The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss (22 page)

The little victories that come from making small changes can alter your life in so many big ways. They show you that you can do things you never thought you could do, and that, in turn, helps give you the confidence you need to improve the overall quality of your life. Suddenly, you’re not just increasing the resistance on the weights, you’re decreasing the amount of time it takes you to do your work; now you have more time to spend with your friends or your kids. Now you’re not just turning down a colleague’s candy, you’re turning down a colleague’s efforts to foist his work on you. Little acts of willpower and accomplishment generate confidence. I can’t tell you how many of our cast members leave the show dreaming big. For instance, Robert and Raymond, the twins who supported their whole family while their mother was in jail, began thinking about leaving their jobs at the door and window factory and embarking on new careers—in the health and fitness field. “Learning the things that I could do changed how I looked at myself 100 percent,” says Robert.

The thing about small victories is that they have a very positive cumulative effect. Panda, who was so successful at weight loss he hit his goal before leaving Boot Camp, describes what the progression was like for him. “After one day, you say to yourself, ‘I’m strong enough to be able to do this for a day.’ That one day becomes two days, which becomes a week, which becomes two weeks, which becomes a month.” Everything for him was, sometimes literally, putting one foot in front of the other.

We take all the
Extreme Weight Loss
Boot Camp participants to Red Rocks, an amphitheater near Denver, where we have them work out on the stairs. The first time out, standing at the bottom, looking up at the top, Panda panicked and said to himself, “There is no way I can climb all the way up without stopping.” But then he thought,
but I can take one step. And that one step will lead me to the next
. Looking back, he says, “sometimes, you’re so focused on what’s off in the distance and that big number when what you really need to do is focus on what you’re doing right now. It’s like that Chinese proverb: A journey of a hundred miles begins with a single step.”

Ultimately, that means stay present in the moment. Don’t let the future overwhelm you. Live in the moment, and appreciate every goal you hit and every victory you achieve. You might not realize it, but you are slowly retraining your brain to release that feel-good chemical dopamine not just when you eat chocolate cake, but when you make healthy, positive steps in your life. So be focused, be purposeful. Think about today, not tomorrow.

A lot of people—especially people who have tried out for our shows—are walking around in a coma. They’re the walking dead. They just keep going through the motions, doing the same things day after day. They’re so used to their routines, their habits—what has become of their lives—that they don’t see the truth. Until someone says, “Hey, look around,” they don’t even know that something is wrong. In fact, many cast members are shocked at how much they weigh when they have their first weigh-in. They know they’re overweight, but not how serious it has become. When you gain a pound a week, you just don’t notice. But then 100 weeks go by, and you’re 100 pounds heavier. When someone points it out, you’re blindsided. You haven’t even noticed. Like I said, the walking dead.

Habit is an enemy for skinny people, too. I mean bad habits, of course, but also just plain old habit. You buy the same things at the grocery store. You come home after work and do the same thing night after night. You go to the same restaurants. You do the same activities with your family or friends on the weekend. Most times, you don’t even realize that you’re stuck in a rut. It’s
Groundhog Day
all over again. If you have a great Groundhog Day, who wouldn’t want to repeat it? But if you don’t have a good Groundhog Day and things in your life aren’t going well, it’s hell. Another day, and I’m still not happy with my husband, my kids are still not nice to me, my bank account is still teetering on the edge—you have to numb yourself and go through the motions. So, it’s no wonder that people slowly get into a routine and turn their brains off. But, little by little, that routine can get you in trouble.

Just to drive home the point that a lot of people are on autopilot, let me tell you this story from one of our shows. We had two people, a couple about to be married, that we had decided to cast on the show, but they didn’t know it yet. Our idea was to surprise them at their favorite restaurant on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, so we hid cameras all around the place in order to catch what we expected to be their last extravagantly decadent meal. As the cameras rolled, the two of them ordered all their usual greasy, fattening dishes—triple sliders and a side of fries with all the extras (sour cream, guacamole, and more) on top. The portions, by the way, were huge. But instead of just playing it straight, we decided to play a little trick on them by sabotaging the food they’d ordered. Then Heidi and Chris would pop out and say, “Surprise! You’re on the show, and you’re never going to eat this stuff again.” We thought it would be funny; we didn’t expect the result we got.

Heidi and Chris went into the kitchen and poured mounds of salt, hot sauce, and Cajun seasonings on the food, doing their best to make the food inedible. It was gross. We thought the couple would take one bite, be repulsed, and welcome the idea that they’d never eat that stuff again. As we watched, they ate the first bites of fries. No reaction. Then the sliders. Again, no reaction. Pretty soon, they were digging into the entire meal, moaning with sounds of joy. It was then that we realized that they didn’t even taste it! All that indulging wasn’t about the food. It was the habit, the ritual; maybe the memory of what that food tasted like at some pivotal point in their lives. Because it sure wasn’t about the food, which would have caused most people to gag. That’s sleepwalking through life.

