The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss (20 page)

Like-Minded People Will Rock Your World

JD,

The 400-meter run was difficult for me today. Bruce Pitcher, who is my mentor, did the lunges with me and then said, “Let’s go, Rod!” as we chug-jogged out the door. But before I got to the door, Brandi jogged next to me, and then AJ jogged next to Bruce, and Sara jogged next to Brandi, and as we jogged out the door, Mandy jogged behind me. Josh was finishing his last 400, turned around and jogged with us, then Cassie turned and jogged again.

We were all jogging. Together. Like a team. . . . Those guys had all done their workouts already. That last 400 meters for me? That’s another shining example of what this is and has been for me. It’s been about the relationships and the connections, about the love. I just felt it in the biggest way. And that is everything.

—Rod,
Extreme Weight Loss
cast member, via email

Joining an online community is a great way to go, but there are plenty of ways to establish community. Think about other ways you can draw people into your cause. Get their (and your) competitive juices flowing. Ask your boss to put up a $50 Whole Foods (or healthy market near you) gift certificate for a three-month challenge: see how much weight, percentage-wise, everyone in the office can lose. It drives conversation—and it drives you. Instead of, “Morning, what did you binge watch last night?” it becomes “Did you work out last night?” What you’re doing is building a community of like minded people who are there to help each other (you included!) stay in step.

You just posted your goals and your picture on Facebook. You called friends and told them you’re going to lose weight. You announced it at a family dinner. You’ve told everyone the news and gathered all these people around you. Now figure out who should stay, and who should go. What do I mean by that? Some people are going to lift you up, support, and inspire you. Other people are going to drag you back down to where they like you—stuck in the sedentary, face-stuffing, miserable old days where they still dwell.

And if you think you can weather the influence of friends and family, I’d ask you to think again. In 2007, researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego who analyzed data from over 12,000 people found that a person’s risk of becoming obese was 45 percent higher if he or she had a friend who was obese than it would be otherwise. Even if a friend of a friend is obese, the risk rises 25 percent. Have a friend of a friend of a friend who is obese? Your risk rises 10 percent. It extends to family, too. If an adult sibling became obese, your risk increased by 40 percent; if a spouse became obese, your risk rises to 37 percent. Fatness is contagious.

This is brutal, but it has to be said: Many of your friends and family members will not want you to succeed. If you don’t want to go out for tacos and pizza anymore, whom are they going to eat with? Your wanting to live a better life puts them in (what they see as) a terrible position. There’s the real possibility, too, that your success will make them feel worse about the way they neglect their own health. You’re fixing yourself, but they haven’t even set foot in the repair shop.

You’d think that the people who love you the most would be your biggest cheerleaders. They’ll be so happy for your success! Um, most likely not. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but most people prefer to have others around them that validate their way of life. When you make major changes, that validation goes away. Hopefully, your friends and family will surprise you, but don’t take it for granted that you will feel supported by all the people who supported you in your old way of life. It may happen, but you can’t count on it. What I’ve seen time and again is that the people you think are going to support you are the very ones that don’t. On the other hand, you’ll be surprised by some others who
do
support you. They will come from places you didn’t expect.

Approach the situation warily. Just like alcoholics, you have to have people around you who are “in the program.” Recovering alcoholics don’t work in a bar. So think about how your friends and family have aided and abetted your eat-a-thons and fast-food way of life. (In some cases, it may have been part of the reason they were with you in the first place. You could always be depended on to go out for drinks and chicken wings.) Remember Panda, the guy I introduced you to in Chapter 2 who always felt too weak to lose weight? During
Extreme Weight Loss
Boot Camp, we sent Panda home to talk to his parents about some of the things that had happened during his youth. It was a revelation in more ways than one. “Going home, I realized that a lot of my memories with my friends are all tied in with food,” he recalls. “I was driving around the city, saying, ‘Oh, my God, there’s that restaurant we’d go to, there’s the best doughnut shop.’ I could see that those relationships that revolved around food were either going to have to go away or change.”

That realization didn’t make it any easier. “People don’t like change,” says Panda. “Oh, what do you mean you can’t go to lunch with me . . . you’re too good for me?” When you change, even if you don’t say it, you’re implying that your former partners in crime need to change, too. That can cause a lot of friction, which is unfortunate because seeing someone you love do something monumental—and it’s no joke, when you consider how many people fail at it, losing weight is monumental—should inspire, not demoralize you.

The Power of Love

Hi JD,

I love what you said about how important it is to have someone hug you, be told that you are loved, and have someone really believe in you. I truly found that with [my fitness trainer] Steven. It has made all the difference in the world to me. I walked into the gym with a lot of self-hate, shame, and a hard heart. How much I have changed as a woman. It has been a total gift to me to be encouraged, pushed, and loved (and, of course, having fun while doing it!!).

—Elaine, via email

Part of the weight-loss process for Panda—as it should be for you—is drawing up the strength to say no. In the beginning, Panda found he’d always break to someone else’s will. Even if he was trying to eat healthfully and he went to, say, a BBQ or a fried chicken place, he would ultimately indulge. I mean, come on! Who goes to McDonald’s and orders a salad? If I want salad, I’ll go to a salad place. Places that sell fatty ribs soaked in sauce and chicken deep-fried in oil are not the places to go if you want to eat healthfully. You have to avoid restaurants that might kick off a food memory and make you pick something you know isn’t going to be good for you. That may mean avoiding the people who stubbornly cling to your old haunts—they don’t want to go anywhere else. For Panda, that meant letting the promise he made to himself override the inclination to give his friends a good time.

