The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss (28 page)

There’s also evidence that ping-ponging between “good” and “bad” eating is not conducive to keeping weight off. One study by the National Weight Loss Registry researchers looked at who better maintained weight loss: people who consistently maintained their diet throughout the week or people who loosened up over the weekend then went back to healthy eating during the week. Not surprisingly (to me, at least), the consistent people were 1.5 times more likely to keep the pounds off.

As the registry researchers discovered, weekends off can be a slippery slope; I’d say the same goes for the weekly “fun day.” But let’s say that you do decide to have your own “fun day,” and it starts bleeding into the following day. When you make a mistake, tell somebody. Call up a friend on the phone, and talk about it. Just putting it out there can be incredibly liberating. You’ll find it easier to just move on. Otherwise, you’re going to plant your butt on the couch with a carton of ice cream and wallow in shame and self-pity.

Another way to avoid wallowing is to look at obstacles as inspirations. You can either be tortured and depressed by your slip-ups, or inspired by them. Try to figure out what made you stray from your promises to yourself and take preventive actions so it doesn’t happen again. There’s always a solution if you want to find it.

A few years ago, my oldest son got the most difficult teacher in the whole school, Mr. Rucker. Everyone felt threatened by the guy; he intimidates the entire student body. Why? Because he expects his students to give their best every day. And if they don’t, he will hold them accountable. He gives three big tests throughout the year called the pebble, the rock, and the boulder. The boulder is the hardest test given by any teacher in the entire school. When my son came home upset about getting Mr. Rucker, I said to him, “You know, you can go along with everyone else who is scared of this guy, or you can look at this guy and find out what makes him tick. What does he have to offer you?”

Mr. Rucker obviously loves to teach and he is passionate about preparing kids for the future. But he makes them earn their grade. Getting an “A” in Mr. Rucker’s class is the equivalent to getting a compliment from Jillian Michaels, the hard-driving trainer on
The Biggest Loser
. It is earned. Turns out, my son now considers this scary guy his favorite teacher of all time. And he’s learned more from Mr. Rucker than from any other teacher he’s had. By reframing the way he looked at the teacher from the beginning, he overcame what could have been a formidable obstacle. “Look at the experience you’ve had,” I told him, “You’ll never forget the guy.” That is truly looking at an obstacle and turning it into an inspiration. By the way, he got an “A” in the class. He kicked that boulder’s ass, and I am so very proud of him.

One thing you are never going to be able to avoid, no matter how virtuous you are, is temptation. Temptation is always going to be there. You can’t make it go away. But you can be mindful. Think about whether you want to waste your calories on something that really isn’t that great. Ask yourself if you are really hungry, or if you’re just eating to fill time or because you’re stressed. You can have your two minutes of comfort or however long it’s going to take you to plow through a burger and fries, but once the food is gone, your problem will likely still be there. And you’ve just topped it off with a giant scoop of guilt.

Rules to Live By

Hi You Guys,

The fact is, if you do our program, if you exercise and eat clean, you lose weight. The pounds drop. If you don’t? You gain 13 pounds in two weeks. So:

• Don’t eat steak except flank steak at 9 p.m.

• Drink your allotted water.

• Don’t buy premade ANYTHING. Go to the store (like I did yesterday) and shop how we know how to shop.

• Don’t go to a restaurant, even a Village Inn, without checking their online menu first.

• Eat more than one or two meals for the entire day.

• GET REST! EIGHT HOURS OR MORE IS ESSENTIAL!

• Don’t EVER rest on your laurels and maybe sorta, kinda think you are invincible or that you can never gain because you haven’t.

• Don’t allow the stress of the day to get you down.

But most important?

If you do any of these things (and I did them all) DON’T ALLOW THE MISTAKES AND SETBACKS AND ADVERSITY TO DEFEAT YOU!

—Rod,
Extreme Weight Loss
cast member, via email

You will make mistakes; everyone does. But put some strategic plans in place to make it harder to make mistakes. At my house dinner can be a trying time. We have two boys who are “sta-a-a-a-arving” all the time. My wife doesn’t want to just feed them anything; she wants to make healthy, complete meals. But each person in the family also has a certain way they want their food prepared. As I said, it’s a trying time. So we developed a trick to prime the boys for healthy eating that has worked so well that, if we don’t do it, they now ask for it. About 30 minutes before dinnertime, we invite the kids to the dinner table to do homework. As they sit there, they can smell what’s cooking and hear the sizzle of the pans. This starts their little mouths to watering and gets them even hungrier. We all know that feeling—at that point, you’d eat a chair if it was covered in vanilla icing. Now that we have them in our clutches, we cut up red peppers, Persian cucumbers, and carrots and stack them high on a plate. As they’re doing their homework, smelling the food, and getting hungrier by the minute, they just start blindly grabbing the veggies. It’s as if we’d served them Double-Stuf Oreos. Most times, they argue over who gets the last red pepper. So what have we accomplished? We have gotten our kids to eat nutrient-dense food that they might have otherwise shunned, and primed them for the healthy dinner to come.

