He’s half the man he used to be, and Danny Cahill couldn’t be happier about it.
Cahill, who won NBC’s The Biggest Loser Tuesday night, is the biggest loser in the history of the massive weight-loss challenge TV show, dropping a total of 239 pounds in a little over three months.
“You have to believe you can do it before you can do it. And I believed,” Cahill said during a telephone press conference with media on Wednesday, putting a zen-like spin on his seemingly super-human pound-trimming abilities.
The 40-year-old land surveyor and musician from Broken Arrow, Okla., was 430 pounds when the season started. Today, he’s an almost unrecognizable 191.
Since that transformation obviously took a lot of personal willpower and strength to accomplish, one can’t help but wonder why Cahill failed to lose the weight before coming on a TV show.
“I asked myself that question and got a little frustrated with myself about halfway through the show, when I started noticing the body changes that I had, noticing myself looking and feeling better, and being able to do more,” Cahill tells Tonic. “It got me thinking, ‘Why Danny? Why did you wait 15 years? Why did it take The Biggest Loser to do this?’ I don’t understand why I didn’t. I look back now and I just look at all those years wasted.”
That doesn’t diminish from his sense of achievement now, of course. “Without The Biggest Loser I might still be 430 pounds [and] putting it off for another day. That goes to show, you’ve got to begin now. You can’t start on Monday. ‘I’m gonna start my diet on Monday.’ That never works. You’ve got to start this minute. This minute.”
This minute, Danny Cahill is starting the rest of his brand-new life. He’s looking forward to starting martial arts lessons with his son. He’s already done some rock climbing with his family — physical things he simply wasn’t able to do before the show changed his life. He can’t wait to get in a little boat and go fishing, he says, or to jump into an inner tube and float around a pond. His body couldn’t fit through an inner-tube’s hole before this.
He’s even looking forward to helping put up the Christmas decorations at his house — something his wife had to take the lead on before, because no manufacturer makes a ladder that can hold a 430-pound man.
Since dropping the pounds, he’s seen his creative juices flowing again, too: For years Cahill put his love of music on a back burner. Now? He’s writing songs again. “I’ve found that fire again to do what I love to do,” he says. “Music will be a large part of my life from here on out. So be looking for Danny Cahill — I’ll definitely have some music out there!”
Most of all, he’s looking forward to helping other people change their own lives for the better. “I’m just looking forward to taking what I’ve learned on The Biggest Loser and giving it to others,” he says. “My goal is to pay it forward and to be an inspiration to everyone I can come in contact with.”
He’s already inspired his wife: She’s lost about 60 pounds on her own since he started the show, he says, and the two plan to have weekly Saturday morning weigh-ins to keep each other in check going forward.
But Cahill has much bigger plans for spreading his inspirational weight-loss story around.
“There are a lot of people out there who need help and need information on how to correct their weight. So for me to take that information that was so generously given to me, and this chance that I was given, and to horde it and not completely sow that seed?” Not a chance, Cahill says: “I’m gonna sow that seed. And you know what happens when you sow seed? You reap a harvest. And that’s what I want to be. I want to be Farmer Danny reaping that harvest across the nation.”
Photos courtesy NBC Photo: Trae Patton.
