On his YouTube channel, The Needle Drop, self-proclaimed music nerd Anthony Fantano has posted over 4,000 videos and accumulated more than 3 million followers over 16 years. His opinions on music are well-documented and widely debated, but his diet, exercise, and wellness routine only recently entered the conversation, when Fananto, who recently turned 40, posted photos of himself competing in the Spartan Race obstacle course competition.
Posting near-daily videos about music ranging from Brazilian pop to Deftones to Earl Sweatshirt, Fantano has a busy schedule and weathers constant attacks online from stans and other music zealots. Sticking to a fairly regimented diet helps him save time, while physical and mental exercise (i.e. therapy) helps him stay serene amidst a storm of people getting mad at him about Wet Leg.
In the Spartan Race, which he completed with no special training in October, Fantano repped a now somewhat obscure country singer whose heyday was in the ’70s and ’80s. Music remains his business and his passion; don’t expect Fantano to launch a fitness channel or make a bid for the manosphere.
GQ: What was the impetus for getting into fitness and having more of a focus on your body and your well-being?
Anthony Fantano: It actually goes back a really long time. My father was a competitive powerlifter. During that time, and for a handful of years afterwards, he was a coach for powerlifters and for bodybuilders. So, as soon as I was old enough, he had me in the gym with him. It just made sense to do while I was there—like, I might as well be doing something to occupy my time. He had me learning proper form with bench, squat, and deadlifts. It was a lot of strength training, but there wasn’t really a whole lot of focus on competitive advancement or diet or anything like that. Honestly, with the way that he trained the people who he was working with, the less you thought about it the better. If you wanted to succeed and train under him without having your life turned into a living hell, you just did what he said.
I see.
Powerlifting is something that you can only do competitively for a certain amount of time before it wears on your body in a certain way, or you run into some injury at some point. At his peak, we’re also talking about an era where steroids were legal. Then, in the midst of that, they became illegal. So, we’re talking about a massive paradigm shift in terms of the way the competitive scene was looking. I’ve stuck with that training for years. But I think my health and the way that I look at fitness personally started to take a different turn when I started to contend with how overweight I was as a teenager.
Even though I was strong and I had listened to all of my dad’s advice, I didn’t really know much of anything about diet outside of, “Well, if you want to lift as much as you possibly can, you should probably be eating as much as you possibly can.” I started to think and worry more about being as overweight as I was, because even though I was strong, I didn’t feel great. When I was 16 or 17, not really doing anything strenuous—maybe I was sore from a workout earlier in the week, I don’t know—I forget specifically when it happened, but I threw my back out. I was bedridden for a few days. I felt miserable the whole time and was reflecting on the fact that I was a teenager, I should be able to get out of bed, move around, and feel good in my body. These are supposed to be my peak years physically. What’s going on?
When my back felt better and I finally did get the ability to move around again without any pain or soreness, I had decided right then and there I needed to lose the weight, which meant limiting myself to three meals a day, watching the amount of fat input, doing a lot of walking, just drinking water (no soda), and limiting myself to a lot of soups, sandwiches, that sort of thing. I had gone from 310 pounds to 175 pounds in about a year and a half.
This is still when you’re in high school?
Yeah. My build was really funny, because my upper body, my arms, and my face just got real, real, real skinny, but my legs were massive from carrying around all that weight for so long. To this day, I excel most at squat. Out of all my muscle groups, my legs have always historically been the strongest. After I lost all the weight, I actually did take a break from weight lifting. I had found that the more I was lifting weights, especially after a workout, I just get hungrier. I was trying to focus so much on controlling my cravings and just starting to eat within more normal parameters. Lifting super heavy was making doing that difficult at the time. My dad did have a lot of advice in terms of what I needed to do, or what I should be eating in order to lift heavy, but he’s no weight loss expert for sure. I mostly needed to figure that out on my own, without even doing any calorie counting or anything like that. This is the early-2000s, so it’s not like I’m going on the internet finding out about this stuff. I’m just doing it just based off of like, I think I should just be eating less.
Yeah, we were guessing.
Right. I was just doing it purely off of intuition. As I transitioned from high school into college, I got more curious about vegetarianism. More information was becoming available in terms of diet and exercise online. I was reading more about vegetarianism. I committed to that and had a bit of a turbulent start getting into it. But eventually, I learned to cook for myself more. Once I graduated college and I had more control over what I was eating because I was traveling less, commuting to school on a regular basis, and there were more options available—because it was a tough time to start going vegetarian around the period that I did, in terms of food options outside of the grocery store and stuff—I was able to pretty much fully go vegan. I’ve pretty much been vegan, for the most part, since about 2007.
What does a normal day of eating look like for you? Do you cook every meal for yourself?
I wouldn’t say every meal is cooked, unless it’s something that I can cook a bunch of in advance and then have saved.
Classic.
If I can cook a bunch of pancakes, I’ll have those for breakfast and save them. But, these days I’ve been on an oatmeal and granola kick.