The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss (13 page)

So why are you fat? First, let’s explore some of the excuses in more depth.
I have the fat gene.
There’s no such thing as a single fat gene. There is the “I make bad decisions gene” and the “I was taught bad habits gene,” but your family members are fat because of their behavior. You don’t have to be like them. Yes, you may have a genetic predisposition that puts you on the chubbier side, but that’s no reason to let your weight get completely out of bounds. It doesn’t mean you’re doomed to be fat. It just means you have to work harder to keep fit! Coming from the family I come from, I’m living proof of that. And don’t tell me that obesity is a disease you’re stuck with. Alcoholism is a disease, but do you think alcoholics should still drink? What if they were to tell their families, “I have the alcoholic gene, so it means I’m going to drink. Get used to it”? Drinking is destructive, but so is being so overweight that it jeopardizes your health.

I find it interesting that a 2014 study conducted by researchers at the University of Richmond found that overweight people who read literature stating that obesity is a disease ate more calories than overweight people who were given information specifically stating that obesity is
not
a disease. Of course they did! The way I read this study is,
See, I can’t help it if I’m fat, I have a disease, might as well eat what I like.
If somebody gives you an out—whether that somebody is a doctor, a scientist, or yourself—you’re going to take it. But whether obesity is a disease or not (I’ll leave that to the medical experts), you can’t make it an excuse to eat yourself into oblivion.

Other feeble excuses? I’ve heard thousands of them. “My knee hurts, I can’t get on the treadmill.”
Excuse
. “My husband won’t watch the kids so I can’t exercise.”
Excuse
. “I’m not a morning person.”
Excuse
. “I have two jobs.”
Excuse.
“I have to eat what my wife cooks.”
Excuse
. “Going out to eat is my social life.”
Excuse.
“I work a desk job.”
Excuse.
“My dog ate my treadmill.”
Impossible!

These things may interfere with leading a healthy lifestyle, but I’m willing to bet that, whether you’re aware of it or not, there is an emotional or psychological issue that is at the root of your weight problem. It doesn’t mean that something horrific had to have happened to you. It could be that the stress of life is getting to you and, with poor coping skills, you find solace in french fries. Who doesn’t? My weakness is chocolate chip cookies. When I’m having a bad day and walk into the house and smell a fresh batch baking, a cookie is better then sex . . . Okay, maybe not better. But it ain’t worse, either!

Read Between Your Own Lines (and Lies), and You’ll Find the Truth

Hi JD,

I have to tell you that I have never forgotten the day that I met you, and you asked me to tell you my story because you didn’t know anything about me.

For so many years, I have hidden behind the mask of looking like I have it all together, and that day you called me out. Thank you. That was the first time

I even told my story. At that moment, I realized that I was going to change for me. When I put my sh** out there for the first time, and started to have a little pity party, you brought it right back to me and helped me confront that a lot of the things that happened to me, were my choice. Ouch.

I am so glad that I finally let go of every secret, bad choice, failure, and disappointment I have been holding onto for the last 13 years and cried out for your help. For the first time, I am looking forward to my future!

—Charita,
Extreme Weight Loss
cast member, via email

There could be lots of things boiling beneath the surface. Maybe you’re angry, very angry, but have no outlet for that anger. Somewhere along the way, you replaced those feelings with cheesecake and BBQ ribs, and it gave you pleasure. Then, when you kept doing it, your brain took over, associating those foods with feeling good. So now, your brain asks you to repeat the action over and over again. In fact, it’s come to the point where the only way you feel pleasure now is to eat those foods.

That mind-body connection is real. Neurobiological researchers have shown that doing something enjoyable, like eating a chocolate cupcake, causes the brain to release a chemical called dopamine. Expose your brain to that hit of dopamine over and over again, and it’s going to develop a habit. Your brain is going to make your body crave that dopamine in a gotta-have-it kind of way.

Maybe, though, you have something else going on. Maybe, like Georgeanna, you succeeded at being a great mom and failed to take care of yourself. It could be something deeper, too. Maybe you’ve never gotten over the pain of parental neglect or the ending of a relationship. Big, small, somewhere in between—whatever it is, you have to deal with it if you want to lose weight. Again, it goes back to what’s in your heart and head. Figure out what’s eating you, and the pounds will melt off.

It’s also possible that your real reason for being fat is locked so deep in your subconscious that you’re not even aware of what’s holding you back. That means you’re going to have to do a deep dive into your life, really look closely, and pick apart, calorie by calorie, bad decision by bad decision, how you got where you are today. Think about the last time you were happy with yourself and work forward from there. Something happened. Somewhere along the way, you stopped being important to yourself. You gave up. The renowned psychotherapist Carl Jung famously said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” For overweight people, fate is “I love food.” “I love to cook.” “I don’t know how to cook.” “I can only afford fast food.” “I have the fat gene.” And all those other excuses that provide solace because they make it seem like you’re powerless to avoid being fat. But there’s something else there. You know it, and I know it.

