The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss (4 page)

I make every participant on our shows ask themselves these questions. One of them was Stacey, a 42-year-old woman, who tried out for
The Revolution
, a daytime weight-loss show I produced a few years back. (
The Revolution
, in case you missed it, was a daily show on ABC daytime where all the cast members were women. We not only helped them lose weight, we helped them make over their homes and personal style. Ty Pennington and Tim Gunn were hosts.) It was casting’s make-or-break moment, and Stacey was being given a final chance to convince us that we should put her on TV. So in she came to the last-chance room, taking a seat in one of those small chairs.

“Stacey,” I asked her, “tell us how you got to this point in your life.”

“I have been married to a fantastic man for 20 years,” she began, “I have three kids, and I love food.”

“No, you don’t,” I said.

She laughed nervously. “Yes, I do. I love the taste in my mouth, I love to cook food; I love everything about food.”

“Your weight has nothing to do with food,” I told her. This is usually the moment where people start looking at me sideways, thinking I am trying to trick them. I am actually trying to get them to honestly look inward; that can be very hard.

“Well, of course it does. How do you think I got to over 300 pounds? By eating broccoli?” She let out a huge infectious laugh that got the whole room blessing it with an “Amen.”

Something Lost, Something Gained

JD,

There are people in world who do a lot of dreaming and talking. Yet, at the end of the day they do not produce results (I used to be one of them). So-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o many wonderful things have happened to me during this journey: I am liberated from my past demons; I have lost more than 50 pounds (and counting); and I am confidence personified. Yet, the thing that has left the greatest impression for me is that I have the honor to see what truly can happen when a person not only dreams but puts calculated action behind their desires.

—Stacey,
The Revolution
cast member, via email

I was honest with her. “Look, Stacey, you’re a nice, warm person, but I don’t see you going to a
real
deep emotional place. I need you to tell me something that happened to you that you haven’t even told your husband or mother about. If you really want to have us choose you and help you change your life, you have to reveal something no one has ever heard before. Something so scary to you that you have put it in a place so deep and hidden from view that just thinking about it makes you want to reach for a sheet cake and demolish it in one sitting.”

And just like that, in a matter of seconds, Stacey’s deepest, darkest secret—something that she had held onto for more than 30 years—came pouring out as if it happened yesterday. And once the silence was broken, the pain came rushing out faster then all the lines of BS about how much she loved food.

Stacey admitted, right there in that chair, in front of ten people she barely knew, that as a young girl she was sexually abused. She’d never told her husband or her mother. She kept this secret, living in her own private hell and using food to shove those feelings down as far as they would go. But, of course, there are not enough cookies in the world, not enough BBQ ribs on this planet, to make that kind of devastation and fear go away. The room went silent. Stacey was sobbing uncontrollably. All I wanted to do was hug her but I held back, and after what felt like an hour (though was probably more like 30 seconds) of stillness and listening to her cries of rage, I said in a whisper, “You know what you need to do, right?”

She said nothing. I went on. “You need to go home tonight and tell your husband everything.” The whole room let out a gasp, as if I had just used a racial epithet.

Looking fear in the face and doing what frightens you anyway is
living
. The very thing that scares you the most might also surprise you the most. I told Stacey that if she wanted to get on the show, she would need to confront the very thing that terrified her most. Telling her husband that she was abused as a child was the start of her journey.
The root of transformation is desire.
Without the desire to follow through and act on this scary suggestion, the opportunity could vanish in an instant. This was not about TV anymore. It was about something much bigger. It was about healing. No matter what happened from that moment on, her life
had
to get better simply because she’d no longer be carrying that burden around. The fat on Stacey’s body was not the end product of 10,000 Oreo cookies and 5,000 Big Macs; it was the weight of evil that had been tormenting her for 30 years.

Of course, food was involved. How can you be married to someone you love for more than 20 years and have a secret that big, that personal, and still carry on as if it never happened? I’ll tell you how. You eat lots and lots and lots of food. Then one day, you wake up 300 pounds and three kids later, and you realize that your shame and pain have now been transferred to them, that they’re starting to show signs of obesity and anxiety, too. And it hurts even more. So you eat even more. Until one day, you don’t. One day, you tell the truth, and you start the healing. Every tear you cry lightens you by one pound and puts you one step closer to conquering what’s been standing in your way. You start to win. You start to take control of a life that has been out of control for too long.

Stacey:
Before

Stacey:
After

The day after Stacey had made her big confession, she came back for a final audition. When I saw her, she practically tackled me, hugging me as she cried. I held her for a few moments, then she told me something amazing.

