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The Heavyweight
S1 Ep. 6 Apr 29, 2026

The Heavyweight

Diagnosed with sleep apnea, Jacob is told the cure might lie in losing weight. To tackle it head-on, he reaches out to Bodybuilder Jacob Reed. But what begins as a fitness plan spirals into a raw reckoning with image, discipline, and the stories we tell about our bodies.

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What happens when you get diagnosed with sleep apnea due to weight gain? Well, if you’re an investigative comedy podcast host with a list of people who share your name… you find a personal trainer that has the same name as you.

This one goes deep into weight loss, body image, fitness culture, personal training, sleep apnea, DEXA body scanning, and the Pacific Crest Trail — but mostly it’s about self-sabotage, accountability, and what it actually takes to change. If you’ve ever started a fitness journey and fallen off, had complicated feelings about your body, or wondered whether any of the diet and wellness industry’s promises actually work, this episode is for you.

Here’s what happened: My wife had been complaining that I was snoring. So I went to an ENT, who sent me to a sleep specialist, who confirmed I had moderate sleep apnea — seventeen pauses in breathing per hour. The cause was clinical but not flattering: I’d gained enough weight that my throat had gotten fat (my words not theirs… I could not get anyone else to say ‘fat throat’ on tape), and it was blocking my airway while I slept. The fix was equally blunt. Lose forty pounds minimum, and the apnea would likely reverse. Never lose it, and it would never go away.

This is the episode I never wanted to make. I am deeply embarrassed not just by having these body issues, but by having the body that causes them.

I was a pretty active kid — martial arts, lacrosse, ultimate frisbee, aquatics camp on the San Diego Bay all summer. There’s a photo of me being thrown into the water by a horde of seven-year-olds where I technically have a six-pack. Even then I felt too fat. Growing up in the nineties meant growing up in the golden age of diet culture: Weight Watchers jingles, Ultra Slim-Fast, the Thigh Master, Jenny Craig, Dynatrim, and most memorably, Olestra — an indigestible cooking oil Frito-Lay used to make a line of fat-free chips called Wow. My family bought them eagerly. I vividly remember an urgent trip to the downstairs bathroom shortly after, because the oil caused what the packaging diplomatically called “anal leakage.” Americans spent half a billion dollars on that product. It now exists primarily as a Family Guy joke.

College brought medication with weight gain as a side effect, late nights, taco runs, and sedentary habits I never fully shook. When I got into comedy and got a commercial agent, I’d sometimes walk into audition rooms and realize from the other guys waiting that it was a fat guy part. One of them — who had at least eighty pounds on me — once looked over and said, sorry bro, guess you’re with us. The agent eventually told me I was too heavy to play a normal guy but not heavy enough to play a funny fat guy. I got in good shape for our wedding. By our first kid I was too embarrassed by what I’d gained to hang up the maternity photos — and I was standing next to a pregnant woman.

The ENT who sent me to the Apnea doctor even suggested a GLP-1 and mentioned how much it had helped them personally. I called around for a consultation, but after thinking about it, I felt like the last decade of choices had gotten me here, and I wanted to try reversing them the same way. So I called Jacob Reed instead.

Trainer Jacob had a PhD in sport physiology from East Tennessee State, a master’s from Memphis, an undergraduate degree from Northern Iowa, and had co-authored seventeen scientific papers in physical education. He’d run a marathon alone on the back roads of Iowa in ski goggles so his eyes wouldn’t freeze over. TL;DR is that he was hardcore and he knew his stuff. Jacob wasn’t currently taking new clients, but was so tickled by the name coincidence that he made an exception.

Jacob’s approach was refreshingly straightforward. Weight loss requires a caloric deficit. Quality of food matters, but quantity matters more than we admit, and sustainability requires eating food you actually like. He introduced video check-ins: I’d send him a short video about what I’d eaten and how I’d moved, and he’d respond almost immediately with encouragement and specific feedback. It was like having a pen pal with a PhD in my exact problem.

We had a lot in common. Kids the same age, same birthday month, even the same company name pun — his was All Trades Fitness, mine was All Trades Co. And over the course of several months of check ins, we got to know each other pretty well. It was like having a video pen pal.

Before we got going in earnest, I needed a baseline. I went to Dexa Body in San Diego, which offered DEXA scanning — dual X-ray technology that maps the precise quantity and location of your fat, muscle, and bone mass — along with a VO2 max test that involved a gas mask, a treadmill, and wires on my chest until I gave out. The results: forty-three percent body fat, ninety-nine pounds of fat tissue. For scale, a pint of Ben and Jerry’s now weighs about 0.87 pounds thanks to shrinkflation. I was carrying the equivalent of 113 pints on my body at all times. The printed report included an image of a human figure taking the test. He was shirtless and jacked. At the bottom of the page, a fitness scale ran from very low to superior. Very low was highlighted.

The technician pointed out the bar could only go up from here.

