The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss (7 page)

—Nikki, posted on
The Revolution
Facebook page

I recently met a woman at the gym who’d I seen grinding it out day after day. She was quite overweight and seemed to be working like crazy to get the pounds off. “Elaine,” I asked her, “why are you working so hard at it? What’s your goal?” Elaine told me that she was going on a trip to Jerusalem and wanted to climb up to Masada, an ancient fortress situated on top of a high rock plateau; losing weight and getting fit were going to make it happen for her. But in our later conversations—Elaine, by the way, had no idea what I did for a living—it also came out that the climb up was really just a metaphor for climbing out of a life that had been filled with unhappiness. She had long been divorced, and her weight made her insecure in social situations. She had virtually been hiding away. In a sense, every day presented Elaine with a hill to climb, but the one in Jerusalem—that climb was going to set her free.

Elaine:
Before

Elaine:
After

Elaine was hoping that losing weight would help her find love—now that’s a good, purposeful, meaningful reason to lose weight. But what happened to Elaine was so much bigger. Being overweight had made Elaine’s life become very small. Maybe that’s happened to you. The more weight you gain, the smaller and smaller your life becomes because you never venture out of your comfort zone. What shedding pounds did for Elaine was make her brave. She wanted to learn how to row, so she found a club in the marina and joined. She learned to sail. She had never been skiing before, so one day, she just hopped in her snappy convertible (she got it after she lost all the weight), drove the five hours up to the mountains, skied all the next day, and drove home. There seem to be no limits to what she’ll do. That’s what I’m talking about when I say that losing weight is just the beginning.

Of course, Elaine climbed up to that fortress in Jerusalem, too. But she didn’t consider it the finish line. Last time I saw her was at the gym. The “new” Elaine was there an hour before her appointment with a trainer, working out harder than most anyone I know. It’s worth noting that Elaine is one of the many inspiring people I have met out in the real world. Inspiring people are all around us, if we just take the time to learn their stories.

The night before the winner of the very first
The Biggest Loser
was announced, the guy in the lead—his name was Gary—went out for a normal dinner with his family and had a healthy meal, shared some laughs, talked about how happy he was about what he’d accomplished, then went to sleep. Gary’s closest competitor took a different tack: He went to the gym and worked out, pushing it to the bitter end. And it paid off. He beat Gary by one pound.
One pound
. That one pound cost Gary $250,000.

You probably think I’m going to say, “Wasn’t the guy who won awesome, never letting up! Isn’t he the very definition of all in?” But that’s not what I’m going to say. I saw Gary many years later, and he was still thin and healthy. The winner put all the weight back on. Competition is the premise behind
The Biggest Loser,
so people motivated by beating out others often win the cash. But the real winners are those whose reasons for losing weight evolve into something deeper. Gary was very upset about losing at first, but then he realized what the bigger win was. He wanted to get his life back, and he did. The other guy was in it mostly just to win it. That only got him so far.

If I had to choose a “best” reason to lose weight, it’s good health. Getting back medical test results that show just how bad things have gotten has made more than a few people drastically change their eating and exercise habits. Some people, fortunately, figure it out before their doctors read them the riot act. (Just as an aside, some people have even told me that they purposefully choose doctors who are overweight, hoping that it means the doctor will not preach about adopting a healthy lifestyle since he or she obviously doesn’t have one either.) One of our Season 5
Extreme Weight Loss
cast members, Mitzi, told me that turning 52 gave her a wake-up call. “My mother passed away at age 65. When I started doing the math, I realized I wasn’t too far away from it.” Wanting to live a long and healthy life—what better reason for losing weight could you have?

This is where the
The Big Fat Truth
solution to weight loss comes in. Being ready to assess your inner life is probably the hardest part of losing weight. The treadmill, the workout equipment, eating right—you can do that. Looking inside yourself, though, is like opening Pandora’s box; you might not like what comes flying out. That’s especially true if you’ve had a trauma in your past, but even if you haven’t, don’t kid yourself. There’s something going on in your head that’s preventing you from getting the best out of life.

More than likely, you’re going to have to face some things you’ve been sweeping under the rug, and sometimes, that can be painful. Maybe you have a big secret; maybe you just have to admit to yourself that you’ve been self-indulgent not because of any terrible event, but because a low level of unhappiness pervades your life. What’s the missing piece? Be prepared to find out and work on changing it, and you will regain jurisdiction over your body. Now might not seem like a good time to take a deep emotional dive; it never is. We’re all so busy just living our lives that we forget to be introspective. And no one likes a mess—emotional stuff is messy.
But to have a breakthrough, you’re probably going to have to have a few breakdowns;
it’s just part of the process. So get off the hamster wheel of life for a while. Don’t think about the bills, the laundry, the kids, the carpool, trying to get a promotion—those are all external things. Instead, look inward. Turn off the background noise of life and turn on the sounds of self-examination. Fall back in love with yourself, and then you are playing the game.

