The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss (21 page)

Love can be a beautiful thing when it is expressed in a selfless way. Remember the vow “in sickness and in health, till death do us part?” Taking the “health” part seriously can take a relationship to a new level, closer and stronger than it ever was! Reaching new heights in health together opens doors to activities and life experiences you never thought you would share. Now isn’t that better than eating a dozen doughnuts for breakfast?

Georgeanna, the wife and mother who devoted herself to her family to the tune of an extra 150 pounds, had great success getting her family on board—her husband, Scott, lost 50 pounds while she was away at Boot Camp. What’s interesting about Georgeanna is that she was having an internal struggle about her weight for a long time before she attempted to do anything about it, but she never told her family how bad she was feeling about herself. “I didn’t want to burden them,” she says. “They weren’t aware that I was struggling, and they didn’t say anything because they didn’t want to hurt me.” The lesson here, I think, is that you just have to give people a chance to help you. Don’t count them out until they prove that they’re not going to offer you the support you need. Georgeanna’s family did rise to the occasion, and they helped her by encouraging her and, in her husband’s case, losing weight himself.

Georgeanna and her husband, Scott:
Before

Georgeanna and her husband, Scott:
After

On the other hand, if some of the people you love don’t see the changes you’re making the way you want them to, give it time. Keep doing what you’re supposed to be doing, saying no to them when you need to, and most of them will eventually come along for the ride. They’ll realize this is the new you. They have to because you’re not going to go back. So, they can either get on board or go away. It’s hard to take that position, but it’s critical. You have to draw a hard line. Give it time, offer your trust, but cut the cord if you have to. I think you’ll be surprised to find that, when you ask for more, people are often willing to change.

You’re now ready for action. So what’s the first thing you should do? Dream big, but start small. What you see on TV when you watch
Extreme Weight Loss
or
The Biggest Loser
is what I like to call the nuclear option. It’s drastic. Overnight, people go from doing laps around the drive-thru at McDonald’s to doing laps around a track and never eating at McDonald’s again. They go from having last exercised in the fifth grade to burning 7,000 calories through physical activity in one day. It’s a radical approach, but bear in mind these two things: One, most of the people on our shows are pretty much at the point where they need to make up for lost time—illness, if it hasn’t already arrived, is knocking at their doors; and two, it’s TV. I’m not going to pretend that we don’t try to put on a good show. There is inherent drama in the nuclear option that plays well on the small screen. (Although I don’t want to give the impression that the people on our shows are nothing more than props to us. No one is more passionately in their corner than us; we are their biggest fans!)

Even without doing something like burning 7,000 calories in one day, the changes our cast members’ bodies go through is nothing if not dramatic. To me, it just proves how strong the human body is. Imagine going for several years, most times decades, doing barely any physical activity, reaching more than 400 pounds, then, all in an instant, stopping all your bad behavior, eating well, and working out four to six hours a day, seven days a week. How can the body withstand such an immediate U-turn? It not only does, it thrives on it. The change is amazing to watch, and results are instant. The body adapts quickly to both bad behavior and good. Fuel your body with good, nutritionally dense food and get your blood moving by exercising, and that engine you have called a heart triggers a metabolic change almost immediately. We have people who come to us with gray skin, no energy, and on multiple medications for life and within 30 days, look younger, have tons of energy, and go off all the medications doctors claimed they would need for the rest of their days.

Any changes you make are going to have an impact, and the more dramatic the change, the more dramatic the impact. Without heavy support from nutritionists, trainers, and doctors, the nuclear option might not be viable for you. But, you don’t need the nuclear option to be successful. For the average person, baby steps actually work just as well. The classic approach to weight loss is to change overnight. You go from sitting in your recliner and stuffing down 5,000 calories on Sunday to running the track at the local high school and eating 500 calories on Monday. How long is that going to last? I’ll give you until Thursday, tops.

It doesn’t even have to be as drastic as that to go bust. I have a friend who cycles through change. “Buddy, from now on I’m only having juice for breakfast, and I’m working out two hours every day.” Maybe it doesn’t sound that hard, but I know that for him, it is. He’ll talk incessantly about all the changes he’s going to make, which lets me know that he’s only three weeks away from not doing it anymore. Consistency is everything. This guy actually went on a three-day juice cleanse in preparation for a trip to Vegas for a three-day bender that was to include eating and drinking himself into oblivion at the hotel buffet. Why bother if you’re not going to follow a cleanse with clean eating? Don’t reward good behavior with doing something bad. Nothing drives me crazier than when, after a 60-minute spin class, covered in sweat, someone steps off her bike and says, “Now I can afford that chocolate cake today.”
No, you can’t!
Reward good behavior (spin class) with good actions (eating well).

