The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss (11 page)

I could tell right off the bat that José was a kid who was used to failing. He didn’t even want to
try
to succeed; he was just so comfortable with the status quo. But we’d given him one of our best trainers, and I wasn’t about to give up. “But you have Joey, the most bad-ass trainer around! It’s going to happen for you. You’re going to do great,” I told him.

“Nope, I’m out,” he said.

This gave the other kids a perfect chance to rally around him, but the room was silent. Cue the
Rocky
music; I was about to go all out. Here’s what I told him:

You get one chance to change your life. This is that chance. If it passes now, you may never get it again. Your life will always be
before
this show started and
after
it ended. Make it an “after” you can be proud of. If you can do this, anything is possible. If you can do this, you can be anything! One hundred days seems like forever, but at Day 100 when you feel like Superman, it will be worth it. Don’t leave today; if you still feel this way tomorrow, then you can leave.

Within 24 hours, José was on board to stay. I never had to ask him if he wanted to leave again. He decided that day that he was going to commit and give it his all.

Happy Can Be Your Happy Place

Hi JD,

I just wanted to send you a picture of my latest milestone in life! Trying on my first bikini. Life has been so amazing! It was so exhilarating to do something I never thought in a million years I could do.

—Amanda,
The Biggest Loser
contestant, via email

What he didn’t anticipate was that “his all” was not only good enough but it was beyond that of any other kid participating in the show. José ended up losing 117 pounds in less then 100 days and was the most successful kid on the whole show. By taking a risk and venturing out of his happy place, he had given himself a different life. Just to give you an idea of how badly he had been treated in high school, his nickname was “Titties.” No joke. Every time someone called him that, he felt defeated. It’s much easier to eat that third doughnut after someone calls you a name like that. Why not eat it? You’re already disgraced by your nickname. Once the show was over, though, it was a different story. His friends changed his nickname to “Pecs.” Happy became his happy place.

José:
Before

José:
After, with his trainer, Joey

My favorite part of the story was the final interview we had with him. He told us that for the first time in his life, he had dreams. Dreams of being successful. Dreams of being a good son. Dreams of getting a good job and making a life for himself. Just by taking control and turning a negative into a positive, his whole outlook on life changed—in 100 days! Aren’t you worth that?

I tell you this story because I wish I could come to your house and yell at you, too! Don’t continue to let unhappy be your happy place. If I were to sit down with you and ask if you loved failure or trauma or being verbally abused by your family or boss, I’m sure you’d say no. But if any of these things are recurring in your life, you have to take a closer look and ask yourself if maybe you’ve become just a little too in love with misery. Maybe it’s even become part of your identity.

Jennifer is a woman we had on
Extreme Weight Loss
who defined herself by her sad story. And make no mistake; she really did have a sad story. When Jennifer was 9 years old, she was playing with her younger half-brother when he fell and hit his head on the hearth in the family living room. He died three days later. It was about that time that Jennifer’s stepfather, blaming her for the death, began to beat her regularly, finally driving her out of the house at age 16. (She later learned that her brother had died of spinal meningitis—the head injury had nothing to do with his death, a fact her parents knew but never told her.) The drama in Jennifer’s life continued. She nearly died after a rafting incident, survived cancer three times, then married a man—her second husband and the love of her life—who she knew before the wedding was terminally ill with an autoimmune disease. Because his time was short, he had asked her to try out for the show so she could lose weight, get healthy, and be around to walk their daughters down the aisle one day. It wasn’t surprising to me that Jennifer also spends her days immersed in trauma: She’s a 911 operator. After reading this paragraph, you would have to agree that Jennifer had been set up to fail by her family—and by herself!

Jennifer:
Before

Jennifer:
After

After I heard Jennifer’s story, I asked her if she knew her husband was sick when she married him. She said yes, and as she did, I could see her bristle. “I don’t mean that you don’t love him, I’m sure you do,” I said to her, and she relaxed a little, “but I just wondered why you put yourself in a position that would inevitably be traumatic. You chose and had children with a man whose life, you know, is going to be cut very short. And why do you work at a job that puts you in the middle of trauma every day?”

Jennifer admitted that my questions pissed her off. I even asked her why she didn’t confront her stepfather. He didn’t, after all, have power over her anymore. She was making a choice to give him power over her. “The idea that it was on me, not my stepfather, made me squirm,” recalls Jennifer, “but I came to realize that I didn’t want to be in that victim state anymore. My sad stories had come to define me; they were who I was. I had to step out of my comfort zone and be different, and that was hard.”

This is an extreme case, but an important one to look at. On a scale of 1 to 10, where do you fall on the unhappy-is-my-happy-place continuum? If you’re on it at all, start thinking about why. Try to self-diagnose. What is it about the drama that sucks you in like a magnet? If you’ve become comfortable living in failure world, then you’re inevitably going to fail at weight loss. Whether your conscious of it or not, that cozy little spot where nothing is ventured and nothing (except more pounds) is gained has come to suit you. Remember, this is a game of chess you are playing, and you have to be five moves ahead if you are going to be successful.

Start believing that failure is no longer an option for you. Resist it, repel it, use Wonder Woman wristbands to deflect it if you have to, but from this moment on, when you feel drama coming on . . . run! (Which will burn calories, too!)

I tell every single contestant on all of our weight-loss shows the same thing. In life, to be successful, you have to have the window and the mirror. I am sure you are thinking this is some kind of L.A. new-age psychobabble, but read on. The window is the dream. It’s what’s out there if you could just get your act together. It’s all the possibilities. What am I going to look like when I’m thin? What will life be like? Nothing wrong with picturing the future, but while, sure, the view out the window is nice, it’s also not real . . . yet. The window is a passive experience. Life is
lived
in the mirror. The mirror represents action. It can sometimes cause lots of pain, but looking in the mirror can also provide the greatest moments of growth.

Everyone has to have hopes and dreams.
Realizing
your hopes and dreams is another story. You can’t just spend your days dreaming about how you want your life to be, or your dreams will be just that: dreams, not reality. Too many people, I find, focus so hard on their aspirations (the window) that they ignore who they are (the mirror) and the way they’re living right now. So stop looking out the window all day and start looking in the mirror. If you haven’t gotten serious about losing weight until now, it’s a sign that you’ve been looking out the window for too long.

I know why you’ve been avoiding the mirror. When you look in the mirror, it’s easy to see how out of control you’ve let your life get. It’s what you really look like. It’s how unhealthy you probably are. And it’s what you’re doing to make yourself that way. Who wants to look at that? Especially with the lights on! But you have to learn to invite those moments in. As unbearable as looking at that reflection in the mirror may feel, you need to be looking at it constantly. It may be difficult to believe now, but once you start to make changes in your lifestyle, looking in the mirror will become more exciting than looking out the window. It will even improve the view out the window by helping you dream even bigger—but this time, with a real chance of making those dreams come true.

Don’t just glance in the mirror—look! Act as if you’re attached to a lie detector and make a truthful assessment. Pretend you are in a room with mirrors all around you; there’s no way you cannot really see yourself as you are. The falsehoods will bounce off the glass and come back and hit you in the face. Truth is essential. You’re never going to live that life you see out the window unless you take a good, hard look in the mirror. That’s where the real work is done.

A Beautiful Reflection

JD,

I found my window and my mirror, and let me tell ya, the future’s lookin’ bright ;).