desire away from
00:06:00.480
consuming things. Was there a spiritual component at all in your decision? Yes, definitely. I grew up
00:06:06.060
Jewish, and I had sort of stepped away from that. I live here in the Deep South, not a whole lot of
00:06:09.840
Jews down here. So, but I wanted to, again, as I got older, as I thought about one day having a family,
00:06:15.380
being a husband and a father, I wanted to at least get somewhat more connected with my faith, with God,
00:06:19.560
with my Jewish community. And you're right, a lot of Jewish holidays and Jewish practices involve
00:06:25.800
dietary restrictions or even fasting. And to me, just once I started thinking about it,
00:06:30.600
remembering how I grew up, I was like, actually, there's a lot of stepping back from consumption.
00:06:34.180
There's a lot of abstaining from various things that is very important to Judaism. And that wasn't
00:06:40.740
part of my life. In fact, gluttony and overconsumption were throughout my life, my financial
00:06:45.800
life, my physical life, everything was just always at the edge, always doing 110% and even extending to
00:06:52.440
things like my career or education. And I was feeling that that was going to burn me out and burn me,
00:06:58.560
I guess, right into an early grave. And I needed to take a step back and reevaluate some of those
00:07:04.080
things, especially as I turned 30 and couldn't even weigh myself.
00:07:07.760
You know, the first time I ever consciously fasted as I was reverting to the church,
00:07:14.160
I thought, there's no way. I can't go a whole day without eating. And you know,
00:07:18.340
our bodies are made to fast regularly, actually. And by the end of the day, by the end of just one day,
00:07:25.640
I thought, wow, I rely on a handful of pretzels or a glass of seltzer or whatever. I rely on these
00:07:37.080
all day long, not to feed any actual physical need that I have, but just to do something with
00:07:43.780
my hands, to take a break from my work, to distract myself. And I think it's perfectly fine to have
00:07:49.680
affinities for products and brands and things like that. I mean, I have my favorite clothing store,
00:07:55.940
you know, and I have my favorite, whatever, cigar brand or something. But it would seem that that
00:08:00.960
becomes a big problem when that becomes the essence of your identity. When your identity is not grounded
00:08:07.080
in God, ultimately, and my religious tradition, my community, and my family. And only then do you
00:08:13.240
start talking about you like to shop at whatever, you know, Banana Republic or something.
00:08:16.800
You know, but it seems like our culture has just totally flipped that.
00:08:20.440
Yes. Instant gratifications and constant dopamine hits. You can see them from the food we eat to
00:08:26.220
social media to everything else. But there's no sense of building something from the foundation of
00:08:30.900
taking your time, of doing it appropriately, of using what had been working in the past. We've
00:08:36.140
gotten rid of all that and we're doing it all now. And it has to be instant. It has to be right
00:08:39.740
now. It has to be constant. And to me, that was just felt in every aspect of my life. It was getting
00:08:45.360
more toxic and more unhealthy. And I didn't, I just didn't feel like I had much left to give if I
00:08:51.180
kept down that path. I needed to, I needed to turn and try something, you know, radically different.
00:08:56.220
But yet at the same time, that radicalism was just pretty basic, normal things that my grandparents
00:09:01.940
or great grandparents probably would have recommended, you know, without some of the technology.
00:09:06.360
So you've been doing this for about a year and it's really great to make a resolution. And frankly,
00:09:11.280
it's difficult, but it's not all that difficult to go to the gym for day one and maybe even day two
00:09:19.340
and possibly day three, but day four gets to be a little bit harder. Has there been a time
00:09:25.180
over the course of this year when you've thought, eh, all right, enough of that?
00:09:30.580
Yeah, there has after about three or four months, the first like 20, 30, even 40 pounds comes off
00:09:37.160
pretty fast, especially when you're up above 400 pounds. Um, and so, but after that, I hit a bit
00:09:43.560
of a plateau where just like walking on a treadmill and like not eating fast food wasn't enough. I had
00:09:48.580
to really buckle down and do more. And for those two or three weeks where I was mostly at a plateau,
00:09:54.500
that was the closest I came to giving up, um, or to just bailing on it. And I did two things there.
