The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss (8 page)

Mitzi doing a Warrior Dash and climbing ropes

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Whether your goal is to be skinny enough to jump over fire one day, complete a marathon, slip into a slinky dress, throw your blood pressure medicine down the toilet, or just feel more comfortable in you own skin, know that it’s going to happen. You’ll be
living
life, not just existing—and it’s going to be great.

This is a typical conversation in my household.

“Dad, I could never get an A on that test.”

“Well, you definitely just got a B or less.”

“But I haven’t even taken it yet!”

“You said you can’t get an A, so you won’t get an A. Mentally, you already took the test.”

There are two types of people in the world. Those who say “I can” and those who say “I can’t,” and both of them are right.
If you don’t think you can do something, you won’t be able to. “I can’t” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Think about it: Is being an “I can’t” person at the heart of your failure to lose weight? That can be remedied. Be an “I can” kind of person, and you won’t hope for an A, but rather demand it, expect it—and feel empowered to do the work to make it happen.

The power of the “I can” mind-set is amazing. We had a guy named Danny try out for
The Biggest Loser
who weighed more than anyone I’d ever seen at his age. He was 18 years old and weighed 450 pounds.
Four-fifty
. He couldn’t even close his hands to make a fist, he was so fat. I usually think anyone can do anything, but I had my doubts about him. I was honest about it with him, too.

“You scare me,” I said to him. “I don’t think we can have you on the show. Honestly, I don’t think you can do it. And, by the way, dude, where are your shoes?”

“It’s too hard to get them on,” he replied. This was the most important meeting in this kid’s life, and he couldn’t even get his shoes on? I felt bad for him, but told him I still didn’t think he could safely master the challenges the show would put in front of him.

“Name it,” he said. “I’ll do anything to be on this show. How do you want me to prove that I can do it?” I couldn’t tell if the desperation in his voice was genuine or if he had just rehearsed the words in his room, preparing the “Sunday Sermon” I mentioned earlier.

“Okay,” I said, figuring I’d scare him off. “Go out of this room and take the first door on your right. It’s the stairs. Take them down to the bottom”—we were on the 20th floor of the Sheraton Universal—“then walk back up.”

Without hesitation, he walked out of the room, still shoeless, and nine other potential contestants all let out a sigh of relief that I didn’t pick them. Yet there was also a sparkle in their eyes as if to say, “If he can do it, I can do it, too.” Singling out one person might seem cruel, but, in fact, I’ve found that the one person who’s picked often inspires the whole room so that, suddenly, maybe for the first time in their lives, instead of feeding on food, they start feeding off each other’s positive energy.

After about 15 minutes, I started to get worried about the guy. Maybe he’d gone home. Maybe (hopefully not) he’d died halfway down. I got increasingly nervous. I went to see if I could locate him.

I finally found him on the ninth floor on his way back up, huffing and puffing, spitting and coughing all over the place. He was soaked in sweat. But he kept going, bare feet and all. When he finally made it back into the roomful of would-be contestants, he burst through the door, barely able to speak. The place erupted with applause. Standing ovation.
He did it. Barefoot.
But not only that; he made them all believe that they could do it, too. Everyone in the room had just had a moment they’d never forget. I know I did. That day, on the 20th floor of the Sheraton Universal, transformation happened right before my eyes. The kid went on to appear on the show and lost almost 250 pounds over two seasons. Now that’s somebody who said to himself: “I can.”

So say you only have 30 pounds to lose. Maybe only 15 pounds. How does this kid’s story relate to you? First, I hope that it inspires you. That’s what all the stories we tell on our shows are meant to do, and I hope the stories I tell you throughout this book do the same. If this 450-pound guy could drag himself up 20 flights of stairs barefoot, surely you can spend an hour on an elliptical trainer every day or give up grabbing a doughnut and vanilla latte each morning. But the bigger message is that you really are capable of doing things that seem impossible to you.

I know that you hold some habits very dear. And that things can
seem
complicated. You’ve been accompanying colleagues to the Mexican place around the corner from your office for eight years. You can’t just stop going; they’d think you don’t like them anymore. You’re so busy that it’s all you can do to get macaroni and cheese from a box, pizza from your regular delivery place, or take-out Chinese on the table for your family each night. How are you going to feed everyone if you give up that fat-promoting, artery-clogging menu? But look around you. Real friendships withstand changes in eating habits, and there are many quick-fix dinners that don’t involve a load of grease and calories (or money). All it takes is a belief that you can change. If you think you can, then you will find the solutions to your problems.

When people protest that they aren’t capable of doing something, I see it as a challenge to convince them that they can. And I relish it. I want to get inside their heads and help them get rid of their kryptonite.

“Tell me what you can’t live without,” I’ll ask cast members.

“I could never live without my chocolate cake.”

“Great. You just committed to me that, for one year, you’re not going to eat any chocolate cake. You over there. You say you can’t live without diet soda? Great, you are never going to drink diet soda again.”

I make it my mission to show cast members that the things they think they can’t live without actually have no power over them. I’ll put a cake on the table, open up the box, and let the smell of chocolate fill the air. As they sit down to eat all their meals, they’ll smell that chocolate wafting by. It’s called exposure therapy, and it sounds like torture, but ask anyone who’s been through it—it just speeds up the process. You sit down for every meal next to a chocolate cake and don’t stick your finger in to have even one lick of frosting, and soon you’ll be able to give up lots of things you never thought you could.