So how do you make the unconscious conscious? Talk about it to anyone who will listen! Attack the situation as thoroughly as you attack a pepperoni pizza! Dig down deep to find the answer to the question: Why am I fat? The other day, I heard a woman being interviewed on the radio who had lost a job opportunity because of her weight. Most people would have dug in their heels and said, “They need to accept me for the way I am.” But she was in the performing arts, and she had to face up to the cold hard fact that the performing arts world doesn’t work that way. So she made a concerted effort to slim down. In the interview I heard, she began talking about how she got to be fat in the first place. “Food was my best friend,” she said.

Immediately, I thought to myself,
Here we go, she’s going to talk about how she was fat because she loved food.
But the woman surprised me. She went on to say that while she had had a gastric bypass, it was only a tool to help her get the weight off and that her lack of self-esteem and her self-criticism did not go away when the weight did. She acknowledged that her emotional difficulties had to be dealt with, or the pounds would have come back on. In that respect, she told the interviewer, losing weight was not as easy as she thought it would be. But by addressing the fact that she didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin, she was ultimately able to keep the weight off. The weight-loss surgery helped, but she owed her success to confronting her personal issues.

There’s no one explanation for why people get dangerously or even just uncomfortably fat, and maybe you already know your (real) reason. Sometimes, though, it takes serious digging to get at the issue (or issues) behind the pounds. Maybe you’ll even need a therapist to help you. Don’t be afraid to reach out to one. But start the process with some introspection. Make the effort to fearlessly confront and work through the problem. Ask your friends and family, too. Sometimes, they have the insight you need—they’ve just always been too afraid to share it. But it can help you.

As the woman I heard on the radio discovered, introspection is no walk in the park. People think weight loss is hard because food is tempting and exercise is painful. That’s not what’s hard. You can do all the exercise and diet stuff. What’s hard is looking at your life. But it’s the solution. When you start admitting what’s really going on, change happens. Yes, that’s right. The real work is done in the mirror!

As I got to know Elaine, the woman I mentioned in Chapter 1 who wanted to lose weight so that she could climb up to the fortress at Masada, I learned more about how she ended up carrying an extra hundred pounds. It wasn’t like she was a fat kid; in fact, she didn’t start gaining weight until she was in her late twenties and went through a divorce. Some people have the life skills to move on. Elaine didn’t. So without the benefit of a supportive family to walk her through the steps of dealing with emotional turmoil, she ran away, landing in probably the worst place for someone in need of comfort: a cruise ship. “It was a great place to disappear,” she says. It was also a great place to get fat. For five years, while working on the ship, Elaine did what most people do for only a vacation: She dove right into the all-you-can-eat-and-drink cruise ship culture. And it wasn’t even fun. The heavier she got, the more she stayed isolated in her cabin. “I didn’t want to feel anything. I was eating and drinking to push down my feelings,” says Elaine.

You know how parents teach babies to self-soothe so they don’t need to be held all the time? Parents should also teach their older kids how to self-soothe without self-destructively stuffing themselves. Most of us never get taught healthy coping skills, so when stuff happens, we’re all vulnerable to the pull of hedonism. When that hedonism gets out of control, it’s like a double-whammy. Without good coping skills, an upheaval will send you into the arms of your neighborhood baker, then because you, once again, are lacking coping skills, the shame and embarrassment of cleaning out the bakery will make you continue your descent into overeating. It’s a vicious cycle.

Fat is insulation in every sense of the word. Psychologically, it insulates you against painful emotions. Physically, it gives you a place to hide away from the world. Nobody wants to deal with the fat person; nobody is going to come on to you in an unwanted sexual way. People might not even befriend or be polite to you. A man will go the extra mile and hold a door open for a thin, beautiful woman. But for a 300-pound woman? Ignored. And she feels that. “People don’t notice you when you’re fat; they look through you,” says Elaine. Perhaps you like it that way? Mitzi—who you might remember from Chapter 1 as the woman who so enjoyed finally being able to go to an amusement park—did.

Mitzi:
Before

Mitzi:
After

When Mitzi began the weight-loss process, she took the time to look at old photographs of herself. The changes—and their causes—became obvious. “I was a normal-size baby, but when I was five years old, my parents divorced and, almost instantly, you can see me going from a normal-size child to getting a little chubby,” she says. “When I reflect back at different times in my life that my weight went up, each time involved a loss of some sort. My mother and father’s divorce, a bad relationship, losing my mother. Getting into my teen years and into my twenties, it was getting attention from older men. If I gained more weight, then they’d leave me alone. It was a way of shutting people out, of not wanting people to be attracted to me in any form or fashion.” Instead of figuring out a way to deal with unwanted attention from men, Mitzi, like hundreds of other women, found it was easier to just get fat, ensuring that most men wouldn’t even bother.

Elaine saw her weight that way, too. Over the years, she ended up yo-yoing back and forth between fat and slim. Early on in this roller-coaster ride, she realized that being thin scared her. “When I would lose weight, I’d feel emotionally naked,” she says. “Fat was like two arms around me, comforting me.”