00:10:01.120
One was, that was the first time I think in years that I've really prayed and really thought
00:10:05.100
about my faith more deeply. And the second thing was that I went to the doctor for the first time
00:10:10.680
in, I don't know how long since my mom made me as a kid and we got my blood work done. This was in
00:10:15.840
September of last year for the first time. And we saw some numbers that were not great pre-diabetic
00:10:21.000
range, high blood pressure, um, and, uh, you know, cholesterol that was a bit too high and combining me
00:10:27.240
looking inward and upward religiously with some like science backing it up from the doctor saying,
00:10:33.780
Hey, these numbers aren't good. That really got me back in the gym. I go, you know, I wake up at 4am
00:10:39.920
Monday through Friday, so I can get to the gym by 4 30. I do it before my, uh, work starts before grad
00:10:45.580
school. And so after that point, I have built, made sure to build it into a routine because every
00:10:52.120
morning you're not going to have the same level of motivation I had on day two, but once it becomes
00:10:56.960
a habit, once it becomes a routine, um, it's a lot more manageable now. And I think back to that
00:11:02.620
sort of couple of weeks, I won't say it was a moment. It was longer than a moment, couple of
00:11:06.180
weeks of weakness where, you know, there might've been some unhealthy eating. And I just think about
00:11:10.160
what I received in that time of reflection and prayer. And then what I got handed to me from the
00:11:16.620
doctor within a two or three week period. And that's enough, um, you know, to make sure I keep
00:11:21.180
going. It was sort of a reaffirmation that I had started along the right path, but you know, I need
00:11:26.380
to lose 200 plus pounds, right? I'm at 80 right now. I was at 30 or 40 back then. That's, I'm not
00:11:31.920
even halfway there. Right. So I got, I have a long way to go and it has to be something that becomes
00:11:36.320
not just a diet or not just, um, exercise, but a lifestyle, a habit, you know, something that I can
00:11:42.580
build and do for decades. I have to ask you on, on diet. Sure. I, I have a hobby horse that I have,
00:11:50.280
I've, I've, I never bought into diet fads in my whole life. The one that got me, my wife,
00:11:57.160
sweet little Alisa convinced me of this. She has convinced me seed oils are of the devil.
00:12:03.520
The devil himself has a seed oil factory somewhere between the seventh and eighth circles of hell.
00:12:08.360
And that this has infected all of our foods and made us all really fat and unhealthy. Now I suspect
00:12:14.760
that obesity owes to many factors beyond seed oils, probably just over consumption of calories and
00:12:22.520
a sedentary lifestyle and all the rest. But have you found that it's not just the calories,
00:12:28.140
but it's different types of food are more or less conducive to weight loss?
00:12:32.860
Absolutely. I think every person my size has gotten sort of like standard diet advice for the last 30
00:12:39.780
or 40 years, eat a ton of salads, do a ton of cardio, track every calorie, make sure you're in
00:12:44.800
a calorie deficit and you'll lose weight. And to be fair, I do think you'll lose some weight. I think
00:12:49.100
you'll be miserable and you'll fall off the wagon and you'll gain it all back. Um, but I do think that
00:12:54.760
getting a lot of the sugar and refined carbs and seed oils out of your diet is what I have found to
00:13:02.220
work and be sustainable. I don't necessarily buy into any specific fad, eat this, not that,
00:13:08.160
but I do think cutting out general category is like so much highly processed, so much pre-packaged.
00:13:15.820
You know, if you're getting the food handed, you know, through your car window and they made it in
00:13:19.620
less than 60 seconds and you're eating it alone in a parking lot on your lunch break, it's probably
00:13:23.620
not something you should do regularly, that type of stuff. And I do think that cutting back just to,
00:13:29.120
I mean, I still eat meat. I eat red meat. I eat eggs. I still eat vegetables. I, you know,
00:13:33.280
both, both sides of those are controversial, right? I eat some fruit sometimes, but it's a lot more
00:13:38.460
natural. It's a lot cleaner. It's a lot more home cooked and it's a lot less, uh, fast food,
00:13:44.060
junk food, pre-packaged food. And I feel like that's more what people would have eaten, you know,
00:13:48.900
a couple hundred years ago. And it's a sustainable way to lose weight. Whereas if I buy diet food,
00:13:55.360
which is like a lot of very low calorie, you know, plant-based salad types of food,
00:14:01.000
I will lose weight, but I will also be miserable. I'll probably have some brain fog and I'll fall
00:14:06.440
off the wagon. So I've tried to find something that's sustainable and more natural and more
00:14:11.420
healthy without going the route of, I only eat meat or I never eat meat or, you know, like some of
00:14:16.320
the very, the very, you know, like I'm sure those work because again, you're doing like an extreme
00:14:20.620
elimination diet, which usually will cause some weight loss, but I'm not sure they're sustainable
00:14:25.180
for me. And I am Italian and Jewish. So like this, you know, there's some carbs and stuff that comes
00:14:29.260
into the food sometimes, right? You're not, you can't get rid of that. I mean, you'd be divorcing
00:14:33.840
a part of your cultural heritage. When I moved to Nashville, I've never, uh, really struggled with
00:14:40.780
my weight all that much. You know, I've, I've never, the biggest I ever got was because Daily Wire was
00:14:44.800
maybe going to make a movie and they needed me to gain 20 pounds, which I did. I gained 20 pounds by
00:14:49.640
eating pizza. I cut my body fat in half, but then I forgot to cut. So then I was just kind of chubby