The first few months went well. The video format made things personal in a way I hadn’t expected, and patterns emerged fast — I was eating a lot of carbs and almost no protein, and I had a small revelation about jackfruit: it’s marketed as a meat substitute for texture, not nutrition. Two grams of protein per serving versus eight in beans. I started making different choices. Jacob kept showing up. Every late check-in, every apology video, every excuse, he responded with patience and specific encouragement. When I said I wanted to push harder, he walked me back — crash approaches produce rebound, and the research on this was not ambiguous. When I essentially disappeared for months, he offered five more months of coaching at no charge. When I said I couldn’t swim because I didn’t have goggles, he offered to mail me his.

I kept not responding.

What the relationship reminded me of was something that happened at USC. I’d gotten into film school through scholarships, financial aid, and my grandparents’ generosity — but into the critical studies track, not the production track where George Lucas and Ryan Coogler learned to make movies. The two crossed in one class where everyone made short films. My professor was the cinematographer William Fraker, six Oscar nominations, Rosemary’s Baby, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — a salty old crank who’d come to USC on the GI Bill and felt duty-bound to give back. Near the end of the semester he pulled me aside to tell me he’d loved my work, then offered to walk me to the dean’s office to use his pull to switch my major. I was floored. But switching meant another year of school my scholarships wouldn’t cover. When I declined, he offered a drink. I was twenty with no fake ID. He said: I owe you a scotch — come collect whenever you’re ready.

I kept waiting until I had something impressive to report. Then an alumni newsletter announced William Fraker had passed away.

Trainer Jacob was doing the same thing — going out on a limb, offering to invest in me. And I kept waiting for the right moment to come back with good news.

I needed a goal. I’d long fantasized about what I called “Pulling a Batman Begins” — faking your own death, disappearing into the woods, training until shredded, reappearing without explanation but ripped and bearded. The real-world version, I’d learned, is called the Pacific Crest Trail. Here’s a video from YouTuber KyleHatesHiking that talks a bit about the trail:

I called my friend Joel — a geology professor and solo backcountry hiker — and we planned a hike. Two weeks became two days when we missed the permit window, then became a six-hour stretch starting at Mosquito Flats in the Eastern Sierras at 10,228 feet.

The night before, a storm was forecast. Joel didn’t think I could handle it. I asked Heather whether I should go.

She’d been storing things up. She told me this wasn’t the first time I’d set myself up for something too ambitious. She brought up the time I’d hurt my back when she was six months pregnant — she’d had to handle everything physical with our son for two months. We had a pretty frank conversation, and she told me she blamed me for hurting my back, and I hadn’t fully disagreed. She said she wanted me to be healthy and feel good. She said she was proud of me for having the conversation.

We found a campsite away from the storm. The next morning Joel and I started hiking at 7:59 am in thirty-three degree weather. At ten and a half thousand feet the air has about a third less oxygen than I’m used to, and my legs gave out before anything else did. Joel kept offering to take my pack. A woman who appeared to be in her seventies passed me on the trail and stopped to check I wasn’t about to die.

When I reported back to Jacob and said I wanted to do a massive cut to double down, he redirected me to a spreadsheet instead — a projected timeline showing what steady, incremental loss would look like over eighteen months. Based on his numbers, I could be at around one ninety-four by the following July. My first reaction was that a year felt like a long time. My second was that we’d already been working together for a year and I hadn’t moved the scale at all. He pushed back: the habits were real, the foundation was there, the ghost of the good work doesn’t disappear just because the number doesn’t change.

That recording sat unresponded to for over a year.

I didn’t lose the weight. I gained fifteen more pounds. At my next physical I weighed two hundred and sixty-two. My wedding ring no longer fit. Looking back at the check-in videos from that period, the first thing I noticed was the clothes — I don’t wear them anymore because they don’t fit, and I miss them. As much as I disliked my body then, I’d trade for it now.

But even without the check-ins, I kept hearing Jacob’s voice. Drink more water. Condense the snacks into meals. Walk outside for five minutes. That’s still a step forward. We get into slumps — we always pull ourselves out.

Another year went by. I lost fifteen pounds, slowly, and was still losing a little each month. I reached out to Jacob to tell him. I apologized for the ghosting. My two-year-old from when we started was now a four-year-old. He responded within hours, gracious as ever. He said he was proud of me. He’d looked up the podcast. He’d even read my dad’s book.

Every day there’s a new message selling a shortcut — the South Beach Diet, gastric bypass, GLP-1s, protein chip rebrandings. There are multibillion-dollar industries depending on that message landing. What I learned — slowly, and at real cost — is that whether you like it or not, it takes time. And if you have a voice on your shoulder that keeps showing up even when you stop showing up, the long road might actually be the fastest way there.

It’s certainly better than anal leakage.

Jacob Reed and Me is a character-driven documentary podcast in the tradition of This American Life, Radiolab, and 99% Invisible. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Support the show and get early episodes at Patreon.

Special thanks to Dexa Body in San Diego for scanning me like a piece of airport luggage.

This podcast was recorded in the Octavia Lab, a free DIY makerspace inside the Los Angeles Public Library’s downtown Central Library. Visit lapl.org/labs to learn more.