Making extreme changes can work, but only if you have a plan for eventually finding a happy medium between all or nothing. Most people don’t, including all the people who go on juice cleanses. To me, juice cleanses are mostly moronic because people think they’re doing something really good for themselves. You won’t have to cleanse if you don’t get “dirty” (that is, constantly eat crap) in the first place. If you’re just juicing, then going back to your old way of living, well, I don’t have to tell you that nothing good will come of it. For this same reason, I’m against diet books that use sleight of hand to make you believe that you can lose weight quickly and keep it off without changing your lifestyle. Most diets are a sprint, but weight loss that lasts is a marathon. Lifestyle changes last the rest of your life. A quick-fix diet lasts only as long as it gives you results (or you give up on it, whichever comes first) but it won’t pull you through the stretch. Gimmicky diets—as opposed to just eating moderately and healthfully—are not sustainable.

So, I recommend making small changes, one, maybe two at a time. Make one change a week, and by the end of the year, you’ve made 52. Now that’s significant! Instead of overhauling your whole diet in one week, for instance, just start with breakfast. If you always order a tall mocha drink and big blueberry muffin, or even something seemingly healthy (but fattening) like a big bowl of granola, change it up. Forget the mocha and just get a regular cup of coffee. To eat, try an all-fruit smoothie (no added sherbet like they put in at most smoothie stores) or a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal (without the brown sugar and cream). Just fix breakfast, nothing else. Try that for a week, then move on to lunch. Inch by inch, you’ll eventually make over your whole diet.

Small Victories Add Up

So I’ve been feeling pretty frustrated because my scale has been stubborn for three weeks straight. . . . I kinda wanna throw it out the window. But today, I had two great nonscale victories: First, several people from work independently asked me what I’m doing because I’m looking “skinny” and “lean.” And second, I had to run down the hall and up three flights of stairs and I was fine—not even a little winded after. Amazing!

—Delia, posted on
The Revolution
Facebook page

Now, it is true that some people can handle making bigger, cold-turkey-types of changes and manage to stick to them. I love the approach that
The Biggest Loser
contestant named Tony took. One of the first changes he made—and he made it before he even got on the show—was to give up fast food. And believe me, this was significant. “I had a whole wallet dedicated to fast food,” says Tony. “I had a buy-one-get-one-free coupon for every fast-food restaurant there is. And I’d eat both of the meals.” In fact, fast food was his life. His first job ever was at a fast-food restaurant, and over several decades, he worked up to manager, so his meals were always free.

In Tony’s case, taking that one big step led to another. Next, he decided to exercise, but gyms were expensive and, he was so big that they were dismissive of him when he expressed a desire to work out. So he walked. “Two hours in the morning and 2 hours every evening. By the time I got on the show, I’d already lost 30 pounds.” Four hours a day wasn’t a small change, but the point is that even though Tony’s changes weren’t small, they were incremental. He didn’t take it all on at once. (By the way, the fact that Tony made changes before the show started was unusual. Most contestants would eat like crazy before the show started to pump up the pounds and make their weight loss seem even more dramatic.)

What small and/or incremental changes give you are small victories, and I advise savoring every one. It can be something tiny (“I walked into my colleague’s office and didn’t grab anything out of her candy bowl”) or bigger (“I increased the resistance on the weight machines”). It doesn’t matter. Make a note of every single one. We ask cast members to write down their small victories each day, and one of the best ones I ever heard was this: “I tried today even when my trainer wasn’t looking.” Most people would gloss over that victory, but when I heard that, I read it to the whole group. “Here’s what this guy is really saying,” I told them. “When no one was looking before, he wasn’t his best as a father, his best as a worker, his best as a husband, his best as a human being. Think about that. That’s what he just said. But today, he said that even when no one was looking, he gave his best. Is he now going to try harder as a father, a worker, a husband, a human being? If he does, it will be a much greater victory than whatever his numbers on the scale end up being. That is real transformation.”