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Drew Magary loves food and cooking. “I just always enjoyed it,” he says. “The idea that I don't have to wait around for somebody to make me, say, a popover? I can just go make them myself? That's very nice.”
And while GQ’s weekly Real-Life Diet interview usually features someone famous in incredible shape—maybe a pro athlete or a particularly ripped actor—Drew is a high-performance human in his own way. He's a former college athlete. He's a champion of the Food Network's Chopped. And he's one of the most prolific and entertaining writers in the game, spinning out a mind-boggling quantity of blogs and takes weekly. We're biased, of course, given that he’s also responsible for some particularly memorable GQ stories over the last decade—quizzing NFL MVP Christian McCaffrey, attempting American Ninja Warrior training, trolling an 18-year-old Justin Bieber.
Magary’s most recent project, The Night the Lights Went Out, which was released this week, is a little more serious than usual. It's a memoir about the brain hemorrhage and fall that broke his skull in three places, and the two weeks he spent in a coma when no one knew if he was going to make it. It's also about his tenacious and ultimately quite-successful recovery. So GQ caught up with Drew to talk about how—or whether—his routines have changed since waking up.
GQ: What do you eat for breakfast on a typical day?
Drew Magary: It kind of depends on what we have, and how unhealthy I’m feeling that morning. Usually a bagel with cream cheese and everything bagel seasoning, or I’ll make a toad in the hole, or oatmeal. But if I’ve stepped on the scale that morning like ah, well, a little porky there Drew, I’ll have a little bowl of almond butter with honey and sea salt in it. And it’s a lot: a lot of honey, a good amount of sea salt.
You mentioned the scale, and I know you love food. Weight isn't health necessarily, but how does loving food interact with health for you?
I do think weight and health are tied together. I know there are nuances to it, but in general, if I were 300 pounds, I would not be as healthy as I would be at 200 pounds. I lost a lot of weight in 2010. Since then, I've always tried to think of dieting as just editing and making sure if I'm eating, I'm eating something really good, and I'm not wasting my time eating things I've eaten a million times or aren't particularly interesting. I say all that, but I still fail. Like I still, you know, if there's a bag of open M&M's on the counter, I'm reaching into that sucker. The only real rule I have is that I don't eat after dinner, and we eat relatively early, like 6:30. If I don't eat after dinner, then I'm really going stretches of like 12 hours where I'm not eating anything. So it sort of fits into the intermittent fasting trend without really feeling that way. It feels really natural.
But I'm still 10 pounds heavier than I'd like to be. It's funny. I was about 225 pounds before I suffered my brain hemorrhage. At the hospital, they weighed me after I came out of my coma and I was 188. And I did a little fist bump, I remember. I was like, Yeah! But I looked like a fucking skeleton! It was bad, right? Then I came back and I got better and now I'm right back where I started, 225 and trying to get 10 pounds off.
You’ve written about quitting drinking. Have you otherwise had to be more mindful of your health—how you eat or otherwise take care of yourself—after this horrible thing happened?
Apart from alcohol? No, I don't think so. I get more rest than I used to, but I think that's more because the accident drained my battery a bit more than before. So I nap every day now and I didn't used to do that. But it's not something I do like, oh, I got to take a nap because of my brain. I just nap.
I try to make sure I'm mentally stimulated. I took up Sudoku afterward, which I sucked at. And then I got better at it and I started playing lots of puzzle games—that's proven to be good for brain health.
But alcohol is not a part of your diet anymore.
Not any more. I talk about this in the book, but we were never able to sort out what caused my hemorrhage or my fall—or if one caused the other. There’s no definitive proof that alcohol caused it, particularly because my blood alcohol level that night was not particularly high.
But then I woke up and I was coming out of a coma and I was potentially going through alcohol withdrawal symptoms but also completely high on all the coma drugs they had given me, and I was asking people to smuggle in beer. I thought there was a bar in the hospital. No hospital has a fucking bar? But I kept asking people to go down to the gift shop and bring me a six pack from the hospital lobby.
A few months into my recovery I got the blessing to drink from one doctor, who said I could do it in moderation—but I knew I couldn't do it in moderation. I had gotten this far without drinking and there was still a possibility that alcohol played a role in my accident. So I just stopped.
As you've written for GQ, you're not 100% sober, right?
