The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss (24 page)

As long as you don’t go out to restaurants and order pasta every night, eating nutritiously can be very simple. Here’s a rule of thumb: Eat only what is grown or raised in or on the Earth and presented to you without processing. That means unadulterated fruits, vegetables, and, rarely if ever, sustainably (and conscientiously) produced eggs, poultry, seafood, and meat. Just limiting the amount of packages you open alone will make a difference in how much you weigh and how you feel. (Try the exercises
here
and
here
, and you’ll see what I mean.)

And there’s some evidence that more and more people are clueing in to this fact. Recently the
New York Times
reported that sales of soda and sugary cereals are down as is the revenue of some fast food operations. Many big food companies are dropping artificial flavors and preservatives and, by buying up smaller companies that produce healthy, organic edibles, casting their lot in the direction of healthier products. Even sales of fruits and vegetables are up!

To me, the most important part of the transformation process is not the actual pounds you lose, but the renovation of your health, mentally and physically. So while calories have to be considered, of course, think about all the benefits good food can give you, and stop eating crap. To look at the participants in our shows, you’d never think they were malnourished, but amazingly, most of them are. They’re eating so poorly, living on cheese sticks, processed chicken fingers, soda, and corn chips, that some of them are even anemic. They eat thousands of calories but get zero nutrition. By nutrition, I mean vitamins and minerals, fiber, and all the micronutrients that experts tell us help prevent disease. That’s what you get when you eat whole, unprocessed foods. Fresh, nutritionally dense foods that come from the Earth (not a lab!) are all that should go in your mouth. If you can’t always get fresh, frozen fruits and veggies are better than canned. They are picked at the peak of ripeness and frozen right away so they retain more of their nutrients.

There are so many benefits from eating mostly plant foods. Have you heard of the China Study? In 2005, the world-renowned Cornell University researcher T. Colin Campbell published the results of a 20-year joint investigation by Cornell, Oxford University, and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine that found eating animal-based foods is associated with chronic disease. The study also found that people who ate primarily plant-based diets were far healthier—they had virtually no incidence of heart disease, stroke, or diabetes and very low rates of cancer. Campbell and his colleagues have even found that you can reverse disease by switching to a plant-based diet. So why aren’t we all doing it?

When you make the transition, you are also going to naturally lose weight. In one of his many studies, Campbell also looked at the effects of a diet low in saturated fat and refined carbohydrates and high in fresh fruits, vegetables, beans, and nuts. The results were impressive: The people who changed over to the plant-based, nutritionally dense diet lost an average of 31 pounds. When they came back two years later, they’d lost an average of 53 pounds. Wow!

My own family has switched to a mostly plant-based diet. Even the U.S. government, the most conservative body there is, is now advocating that people eat far less meat and are working on changing the food guidelines. Meat is bad for our health, it’s bad for the environment, and it’s not sustainable. Sugar, refined carbs, and fat are generally the problem for people who need to lose weight, but if you’re a big meat-eater, ratchet it back. A life existing on hamburgers is good for no one. Even cutting your meat portion in half and increasing the amount of veggies on the plate is a huge step in the right direction.

At the same time, I urge you not to get carried away with calorie reduction. I’ve seen people go overboard, to their detriment. One of our cast members started to lose weight really rapidly, actually at an alarming rate. It turned out that he had stopped eating regular meals and was living on protein bars and a handful of almonds here and there. That was the worst idea ever. He was nervous that his lack of nutrition knowledge was going to hurt him, so he just went with a food that was approved of by the show’s dietitian: protein bars. Approved of, yes, but for emergency situations, not as a main source of calories. When it’s not getting enough nourishment, your body will cannibalize its own muscle tissue. We put the guy in the Bod Pod, a machine that measures body composition, and discovered that he had lost 10 to 15 pounds of muscle. I want you to lose fat, not muscle! This process is about getting healthy. Don’t just think that dropping weight will make you healthy. It takes a lot more.

Know yourself, not just nutrition. Knowing your nutrition facts is going to help you make better choices, but you still have to deal with issues of control. Can you resist favorite foods put right in front of you? Then do your best to make sure they
aren’t
right in front of you. I would argue that sometimes you don’t actually need willpower if you consistently make the right choice. If there’s nothing “dangerous” in your house, you don’t have to worry about making a bad choice. If you have to get in your car when it’s 18 degrees Fahrenheit outside to get a carton of ice cream, you’re not going to get it (at least most of you won’t). But if you’re snuggled up in your warm house next to the fire, settled in to binge watch a show on Netflix, and there’s a half-gallon in your house, you’re eating the whole thing. A skinny person would, too. And if you do get in your car to brave the 18-degree weather, talk to yourself all the way there and decide BEFORE you get there what you are ordering. Then keep your promise. If you go in with an open mind, you will end up in the ice cream shop with an open mouth. My trick is to tell my wife in the car that I’m getting the kid’s scoop so I don’t turn into a hypocrite once I get into the ice cream shop. That is being in control of your destiny!

Until you form new habits, take temptation out of the equation. If you need to put a padlock on your refrigerator and give the key to your husband or neighbor so you won’t eat at night, do it. I am not kidding here. Remove temptation, because you are human. Would you put a bottle of gin next to an alcoholic and ask him to only have one shot a day? So why would you put a half-gallon of ice cream in front of a food addict and ask her to only have one spoonful a day?