In the end, the things that you fear most are also the things that will help you grow. They’re the things that will help you take the biggest leap forward. Without a breakdown, there is no breakthrough. As we go along, I’ll talk more about this critical part of weight loss. For now, I just want to know if you’re willing to find the
real
answer to the question: Why are you fat?

Wait—you’re not going on one of my shows, so why does the world need to know what you’re doing? There are a few reasons, starting with the fact that telling others what you’re doing helps make you take a more honest look at yourself. When contestants on
The Biggest Loser
or
Extreme Weight Loss
weigh in, we make them take off their shirts and show the TV audience what their bodies really look like. Of course, this contributes to the drama because you can really see how radically they’ve changed their bodies by the end of the season; it is a TV show, after all. We’re not, though, trying to humiliate or shame them. Far from it. We also ask the cast to put their fat on display because it’s not just the audience that’s seeing them as they really are; they are seeing themselves. You might think that by standing in line to audition for the show, our contestants have already acknowledged their problem, and, yeah, they have, sort of. But most people who don’t like their bodies change and even shower in the dark; they don’t really look. They don’t see how bad it’s gotten until it hits them smack in the face.

The very first weigh-in is the cast members’ kiss-the-curb moment. By that I mean that they can’t get any lower than this. It’s their coming out. They’re admitting in front of everyone, including themselves, that they have a problem—it’s like when a drinker stands up in an AA meeting and says, “My name is John, and I’m an alcoholic.” I’m not suggesting that you do the same thing in the conference room at work by coming out to unsuspecting co-workers—unless, of course, you want to! But you can make a declaration in a different way. Just make sure that you plant the flag in the ground loudly, proudly, and with conviction.

Again, you don’t necessarily need to take off your shirt and put a selfie on Facebook (but if you do, I will applaud loudly!). If you’re fat, people already know it. But you do need to be ready to let other people know that
you
know you have a problem, and you’re working to change. Along the way, you’re going to need friends and family to help you and hold you accountable, so if you’re not ready to reach out, stop reading. Come back to this page when you feel you can be open and accept the help you need.

Reaching out can be scary, but let me just say this: If you’re not a little afraid of what’s to come, then I’d hesitate. Yes, you should be enthusiastic and raring to go, but changing your lifestyle is hard. It requires making sacrifices, including your pride. So it’s okay to feel butterflies in your stomach (just don’t mistake those feelings for hunger pains); in fact, you should. You’re letting go of the notion that there’s an easy way to lose weight and admitting to yourself that you have a lot of work ahead of you. That’s tough.

One of our contestants, a young woman named Amber, who was on
Extreme Weight Loss
with her fiancé, told me that her readiness quotient went way up when she stopped thinking that there was an easy way to lose weight. “I thought I was ready when I tried CrossFit for two weeks. I thought I was ready when I went on the paleo diet and got a workout DVD. But looking back, I wasn’t ready. I wanted a quick fix. I didn’t want to do the work.” So yes, there is going to be work to do. But don’t for a minute think you can’t do it, because you absolutely can.

Being overweight can take the joy out of life in both little and big ways. One thing I was surprised and sad to learn over the past few years is how many people sleep in recliners, because they’ve become so big it’s uncomfortable to lie flat on a bed. We’ve had people on the show who are taking up to 20 pills a day because they have so many obesity-related problems. Even people who don’t have a lot of weight to lose feel uncomfortable in their bodies—and in their too-tight clothes—plus know that they could be headed down the recliner-and-20-pills-a-day road if they don’t get their eating in check. No one wants to live a life hampered by his or her body size.

I think the way Mitzi described being overweight to me sums it up well. “The weight weighs you down and makes you live a life that’s small. You’re big, yet your life is so small.” When Mitzi attended
Extreme Weight Loss
Boot Camp, her group did a series of activities, including an obstacle course race called the Warrior Dash, six 5Ks, and whitewater rafting. “I can promise you that I never thought about going whitewater rafting. That wasn’t on my radar, bucket list, nothing,” she laughs.

And that was just the beginning. The group also went to an amusement park. “For a fat person, an amusement park is panicsville” she says. “You look for the sign that says the ride’s weight capacity and hope and pray that you fall under it, and that the bar in the roller-coaster car will go down. To get to the point, after losing the weight, where I didn’t have to worry about the weight capacity, and the bar just clicked into place, was joyful. I rode some rides six or seven times!”

When Mitzi thinks back to the time before she lost weight, she remembers how left out being fat could make her feel. “Some of my friends were going to do a 5K with lots of obstacles, and they never even thought to ask if I wanted to participate. They asked if I’d support them and be there as a cheerleader. The truth is, I probably couldn’t have kept up or done the obstacles, but it still hurt. So I sat on the sidelines and took photos.” Now, though, things are different. “I have photos of me doing a Warrior Dash. I have photos of me climbing a cargo line and jumping over a fire. It makes me feel proud. I’m not living small anymore. I’m living large in a smaller body.”