The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss (16 page)

Bruce:
Before

Bruce:
After

What it boils down to is attitude. One of my favorite sayings from Bruce is,
“The only thing in life that’s not hereditary is your attitude.”
Any psychologist will tell you: You can’t always control what happens to you in life, but you can control how you interpret and react to the crappy hand you’re dealt. That is 100 percent up to you. Of course, it’s hard. And I’m not just telling you to put on a happy face and everything will be all right. But keep in mind who you want to be and adopt the attitude of that person.
Be
the person you know you are deep down inside.

Here’s a story about someone who did exactly that. One thing I haven’t yet told you about Mitzi is that her problems extended beyond being overweight. Mitzi, 52 when she joined
Extreme Weight Loss
, doesn’t like the word
hoarder,
and rightly so, if that brings to mind a slovenly person. Mitzi, in truth, is a lovely, well-put-together woman and no one had a neater room during Boot Camp. Nonetheless, things had piled up in her house to an alarming degree. A better way to put it might be to say that she could have been on an episode of
Extreme Hoarders
. And nobody knew. She had kept it a complete secret, telling friends from out of town who wanted to stay with her that she was going to be away. She’d never invite local friends over, either, and when anybody did drop by, she’d pretend she wasn’t home (“It was so strange, your car was in the driveway but you didn’t answer the door”). Not one friend had been to her home.

Mitzi in her house

What feelings Mitzi could not push down with food, she pushed up against her front door so no one could get in. Emotionally, you could not get into her head, and, physically, she shut everyone out with the mountain of objects piled up high in her house. So for Mitzi, confronting the issues in her life didn’t just mean dealing with what was leading her to overeat and resist exercise, it meant facing up to what was making her live in chaos. Add to that the fact that she would be doing so in front of millions of television viewers, and, naturally, she was fearful. “My body was cluttered and my life was cluttered, and the thought of opening up that aspect of myself to reveal the whole Pandora’s box of my life was terrifying to me,” says Mitzi. Most people come on our show to overcome one addiction. Mitzi would have to overcome two!

Mitzi had actually gotten on the show by happenstance. She accompanied a friend who was trying out for the show and we ended up encouraging her (not the friend) to go through Boot Camp. But though she’d signed on, she was ambivalent and even tried to quit the show, emailing staff members and thanking us for the opportunity but acknowledging that she just couldn’t do it. We eventually talked her down. Emailing back, I pointedly told her three things: Don’t let the
situation
stop you. Don’t let
fear
stop you. Don’t let
you
stop you.

Mitzi didn’t respond to my email right away. Instead, she told me later, she called a friend. They talked for three hours, and Mitzi told her about the hoarding; it was the first person she’d ever told about the problem (we knew about it because we’d been to her home as part of the casting process). What a
huge
step to tell someone! The first step to healing.

Mitzi’s friend reminded her of a joke that I think is relevant to anyone who’s hesitating on opening up his or her emotional life in order to bring about change. It particularly resonated with Mitzi, who’s a very spiritual person. It goes like this:

A town is flooded by rain. A man escapes his home and stands on the rooftop. A boat comes by and the driver shouts out, “Get in, let us help you.”

“No,” says the man, “I’m waiting on the Lord.” Next, a helicopter hovers above him. “Grab onto the rope,” the pilot yells.

“No,” says the man once again, “I’m waiting on the Lord.” One after another people come to help the man get off the rooftop, and each time, he turns them down. The water rises and the man drowns.

In Heaven, he meets God. “Lord, I was waiting for you to save me. What happened?”

And God says, “I sent a boat, I sent a helicopter. . . .”

Could you be doing the same thing? Certain signs may be there. Say your doctor told you that you have to give up frozen yogurt with ten candy toppings and hop onto a spinning bike, or else. That’s a sign you get. But the signs that you also need to attend to are the emotional reasons behind your weight gain; signs that, out of fear, you may be missing. Like Mitzi. Her friend laughed at her. “Mitzi, do you realize that God’s been sending you a sign the whole time? You accompany a friend to a casting call, and out of 6,000 people, you get picked for a show you weren’t even trying out for?” If that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is.