Can’t resist eating everything on your plate? Open up the saltshaker and pour salt all over your food after you’ve eaten half. Don’t just throw the remaining Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies in the trash after you’ve eaten two or three, destroy them with hot water—because you know you’re going to dig them out of the garbage if you don’t. These things sound crazy (and wasteful), and maybe they are, but what you’re doing is training yourself to eat better so that, eventually, as you develop new, healthier habits, exercising restraint isn’t going to be such a big deal for you. Set yourself up for success, and you’ll win.

Another way to set yourself up for success is to always plan ahead. Even if you’re going to be eating out, check out the restaurant menu on Yelp or on the restaurant’s website first. Decide what you’re going to have before you go, and you’ll be less likely to order something you shouldn’t. If one reason you end up in the drive-thru line at McDonald’s is because you’re pressed for time during the week, plan your meals and make food on the weekend. Bring your lunch to work. These are the basics of being a healthy eater, while being caught unprepared is what leads people to make bad choices 90 percent of the time. I’ve seen this play out on our shows, but I’m not the only one who’s noticed. When Oprah’s
O
magazine analyzed data from MyFitnessPal, the online weight-loss tool, they found that the users who’d lost 30 pounds or more were twice as likely to plan their meals and snacks ahead of time as people who’d only lost a little weight.

Twice as likely!
Don’t reinvent the wheel here. Do what other successful people do. Follow patterns that work, and shockingly you will find they work for you, too. I asked one of our very successful weight-loss contestants what he tells people when they ask his secret for losing weight. You know what he said? “Turns out eating better and moving more really works.” He lost more than 200 pounds by doing the basics.

Of course, there will be times when you won’t be able to plan ahead or control your environment. Life happens. That’s where you need to work that willpower you’ve been developing—and see if you can be happy with less. My favorite ice cream shop has a great thing called the itsy bitsy. It’s just about a large spoonful of ice cream in a tiny cone. Sometimes after dinner, we’ll walk over and get an itsy bitsy, and it’s great. We feel like we’ve had the whole ice cream shop experience—standing in line with the crowd, watching our kids flip-flop back and forth about what flavor they’re going to get—but we go home no worse for it. I have my itsy bitsy, and it’s enough. It’s plenty. We had the experience, and that’s what we’re after. And it cost us only about 100 calories to do it. So if it is the experience and the act of going to the ice cream store and smelling the fresh-made cones, and seeing the excited kids in the line, then go do it. But
commit
ahead of time to what you are going to get (write it down if you have to) and under no circumstances deviate from your plan.

One of the things that makes the experience satisfying is that the itsy bitsy is the real thing. I’m not a big believer in most low-calorie, “diet” versions of food. Usually, these are foods that have chemical flavor enhancers or are bolstered with sugar. Many of them are also lightened up in such a way that they aren’t satisfying. If you want pizza, get a slice of pizza (just don’t eat the whole pie). Eating pizza with light cheese is just going to make you crave more pizza. You may even end up eating the real thing on top of the diet slice you just ate. It’s the same thing with diet soda. Why do I hate it so much? It doesn’t have calories. But it does have chemicals and an intensely sweet taste that just makes you long for more. You may never wean yourself off sweets if you drink diet soda.

Here’s something to think about, too. Don’t let money drive your eating decisions. (Ironically, it used to be that being fat was a sign of wealth. Back when kings had big bellies, it was because they were at the top of the food chain, feasting on whatever they wanted, while the poor peasants went hungry.) When I get the itsy bitsy at my neighborhood ice cream shop, I never feel like I got gypped. Yeah, it probably cost me more than sticking a spoon into a carton in my freezer, but it’s worth it not to have the temptation at home.

In one of our
Extreme Weight Loss
episodes, we filmed another couple in a restaurant with a hidden camera right before they were going to get surprised by Chris and Heidi, who’d be telling them they’d been picked for the show. The guy was sitting at the table with 30 saucy, greasy chicken wings in front of him. His fiancée says to him (and the guy, by the way, was 450 pounds), “Don’t eat those. We really need to start our diets now.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he replied, “But I paid for these!” That was his mentality.
I paid for these, so I have to eat them
. That is just so wrong. Losing the price of a batch of chicken wings is so insignificant compared to what you lose when you completely disrespect your body. And besides, once you stop eating so much, you’re going to save money in the long run. Think about the future, not the here and now.

I fall into the camp that thinks you should settle into a way of eating and stick with it. Deviating a little here and there might be okay, but if your personal rules are that you don’t eat fattening, processed, unhealthy food then you don’t eat fattening . . . you get my drift. Changing your eating habits is like giving up drugs and alcohol. In 12-step lingo, it’s called “working the program,” and you have to do it every day.

Something we have cast members do that I think is extremely beneficial is to keep a food log. Moses probably kept a food log—that’s how long this recommendation has been around—but there’s good reason for it. You don’t really know the cold hard facts of how much you’re eating until you see it in black-and-white. Whether you do it on your computer with the help of an online weight-loss tool or whether you just get a notebook and start recording every morsel that passes your lips, it’s going to help hold you accountable—even if you’re just reporting it to yourself. (And you don’t have to just report it to yourself; go ahead and post your daily entries on Facebook where other people can see them. Now that will really hold you accountable). Everything—every piece of gum, every bite you take from someone else’s plate, every piece of candy you find in the recesses of your desk drawer, everything—goes into that log. Sometimes, you will choose not to eat that extra snack, because you are too lazy to go over and enter it in your log.

So start writing.
And be honest!
If you’re not going to be honest with yourself, there’s no point in doing it. So while facing up to what you’re really eating can be scary, you can’t change things about yourself if you don’t have all the facts. Get the facts, then deal with them.