You can do this for yourself, too. Put healthy food in your way, and you’ll eat it. It will fill you up, and you’ll be less likely to get caught with your hand in the cookie jar.

Make it easy for you to succeed. Talking yourself down can help, too. Say out loud, “I am better than this (insert tempting food here),” or give yourself a mantra (see
Everybody Needs a Mantra
) to deal with temptation. Or, maybe you do something physical. Every time you feel tempted to cut yourself a slice of cake or unwrap a candy bar, do ten push-ups. By the end of the day, you could be 200 push-ups in before you realize your arms are too sore to pick up the cake anyway.

When all else fails and you indulge anyway, figure out how many calories you ate, then burn triple that number of calories on the treadmill that day. No waiting, no avoiding. You eat a bite of cheesecake, and it’s 50 calories? Great. Go burn 150 calories running up and down your stairs at home. Every decision you make in life has a consequence, and the sooner you deal with it, the less likely you will be to continue to let it happen. Pretty soon, you will do the math
before
you order that double chocolate-chip frappe and realize it ain’t worth it! You are worth more!

If you don’t want to gain back the weight you’ve lost, keep doing what you’re doing. It’s as simple as that. Don’t backtrack. This is obviously easier said than done because, within the general population, most people who lose weight
do
gain it back. The statistics vary, but it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 percent of people gain back the weight they lose after a year; 95 percent gain it all back after three years. Pretty dismal. Our shows have a far better success rate: 65 percent of people on all our shows keep the weight off
permanently
(we’ve been tracking them since 2004). Every once in a while, though, a former cast member reaches out to me to say they’ve slipped up in a big way.

Anyone who’s lost weight can gain it back, even the people who did it on TV. That’s why you have to stay on guard—and nobody likes to hear this—for the rest of your life. This doesn’t mean you can never have a slice of pizza or take a day off from exercise, but as you surely know by now, you can’t think of it in terms of “I went on a diet, I lost weight, and now I can go back to normal!” You now have a new normal. Everything you did to lose weight is normal for you now. And the life you were living before was
not
normal, or you wouldn’t have ended up as large as you did. You didn’t know what normal looked like. Now you do.

I think it’s helpful to know what went wrong with people who gained back weight. What can you learn from their mistakes? One former contestant I’ve stayed in touch with is Ashley, who lost 183 pounds on
The Biggest Loser
(and gained a fiancé, one of the other contestants, in the process). Ashley came on with her mom (the two of them always wore pink) and proceeded to lose about 49 percent of her body weight, an amazing feat, by anyone’s standards. Yet she put back on a lot of the pounds a few years later. Okay, more then a lot. She lost 183 pounds . . . and gained back 185.

Ashley, who has since gotten back on track (you can see some of her emails to me scattered throughout this book), is very clear-eyed about what happened. For one thing, she let fear get the best of her, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I was so afraid of gaining back the weight that I weighed myself six times a day,” says Ashley. “Then my body listened to my brain, and after six months, I
did
gain the pounds back.”

You Know What to Do—Now Do It!

Good Morning JD!

I hope you and your family are well! When I applied for
The Biggest Loser,
one of my main goals was to be able to lose the weight so I could start a family. Little Ethan is now 9 weeks old, and I could not be happier!

Before going on
The Biggest Loser,
I would have said things like “I have tried
everything
to lose weight.” “Nothing has worked.” “If I only knew the right way.” Truth be told, those of us who have tried “everything” to lose weight know a lot more than we give ourselves credit for.

—Kristin,
The Biggest Loser
contestant, via email

Ashley:
Before

Ashley:
After

Obviously, she didn’t just imagine the pounds coming back on, and they magically appeared; but her fear and obsession with the scale made it difficult to feel confident and empowered. She lost sight of all the hurdles she’d overcome and started to beat herself up every time she made a mistake. In her misery, she reverted to the old habits that got her on
The Biggest Loser
in the first place. It was hard to get out of bed in the morning—let alone make it to a workout.

There’s also more to the story. “I strongly believe that weight loss is more of a mental than a physical battle,” says Ashley, “and I still had things I hadn’t dealt with. My unresolved issues were awoken working with trainers Jillian Michaels and Bob Harper on
The Biggest Loser
, but it’s like an onion with several layers—you need to remove them one by one until you get to the core. I thought that I was fixed after six months, but it took me 29 years to get where I was, so I can see now that it does take time.”