Sometimes, you just need proof that you really
can
do something you believe you can’t. I got so tired of hearing people on
The Biggest Loser
say, “I can’t run, I’m not a runner,” that I decreed, “okay, every finalist on this show is going to run a full marathon.” You should have seen the panic on their faces. Every medical professional, every standards-and-practice person at the network said, “You can’t do that.”

“We can and we will,” I told them. All four of our finalists not only ran the full 26.2 miles, they set the bar for contestants to come. Think about it. These people went from not being able to run one mile to running 26.2 miles in less than six months. Again it proves that
the body is no match for the power of the mind.
Say that last sentence out loud. Again. Say it until you believe it!
You
tell your body what to do, and if it doesn’t listen, tell it again until it does. Your mind will get you over this perceived mountain, but not without the conviction it takes to fight the battle every minute of every day. Where are you fat?
In your head!
Your body is just the outcome!

What Would It Feel Like to Be Living in a Different Body, with a Different Mind-Set?

JD,

I watched your
TEDx talk
today and found myself sobbing uncontrollably at my desk. I began sobbing harder when I saw how much space I had between the armrests of my desk chair and my thighs. The last time I sat in this chair was before Boot Camp, and I had to adjust the arm rests to keep them from cutting into my legs. My goodness, how things have changed.

I felt an incredible sense of accomplishment when I heard you mention that you could tie a doughnut around many of the people on the show’s neck and they wouldn’t eat it. I realized . . . I’m that person! I wouldn’t eat a doughnut right now if you attached it to me, and paid me to eat it. Then I thought, Why wouldn’t I eat it? Is it because I have a weigh-in next Monday and a deadline to meet, or because I’ve transformed enough to know what’s best for me and what isn’t? Would I refuse the doughnut because I’m afraid of a camera over my shoulder or because nothing (not even that doughnut) would taste as good as all the extra room in my desk chair feels? I felt so proud because I realized I wouldn’t eat the doughnut for the right reasons!!

—Hannah,
Extreme Weight Loss
cast member, via email

The “I can’t” mind-set isn’t unique to people who are overweight. Skinny people have just as hard a time giving things up. They’re not special. They basically have the same brain as you do and the same issues to deal with. Taking the naturally thin people out of the equation, most people who are skinny just exercise greater willpower. They say, “I can” eat healthfully, “I can” exercise hard, and they do.

Let’s be clear about the difference between “can’t” and “don’t want to.” If you think you can’t do something, it means that there is a brief moment when you contemplated it. “Can I? Nah, I can’t.” Maybe if you’d paused just a little longer you would have seen that what you were really saying was not “I can’t,” but “I don’t want to.” Ask yourself what it is you believe. Can you not do something or do you just not want to? Not wanting to is a choice; thinking you’re not capable is a mind-set—a mind-set that you can change if you see yourself accomplish what you once thought was impossible.

There are going to be plenty of times—especially when it comes to exercise—where your body tells you,
Hey, I can’t do that
. But if your mind says you can, eventually, your body will listen. Just when you think you can’t do another push-up, that voice in your head—
Do I want to be the person who can or the person who can’t?—
will help you fight on. And don’t just do one more. Do 10 more. Go
past
the goal to prove to yourself that it’s just a number. On a treadmill, 5.5 miles per hour is just a number. If 5.5 mph is your goal, go to 6.0 mph to confirm that a number does not define you.

This isn’t just the old mind-over-matter argument. There are actually some sport scientists investigating the possibility that the muscle fatigue we feel when exercising hard does not really signal that your muscles are going to fail—in fact, you’re probably only using about 40 percent of your muscles’ capacity when working out hard. The fatigue you feel may just be the body’s way of conserving energy. It doesn’t mean that you are incapable of doing more. So when you feel that you can’t take another step, know that you actually can: You have the physical potential; it’s just not being unlocked by your mind.

Panda (the nickname everyone knows him by) is a young guy who definitely believed he was incapable of losing weight. Yet, as it turns out, he so excelled at paring down that he reached his goal in three months. On
Extreme Weight Loss
, we give people a year to lose weight; Panda lost all the weight he needed to while still in Boot Camp. It was monumental. One hundred pounds, obliterated. I bring up Panda because, initially, he had a striking lack of the “I can” factor. Tellingly, he was nicknamed after a lazy animal that sleeps most of the day. We get people on our shows that are as confident in their abilities as can be—“I can do this, just show me how”—but Panda considered himself a 90-pound weakling (who just happened to be carrying another 230 pounds).

Panda had tried out for
The Biggest Loser
and made it to the semifinals one year, but ultimately got sent home. Still, we remembered him, and when it came time to cast Season 5 of
Extreme Weight Loss,
we called him back in. Korean by birth, but raised in an adoptive American family, he had been physically abused by his older brother and was carrying the burden of having never told his loving-but-clueless adoptive parents the extent of the mistreatment he’d suffered. Panda works as a camp counselor, a job he adores but describes as like being a parent to 12 kids 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In other words, it’s stressful, giving him the perfect excuse to soothe himself with food. Add to that the fact that he has a nickname that equates him with a big, round, cuddly animal, and Panda just got larger and larger.