The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss (6 page)

What person buying a book on weight loss isn’t ready to lose weight? It sounds like an idiotic question. But if you’re going to identify why you’re still fat and having to buy this book in the first place, you have to pinpoint what went wrong in the past. Maybe you just weren’t ready. The question is: Are you ready now?

Here’s one way to know for sure. Ask yourself if you’re willing to give up on the idea of a quick fix. You know what I’m talking about. The magic workout that delivers thin thighs in three days. The cleanse that guarantees to slim you down in just a week. Five-minute-a-day exercise routines. Soup-only diets. Ab-sculpting gadgets that you can own in three easy payments. If you’re ready to say no to all these gimmicks, then yes, you’re moving in the right direction.

Quick-fix gimmicks make me crazy. The promises made in many diet books, on infomercials, and on magazine covers work all right—they work to make billions of dollars for the people that hawk them. They get fat wallets, and you’re still fat! If any one of those “remedies” actually did the job, there’d never be another one invented. We could all go home. Just like if all it took was five minutes a day to get abs like the guy on TV pushing some workout contraption, we’d all be dating supermodels. But it just isn’t true. None of it. You have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting thin with these empty promises.

The Secret to Weight Loss? There Is No Secret

I’m pretty chummy with the security guard at my local bank. I’d just left the bank and our conversation went a little something like this:

Guard:
Hey . . . haven’t seen you in a while, how are you?

Me:
Great, how are you?

Guard
(staring at me with his mouth open): Can I ask you something?

Me:
Sure, what’s up?

Guard:
Wow . . . are you losing weight?

Me:
Aww . . . yes, I am trying.

Guard:
What’s the secret?

Me
(whispering): Eating healthy and exercising.

Guard:
No . . . come on, tell me. How are you losing weight?

Me:
I’m serious.

Guard:
Whatever.

Hahhhhha-a-a-a. Wow! I wish people knew . . . there’s no big secret, and if I can do it, they can do it!

—Jamilla, posted on
The Revolution
Facebook page

Anyone who falls for these gimmicks (and I’m betting you’ve tried your share of them in the past) wants to believe that there’s an easy way to get fit and thin so they don’t have do the work. You’re fooling yourself if you think the girl in the seven-minutes-to-a-better-butt workout video looks the way she looks because she used that routine a few times a week. Her job is to be fit and thin and, guaranteed, she works at it
hours
not minutes, and not just a few times a week, but
every day.
No doubt, too, she’s living on a diet of steamed broccoli and grilled chicken. She might have even given up drinking any liquids for 24 hours before the shoot to make herself look even leaner in front of the camera, and then painted herself the perfect even medium brown tan (remember, I’m in the TV business. I know how they do this stuff!). The fact that millions of people buy into these pipe dreams only proves P. T. Barnum’s famous line: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

So first things first. Don’t be a sucker one second longer. Stop thinking that magician David Blaine is going to wave his magic wand over your belly and make it disappear. If you’re serious about losing weight, you’ll stop taking the path of least resistance, and get to work! What I’m asking you to do hurts (sometimes literally). Accept the fact that there’s no easy way out, and the next time that you’ll find yourself pulling out your credit card at midnight to make three easy payments for some pie-in-the-sky gadget will be . . . never!

What are some other signs that you’re ready to take on the challenging process of weight loss? One is that you’re not just paying lip service to all that you’re going to do to make it happen; you actually have a plan. I hear people say they’re pumped up and ready to go all the time. Many of them have a determined look and a fire in their eyes that’s pretty convincing, too. They’ll give me their “Sunday Sermon,” a spiel about how committed they are with a laundry list of how they’re going to make good on their promises. “I’m going to wake up every day at 4:00 a.m. and exercise!” they’ll say. “I’m going to throw everything in my refrigerator and cupboards in the trash!” And yet, these are often the same people who, during casting finals, order steak and fries from room service (did they think we wouldn’t find out?). My point is, it’s easy to talk a big game, but harder to actually do what you say you will.