00:14:53.620
for a little while. But, but I did find when I moved to Nashville, I gained 13 pounds in four
00:15:02.040
months, which for me, I'm just not a big guy. So 13 pounds is pretty noticeable. And I thought,
00:15:08.440
what the heck happened? Why is that? And it's because I wasn't really walking around anywhere. I was,
00:15:12.940
you know, I'm, I'm now in the Southern suburb and I was eating biscuits and just the fatty
00:15:19.620
Southern food all the time from all these local restaurants and everything. And my wife just
00:15:25.240
started cooking more, you know, once we had our first child, you know, and sort of was getting
00:15:31.520
back in the groove of cooking more. And it's not that I ate really all that much less than I previously
00:15:38.120
did. It was just much less sugar, much less grease, much less processed kind of food. And it all went
00:15:47.020
away. And it did get me thinking like, huh, maybe there is just something in the typical American
00:15:51.320
diet that kind of makes you fat. Yeah. I don't count my calories. I don't count my carbs. I'm not
00:15:57.540
explicitly trying to cut out seed oil, but the diet I've adopted in effect cuts out a lot of carbs,
00:16:04.100
a lot of processed food. I'll probably eat 75% of my seed oils. And for me, that works better than
00:16:09.340
trying to explicitly, you know, kill myself by cutting out every gram of sugar and every drop of seed oil,
00:16:14.820
or trying to log everything I eat or drink into an app. Again, it is, it has to work long term for
00:16:21.380
me. And I would prefer to find something that does that rather than do a crash or a fad or something
00:16:27.480
that I think will work short term and get maybe impressive three month results. But then three
00:16:31.400
years down the line, I'll be back to where I was. So before I let you go for anyone who's watching or
00:16:36.140
listening right now, who, you know, maybe wants to lose some weight, feels they've, things have spiraled
00:16:41.620
out of control a little bit, but they don't know a damn thing about the gym. Sort of like me. I
00:16:46.460
don't know. I don't know anything really at all about the gym. Day one, you're there for the first
00:16:52.200
time since the Clinton administration. What do you do? I didn't do this until probably week two,
00:17:00.660
but once I did it, I stopped feeling that intimidation and anxiety as I walked into the gym.
00:17:06.100
Because again, I was walking into the gym at over 400 pounds alone, having never stepped into one
00:17:10.280
before. And what I would recommend isn't an exercise, but it's talking to someone. Find the
00:17:16.920
most like buff guy there and ask him what you should do. And then if the gym offers like trainers
00:17:23.760
or something like that, I would also engage with them. But I go at four or five in the morning. So
00:17:27.400
they're not awake yet. But I, everyone in the gym who you think is judging you and who is, and who
00:17:34.760
you're intimidated by is actually incredibly friendly from what I found, at least here in the deep
00:17:39.340
south and incredibly helpful. And not necessarily that all their advice is great, but getting a few
00:17:46.720
basic ideas of do this and then that try this and then that. And one other thing that I would add a
00:17:53.360
little bit more practical is take it slow. It's a marathon, not a sprint, take the weight light and
00:18:01.080
just focus on form and learning one thing at a time, rather than how much weight can I push up for
00:18:08.100
how many reps? I know that's popular with like gym bros online, but like, I'm not there yet.
00:18:12.060
So just talk to people, learn from them and take it slowly. And don't be afraid to ask questions and
00:18:18.740
and real. I mean, I know I'm saying it a lot, but like, that's really the key to me is the people who
00:18:23.100
I thought were watching me and judging me just wanted to help. And we're incredibly supportive
00:18:27.840
and gave me a lot of good advice. As long as I kept in the back of my mind that I'm going to take it
00:18:32.360
slowly, I'm going to keep the weight low. And at three or four or 500 pounds, what's really
00:18:37.240
important is that you're getting moving for 30 to 45 minutes per day, getting your heart rate up,
00:18:42.040
getting your blood pumping, sweating. You're going to burn calories. Every time you stand up,
00:18:45.700
you're lifting three, 400 extra pounds, right? So the weight's not that important right now.
00:18:49.280
And then a couple of months down the line, a year down the line, you can dial it in and specialize,
00:18:54.500
but you're going to burn a couple of hundred calories just by going to the gym and being active.
00:18:58.940
So the more relationships you can build there and the more comfortable you can feel
00:19:02.300
long-term, that's what's been successful for me.
00:19:05.040
Well, I love that advice because that's the most intimidating thing is the gym bros because
00:19:10.520
you just think, man, I'm never going to be like that. They're judging me. They're probably mocking
00:19:14.780
me. But one, in my experience, the gym bros I know are some of the friendliest people on earth.
00:19:20.420
And two, man is a social creature. And so you're not going to do very much of anything on your own
00:19:27.500
as a little island. You've got to engage in the community, avail yourself of the wisdom of your
00:19:32.700
peers and people who have been doing it a long time and the wisdom of the ages. Really,
00:19:37.660
really inspiring stuff, man. Dave, thank you for coming on. Where can people find you?
00:19:42.240
I appreciate that. I'm on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, Dave E. Dana on all of them,
00:19:48.820
Awesome. That's great. I probably won't see you in the gym, though.
00:19:51.980
If anyone's going to inspire me to go back to the gym, it might be you,