“Wha . . . What happened?” I asked her, feeling a little nervous about the outcome.

When Stacey went home the night before, she couldn’t sleep. Late in the evening, she told her husband her secret. He began crying, and she feared the worst. Maybe he wouldn’t understand. Maybe he’d think she was damaged goods and walk away from the marriage. In fact, it was the opposite; he understood too well. Unbelievably, he revealed that the same thing had happened to him as a child. They both had been holding onto a terrible secret all throughout their marriage—sleeping in the same bed for 20 years, having the same nightmare, only to wake up and fake it for another day. They kept secrets from each other out of love, but it hurt both of them in the long term. The willingness to see something in someone’s eyes and not ask questions was probably one of the very things that attracted them to each other. It bonded them in some sort of twisted empathy that allowed the secret to live on but only in silence. It also allowed them to love each other unconditionally. Beautiful and sad at the same time.

Stacey made it onto the show, and if you see her today, she looks amazing. She said her marriage started over that night, and they have never been happier.

Stacey’s story is very, very dramatic—a lot of the people who participate in our shows have dramatic stories. That’s TV. But we have also had people on our shows whose narratives are so common that I’m sure thousands of readers share them. If you can’t see yourself in a story like Stacey’s, you may be able to relate to Georgeanna’s.

When Georgeanna tried out for
Extreme Weight Loss
, she didn’t think she’d make it on the show—there had been no abuse or other craziness in her life. And that’s exactly why we wanted her. Georgeanna weighed in at 315 pounds when she started. A former gymnast and cheerleader, she became pregnant during college, dropped out, got married, and spent the next 23 years devoting herself to her husband and two daughters (while holding down a job, too). The first few years were stressful; money was tight and Georgeanna didn’t really know how to feed a family properly. But she was also intent on proving that, despite having gotten off to an unplanned start, she could be a great mom. “I just lost focus on who I was,” she said. In the end, Georgeanna proved she had a great “family plan”; she just didn’t have a great “me plan.”

Family life got pretty crazy. Running from one daughter’s volleyball game to another, eating out all the time, and a general lack of healthy habits all conspired to make her fat. Georgeanna succeeded at being a great mom and failed at taking care of herself. It was when her kids went off to college that she finally realized she didn’t have a “me plan.” Yet, when she finally committed to turning things around, she lost 150 pounds. Hear that?
One hundred fifty pounds
. Say it out loud because it seems impossible. But what I’m trying to get across is that the impossible
is
possible. Get your head and heart into it, and the weight will come off.

Georgeanna:
Before

Georgeanna:
After

Georgeanna’s biggest problem was that she got caught in a parenting rut. Ask yourself where in your life are you stuck? And then let me help you get un-stuck. In a bad marriage, a job you hate, still living at home, not happy with your social life? Forgive yourself for being in the situation you are in, then start living in the solution. Actively change. Keep taking steps forward to improve your life. I know you are saying right now, “Easy for him to say.” It is never easy for anyone, including me, but people who work toward attaining success in every area of their lives don’t make excuses; instead, they look at obstacles as inspiration to make progress. Nobody gets it right all the time, but people who succeed keep trying until they get the desired outcome.

*  *  *  *  *

The cast members on our shows have a lot of help: trainers to put them through their paces, cooks to make them healthy food, nutritionists to give them diet tricks, me to inspire and push them, and the cameras as an incentive to avoid failure (no one wants to crash and burn in front of millions of viewers). But you’d be wrong to think that you can’t do the same thing without all these trappings. First of all, there is no end to weight-loss resources out there, and I’ll give you some suggestions in the Resources section to help you find them. Believe me when I tell you that the main reason our contestants shed pounds and keep them off is because they deal with their issues and shift their attitudes about what they’re capable of.
The big fat truth is that the game is in your head!
Fix your head, and you’ll lose the fat. That’s something anyone can do anywhere, anytime—and it’s hands-down the most important part of the journey. Actually it
is
the journey. No piece of exercise equipment you have to buy on QVC at 1:00 a.m. No $50-a-day super-fantastic cleanse. Just working an organ/muscle you already have. It’s called your brain. Once you change your mind-set and start saying, “I can” instead of “I can’t,” the pounds just roll off. I’ve seen it time and time again. Remember: to make something happen, you have to put it out there in the universe. Seems silly to even write this, but I deeply know this to be true on every level of life, not just weight loss.