It may sound like I’m trying to scare you off. I’m not. I’m just all about being realistic. It’s easy to get excited about the prospect of losing weight, but when it comes to doing the actual losing? That’s hard. So before you jump in, ensure that this time things really
are
going to be different by doing a little more introspection. Here are five more questions to ask yourself.

Every time we put out a casting call for one of our weight-loss shows, thousands of people line up. Who eventually makes the cut depends on a lot of factors, but I can tell you that we always choose people who are absolutely, 100 percent all in. (Or at least they seem to be—I won’t say that we’ve never made a mistake.) These are people so determined to change their lives that they are willing to do whatever we ask of them, no matter how crazy or difficult. And we have had them do some crazy things. One year, we had contestants participate in a competition that involved pulling a burro uphill for 11 miles. It’s called the Western Pack Burro Association race and you have to love the motto: “Celebrating 64 years of hauling ass.” That race is a fairly extreme test of physical stamina (and of how well you can control a burro, which is not a piece of cake). The craziest thing we ask of contestants, though, is their participation in the one-day 7,000-calorie-burn challenge, an insane undertaking that I’ll tell you more about in Chapter 17. Go beyond what you think you can achieve, and the rest is easy.

The lengths people will go to when they’re committed continually impresses me. However, the feats that impress me the most require not physical, but emotional stamina. On
The Biggest Loser
and
Extreme Weight Loss
, the cast begins their year with an intensive Boot Camp that requires them to leave behind their families and friends (not to mention their jobs) for three months. And believe me,
these
Boot Camps are no spa; it’s really, really hard work—and part of that work is coping with the emotional fallout from being away from their regular lives and thrust into a situation where they must confront their demons.

You don’t have to pull a donkey up a hill to lose weight or go to any other extremes. But your chances of succeeding are exponentially higher if you have the same whatever-it-takes attitude that drives people to work out enough to burn 7,000 calories in one day. Because you can’t just dabble in weight loss and expect to reach your goals. Think about it: Have you ever done anything halfway and had it go well? Doubtful. It’s just as bad as going for the quick fix. So if your idea of being ready is to say, “Okay, I won’t have dessert for a month, and I’ll stop eating bread, but I’m not going to exercise” or “I’ll go to the gym, but I refuse to give up Friday happy hour with my friends,” then you’re fooling yourself.

I am sure you can do an Internet search on how to lose weight without working out, or find a study on the reasons why you shouldn’t restrict your calories. Whoever tells you that you don’t need to do both is full of crap. You can always find some “research” or make up your own excuse to confirm whatever it is you want to do in life. But what if for once you took a different approach? Look for what scares you. Instead of looking for things you can use to talk yourself out of what you know you need to do, look inside and start being honest with how unhappy you are. Then you’ll see—you’ll know—that you have to be all in to get results.

And when I say “all in” I mean
all
in. It’s not even okay to say, “I will follow a diet and exercise plan to the letter, but I’m not going to deal with the secret I’ve been holding onto for 20 years.” Whether you know it or not, it’s the secret that’s making you eat.
What you perceive as hunger pain is really emotional pain
.

Most times, cherry-picking what you will and won’t do leads to failure. Choose to ignore any of the bad habits, destructive coping techniques, rationalizations, and enabling relationships that have made you fat in the first place at your peril: You have to address all of them. The people I know who’ve been successful at weight loss have changed just about everything in their lives. That doesn’t mean you have to do everything at once. I’m all for taking baby steps, which I’ll talk about in Chapter 13. But you have to commit to doing everything it takes to get a healthier body. And consistency is everything. Showing up each day at the same time to the gym, working out hard, eating at the same time—all these factors are important. And you have to be in it for the long haul. Weeks are not enough. Months, years—essentially always—making the right decisions will not only get you to where you want to be but also will inspire others around you, including your friends, family, co-workers, and even people you’ve never met but who have seen you from across the gym.