Again, you have to look at overeating and inactivity as you would a drug addiction. Who do people who are hooked on drugs hang out with? Other drug addicts. If they get off drugs, then go back to hanging out with the same group of fellow addicts, what happens? They end up back on the drugs. You have to get rid of those friends and start over—which is painful for everybody—or you need to hope that those people can make adjustments. If you don’t insulate and protect yourself, it’s so easy to fall back into the same old ways. Meet people at a bar . . . you drink. Meet people at a gym . . . you work out. Do the math. Think of it this way: It’s time to choose you. Tell anyone not being supportive that it’s time to join you, or that you won’t be hanging out with them. Like I tell my kids: You are whom you stand next to. If you stand next to people who don’t take care of themselves, guess what? It won’t be long until you are adopting similar behaviors.

During the talks I give to cast members of
The Biggest Loser
and
Extreme Weight Loss,
I repeatedly warn them about how their relationships may suffer when they leave Boot Camp and go home. This isn’t me going all doomsday on them; it’s just that I’ve seen friends and family undo someone’s hard work too many times. When I sound the friends and family alarm for the cast, though, most of them react badly to the news. “It’s my best friend; of course she wants me to succeed.” “Why wouldn’t my husband want me in a sexier body?” They may and they may not, but if they don’t, it’s not because they don’t love you. We’ve had people whose parents didn’t want them to lose weight because they didn’t want them to feel confident enough to leave home. We’ve had mates—husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends—who’ve felt the same way. They think that if their significant other gets thin, they’ll leave them.

And sometimes they’re right. But people don’t leave because they’ve become thin. They leave because they’ve become happy, and they want to stay that way. They leave because they weren’t really happy before they lost the weight. You don’t all of a sudden fall out of love by getting thin; you just realize you want more out of life.

Unless, of course, your mate decides to go on the journey with you. Suddenly, you find him getting up at the crack of dawn to join you for a run, or you find her preparing a healthy, low-fat meal that she learned to cook just for you. Sharing the experience versus having a passive (or, worse, unsupportive) partner makes all the difference in the world. The chances of your relationship making it through this life change go up exponentially if your partner joins in the transformation.

After spending 90 days in Boot Camp, the people who appear on
Extreme Weight Loss
go home on the 91st day with a new way of life and quite possibly a feeling of independence that they never had before. The contestants on
The Biggest Loser
contend with an even bigger disparity since they’ve been away for a longer time. They go home after six months having lost way north of 100 pounds feeling as though they are different people.

But, as is often the case, everything has changed for them, while nothing has changed for their friends and family. While they spent months looking in the mirror, doing the work of changing inside and out, their loved ones have usually spent months looking out the window, maybe dreaming of change, but not changing a bit. Their husbands are still sitting in the same recliners with the same plates on their bellies watching the same TV show with the same food stains on their T-shirts. Their wives are still cooking the same meals. Their friends are still going out for pizza and beer. Their co-workers are still racing out the door to happy hour as soon as its quitting time. I can’t tell you how many people we’ve had on our shows who, after they lose the weight, go home and quit their jobs or leave their spouses. They realize that they are in a toxic situation—whether it is at work or at home—and that if they hope to maintain all that they’ve gained (and lost), they have to shake things up. Some people even move to a different state. It’s all part of the same trajectory: Change your attitude, change your habits, change your life. Realize that you deserve it. Put value on your own life, and surround yourself with people who share the same value system.

My goal isn’t to break up families or friendships. The best-case scenario is one where getting healthy adds a new dimension to your relationship or brings out the caring side of those closest to you. That can happen and it often does. Friends and family that get on board by transforming their own habits seem to get closer to the person who initiated the change. But I can also say I don’t regret that we helped some people gain the emotional toughness they needed to walk away from unhealthy relationships. (By the way, many people on our shows have formed healthy relationships with each other and gone on to marry. There are lots of
The Biggest Loser
babies.) If you come home from the gym and your husband is waiting impatiently for you to head out for your usual Friday night ribs and onion rings, that’s trouble. He may mean well—he missed you while you were gone and is eager to spend time with you—but he obviously doesn’t understand what you’re going through. One way or another, that has to change. And more often than not, when you play the card of “you either start supporting me, and better yet, also get healthy yourself, or I am choosing a better life,” the other person snaps to attention and learns to get in line. That doesn’t necessarily mean he has to come to the gym with you, but it does mean he needs to take care of the kids so you can.

Let’s also look at this in a different light. Your decision to clean up your lifestyle provides the perfect opportunity for your family and friends to pull together and become even closer. Lean in and say, “Let’s do this together.” When someone loses weight and deals with issues right alongside you, it’s an act of love, demonstrated through actions, not words. It can trigger the rebirth of a relationship. I’ve told you about how cast members often go home to find that nothing’s changed. Well, there are also times when they go home after months only to discover that their mates spent that whole time losing weight themselves. What better way to show love than to achieve the same goal? It’s like saying, “I love you, I love us, and if you can do it, I can, too.” When friends and family take up the challenge, it honors you in every way.