Mitzi and Bruce are extreme examples of people keeping their real feelings inside. Their problems were monumental. Most of you (I hope) aren’t going to be dealing with sexual abuse and hoarding, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to start talking about what’s going on. Maybe the problem is that you hate your job, and your boss is an jerk. Quit and work somewhere else? You can’t. You need that medical insurance, which your spouse doesn’t have, and you have a mortgage to pay. So, every day you go in, and you’re miserable. The only time you feel good is when you open that drawer in your desk—and I’ve heard this story a bunch—and that bag of M&Ms is there. For a moment you feel free. Or maybe it’s your marriage. You can’t get divorced; you’ll end up broke or without your kids. You feel helpless.

The gravity of your problem isn’t really relevant to what I’m trying to say because this goes for everyone: Figure it out, and deal with it. You’ve picked up this book; that means you want to make a change. So don’t say now’s not a good time. There’s never a good time for drama, so most people tend to push the real reason they’re fat down further and further from their conscious thought. And I get it. You’re so busy going to work, getting the dry cleaning, picking up the kids, doing your volunteer work, making food for the big family dinner at your sister’s house, there’s no way you can stop and say to your husband or best friend that there’s something that’s really bothering you and start opening up. There isn’t time for it. How do you wake up one day and declare, “I’m going to do this emotional work on my own during the ten minutes I have between my shower and making my kids breakfast?”

I know one thing that works for sure:
Me . . . confronting you.
Not letting you off the hook with your standard BS line about why you’re overweight. Of course, I’m not there to challenge you in person, to climb inside your head and play mental Ping-Pong like I do with the people on our shows. This is not guesswork. It works every single time. I have 12 years of proof. Nonetheless, imagine that I
am
there testing you, pushing you, backing you into a corner, and making you shadowbox out of it. If that’s beyond your power of imagination, find someone who won’t let you off the hook. Instead of walking through life in a dark room unable to see the truth that will heal you, I need you do to whatever it takes to start turning the lights on.

Maybe it’s a friend, or maybe you need to get professional help. On our shows, we have the luxury of pairing people up with therapists, something that may or may not work for you. But, okay, say a therapist is not for you; it’s not your only recourse. Just get started in some way. When I made Stacey go home and tell her husband about the secret she’d been keeping from him, it opened the floodgates. Do you think she would have done that on her own? No way. She had already spent 20 years hiding it, why bring it up now? It took a metaphorical smack in the face for her to realize that it wasn’t impossible after all. And after she did, her whole life improved. In every category, life got better, but she had to confront her biggest fear first. That blind leap of faith is easy to write about, maybe even easy to consider for someone other than yourself. But the reality is, if you don’t bring yourself to do it, emotional recovery is not possible.

However you handle it, here’s the bottom line: Stop pushing the problem away. Let it bubble to the surface. Acknowledge it. Then take a step. From where I’m sitting now, the door is 75 feet away. I can’t reach the door in one step; it would be impossible no matter how far I can jump. But as long as I take one step—it doesn’t even have to be a big step—I will be closer to the door than I was a second ago. If I stay in my chair, I’m definitely not getting closer to the door. Get out of the chair; that’s the first step. You don’t have to climb a mountain. You just need to take one step. And remember that view out that door gets better and better as you get closer to it.

I already keep my promises!
I can hear you saying that to yourself under your breath. How could I even think that you don’t keep your promises? Relax; I know you keep your promises—your promises to everyone else. You probably keep promises to people you barely even know. Well, how about keeping a promise to yourself for a change?

I get it. When no one is watching, it’s easy to break a promise to oneself. But when you tell your sister you’ll watch her kids on a Saturday night, that’s a harder vow to break. There’s going to be some blowback on that one. That keeps you honest. I bet you’re the best friend, worker, family member anyone could ever have. You’ll promise virtually anything, and then you’ll always deliver. You’ll pick up your friend at the airport in rush-hour traffic, no problem. You’ll do the extra two hours of work because your boss wants to go home. You’ll go to your brother’s house and feed the cat. You’ll do it all, just as you said you would. Yet when you say to yourself, “I promise not to eat that doughnut,” your word of honor goes out the window in an instant. It’s so easy to keep promises to everyone else and sacrifice yourself in the process of doing it, but can you keep a promise to yourself? If you’re reading this book, you’ve broken a promise or two to yourself, whether it’s to eat right or to go to the gym or to address the emotional turmoil you’re holding inside.