I’d say that I’m a pretty disciplined exerciser, but even I’m amazed and inspired by the diligence of others. For more than a year, I would pass a guy running every day at 5:30 a.m., in the dark, on the path by my house. I would finish my 7-mile run, shower, eat breakfast, get ready for the day, drive my kid to school, and on the way back from drop-off see him just finishing his workout! Two and a half hours! I ended up seeing less and less of this guy, and by that I mean that there was less of him to see. Over that year, he had been steadily losing weight.

I was just in awe of the guy. He was keeping me motivated, but I didn’t even know his name! Finally, one day I stopped him and said, “Excuse me, but I have seen you out here for the last year, and I am amazed at how hard you’ve been working. Do you mind if I ask you how much weight you’ve lost?”

He was embarrassed, and I got the feeling that he didn’t want to let me know. So I told him that he had inspired me with his work ethic. He then said, “I think at last check, I have lost 160 pounds.” One-hundred-and-sixty pounds! Are you kidding me? In the dark, by himself, pushing day after day, this man lost 160 pounds! His name is Sam, and now every morning, we scream and root each other on like we are long-lost brothers.

“Morning Sam! Go get ’em!”

“You saved my life, JD” (I told him I was one of the creators of
The Biggest Loser,
and it turned out that that was the show that got him to begin his journey . . . the irony!)

“You did all the work, Sam!” I say. It’s a ritual I now look forward to.

I always say that, in setting any goal in life: The best backup plan is no backup plan. What kind of advice is that? Who would tell their kid, “You know what, follow your dreams of being a rock ’n’ roll star or the great American novelist, and don’t have a backup plan.” It’s sounds like horrible advice. And yet it’s the advice I give everyone, every single person, especially those looking to get into the television business. It’s just another way of saying that you need to be all in. In the case of aspiring showbiz folks, if you’re not all in, there’s going to be someone more committed than you. In the case of weight loss, leaving some wiggle room is going to just make you that much more susceptible to bagging exercise and curling up on the couch with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s.

So tell yourself that you have nothing to fall back on; you have no alternative but to adopt a healthy lifestyle. You’re Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid standing on a cliff with your nemesis fast approaching on horseback. It’s jump off the cliff or perish. When you have it in your head that there’s no safety net, it makes it easier to forge ahead—and that leads to success. You don’t have to be perfect. This isn’t about perfection. There will be cookies eaten and workouts missed; everybody screws up occasionally. But having that do-or-die mind-set will help keep you from messing up too often—as well as ensure that when you do mess up, you quickly put it behind you and return to your healthy habits. The new you is going to be defined by what you do
after
a screw-up.

There’s no right answer to this question. You want to look better, feel better, save your life—every one of those reasons is legitimate. You’ll hear a lot of experts say things like: “Don’t try and lose weight for a high-school reunion.” Or a wedding. Or a tropical vacation. I don’t have a problem with these slightly superficial weight-loss incentives because, while some people will just go back to their old habits once they get that reunion-presentable body, other people may find that it starts them on a life-altering path. Those things can give you a good jump-start. If putting a picture on the treadmill of the guy who broke up with you and told you were fat makes you run faster, I’m all for it. Don’t worry about whether you’re losing weight for the “right” reasons. Just get going, and do it.

Need a Good Reason to Lose Weight? How about a Dramatic Change in Your Health?

Last year, my A1C [blood glucose level] was 7.9, bona fide diabetic. I have been a type 2 diabetic since 2003 (after the birth of my first child). Yesterday, I received my 28-page blood panel and my A1C is 6.4. That means that I am off of my medication and need to just monitor my life and levels. I’m so overjoyed; I can’t stop the tears of joy. I could climb the Empire State Building on the adrenaline pumping in my nonclogged arteries.