Green and sober. I think that does the job nicely. It's like, oh, okay, well, instead of poisoning your body with alcohol over the course of years and years and years, you can just be green and sober and you can be uninhibited but you're not going to wake up feeling like absolute shit the next morning.
We covered breakfast. What do you usually eat for lunch?
If I haven't had a bagel or a toad in the hole, that's what I get to have for lunch. But I've also gotten on a burrata kick. Because I thought burrata was something you really only find on the menu at fancy restaurants, but I was going around the fucking Giant supermarket and they were selling it in the deli case. It was like $8 and one tub will make two lunches. So that's four bucks a lunch. That's not bad to get to feel like fancy pants.
I used to be more ornate with lunches: I would make breakfast tacos with eggs and feta, sometimes I would put some gochujang in there, or I would soak some glass noodles and sautée that with kale, or I would make ramen. Not packaged ramen, but I would use a little canister of pork bouillon ans shrimp paste and make ramen broth and use the good ramen noodles from H-Mart. But I don’t do that as much any more, because I’d rather nap.
It sounds like you really love food, though.
I was an overweight kid because I love eating food, and that's still true to this day. I think and talk about food all the time. I think I got it from my grandma—she would always talk about whenever she had eaten or what she was about to eat, and I always do the same thing to my wife. She’s like: we have to talk about something else instead of just what we’re going to eat for dinner. But it’s the big part of my day. If I we’re having boeuf Bourguignon for dinner, that's where my mind is for most of the day. That’s my reward for the day’s toil.
So then what’s usually for dinner?
Dinner’s a family affair. My wife and I have to go through it at the beginning of the week and plan to shop to cook for two nights and have leftovers for two nights so that lasts us through Thursday. Never happens like that.
But we have a rotation and make a lot of different stuff. She has family favorites like chicken paprika and lahmajoon, which is Armenian pizza. I make regular pizza, we’ll make pasta—there’s a special pasta with mascarpone and broccoli and sausage. It’s a Giada recipe from the Food Network. My daughter is sort of—she says she’s a vegetarian. Sometimes she lapses. She’d rather eat vegetables than not. So there's a bit of a challenge to make sure that it's something that everybody can eat. And then some nights we have to make two different meals and it's a real pain in the ass. But really it’s all over the place.
You’re a Chopped champion. You’re making lunch ramen and Giada pastas and all this other food. How did you learn to cook?
My mom was raising us just as the food revolution was happening—you know, Alice Waters and all that stuff. She would let us participate in the cooking and she would introduce us to new things, and whenever she thought it was okay for me to make my own eggs or top ramen she would let me do that on the stovetop. I always loved doing that. I liked to control my own food because I liked looking at it and getting ready to eat it.
And then: this is really stupid, but when I first moved to New York and met my wife we would watch Oliver's Twist. So not The Naked Chef—that was Jamie Oliver's first show, but the one after that. We would get those cooking techniques from him and do the accent. I learned to chop onions like Bourdain. It was just sort of this amalgam of my personal history and the culture evolving towards food and cooking.
Were you cheffing it up in the dorms in college?
I didn't cook in college except when I had a semester abroad in England because I was living in a place with a kitchen. And one of the things that I realized was that if I cooked for girls, the girls would like me.
You played football through college, right? Were you a pretty serious athlete?
I was someone who really wanted to be a serious athlete without being terribly competent at it, if that makes sense. I liked being a football player and being on a football team and doing the off-season weight programs to be a football player. I was third string in college, so like two snaps in my two years.
But you're still doing the camps and the weights and the runs and stuff.
Yeah. I did all that. I would go to a field in the summer and do wind sprints because I wanted to get my 40 time down. I imagined myself being like Barry Sanders in a Nike ad—or just, someone who goes in their off time and flips monster truck tires and all that.
Has that carried over into your adult life in any way?
Only a little bit. I don't even go to the gym anymore. I quit the gym because of the pandemic.
You don't think you're ever going back?
I'm not going back because I bought an elliptical. I bought it in June of 2020, but it didn't arrive until like November or something. But since then it's been the greatest thing. I don't have to drive to a gym anymore? I can just do it downstairs? I do 45 minutes a day, five days a week. But also I incorporate push-ups into my regime, and that's when ambitious teenage athlete Drew comes out—like, all grunts. I tape up one of my wrists up like I'm about to go play defensive end. And then when I'm done with with my sets I’m like fuck you, I did it!
The Miami Heat forward caught up with GQ about avocados, his new coffee venture, and exploring the world through food.