It’s taken for granted that to lose weight, you need to change your eating and exercise habits. Of course, you have to stop doing things like going to get a triple mocha latte two or three times a day. But I say do more. Change up some of the things that seem to have nothing to do with weight loss, and you will drop pounds. Because what you’re trying to do here is make a better life for yourself; eating and exercise is just one part of that. It’s like dominos; changing one thing will help you change the next and the next and the next. Pretty soon you’re living a different life. Here’s another metaphor for you: If you do the same biceps exercise every single time you go to the gym, your biceps muscles will adapt and stop getting stronger. They’re used to the same thing. To get those muscles to grow, you have to shock them by doing something different. Maybe, for instance, instead of doing curls each workout session, you spend some time on the rowing machine to work your arms in a different way. Same thing if you’re a runner. You run the same direction and speed every time, you’ll never get any faster or improve your stamina. Start doing sprint intervals, or make each day you run a different intensity and distance, and, suddenly, you get better and faster. Life works the same way.

Okay, so here’s what I want you to do to shake up your life. Go into your bedroom and take everything out. I’m not talking about just cleaning it up. Empty the room completely; deep clean it. Then sit in the empty room in silence. Look around you. A clean slate. A new beginning. What do you feel? Does the room feel bigger? Does it feel like a new space? Live with it like this for a few hours. Start thinking creatively. Should the bed go on the opposite wall? Do you really need that 20-year-old table you have been using just to pile up unopened mail? Should the room be a different color? Breathe deep in the calm of it all. Now go outside the room, look at what you’ve removed, and judge it all. Put it in three piles: must have, get rid of, and not sure. Immediately throw out everything that fell into the get-rid-of pile. Now go back and separate the rest into three piles again; hopefully you’ll find even more to give away.

After you have done this, put your room back together, changing everything. Put the bed on a different wall. Move the artwork. Maybe get rid of a few things and, if you’re up for it, buy some new things. It probably sounds crazy or maybe even a waste of time. When I suggest it to people, they’re usually skeptical. “I want to lose weight, so I go into my bedroom and empty everything out? No, no, I said I want to lose weight.” Right. I got it, but this is part of it. Most people will tell you that to get a fresh start, you should go take everything out of your kitchen cupboards and refrigerator, and yes, of course, that can help. But leave that for a while. First get to the bedroom (or living room; that works, too). Taking everything out and doing a deep clean is essentially what I’m asking you to do to yourself, too. Take a look around. That is called waking yourself up, and that requires more than just eating better. Doing a deep clean of your home is the first step to doing a deep clean of your mind.

I can’t claim to really know the science behind this, but I know that I’ve seen what happens when people shake things up. It’s like they’re rewiring they’re brains—changing the pathways—and it helps them break habits and feel differently not just about their space, but about themselves. When you make over your living space, instead of walking back in and automatically going back to your old ways, this visual and spatial disruption will make life seem different—and it will be different now. You’re different now—different eating habits, different activity habits, a different way of thinking.

One of the most depressing moments for me as a producer was when we sent a cast member named Rodney home after his 90-day weigh-in. There was a giant celebration. Hundreds of people had come out to scream his name, applaud him, and high-five him. Then, on a high from all the love surrounding him, he walked up to his apartment door, opened it, and the camera followed him into the place that looked exactly as he’d left it 90 days earlier. He walked right into all the old feelings of failure as embodied by that crappy apartment. Our brains make associations. We’re like Pavlov’s dogs, so when we walk into a room, our subconscious links it to expectations. And it’s pretty powerful. So if you’ve always sat around in your living room kicking back in the recliner downing caramel corn after a brutal day at work, or crawled into bed with a carton of cookie-dough ice cream because you didn’t want to face your family, those urges are going to resurface every time you set eyes on that same old space.

Change Is Motivating

Hi, JD,

One of the best pieces of advice that you’ve given that sticks in my head is to change your living environment. With each phase I have changed my home, recreating spaces from home gyms to a home office to a sewing room. After the finale, I came back and changed my space again and when I came home from surgery I did it once more. Each time I feel complacent I change my environment and it keeps me motivated. Thank you for that tip.

My life has completely changed and I am appreciative that you have selected me to go through this transformation so that I could live the life I’ve always wanted to live.

—Kim,
Extreme Weight Loss
cast member, via email

I know this sounds like mumbo jumbo, but it’s not. I’ve seen it so many times. Redecorating a room is like redecorating your mind, and it makes a significant difference. That’s what Rodney did. He changed his bedroom around; soon after, he fell in love. And he kept off almost all the weight he lost on the show. You can go even further with this. Change the way you drive to work. Change where you go on your lunch hour. Choose different activities on the weekend. If you walk around the block clockwise, do it counterclockwise. If you usually eat on the couch, eat at the table instead. If you eat at the table, change the seat you usually sit at. Make your life as different as possible, and it will be easier to break the habit of picking up a daily double mochaccino with extra whip or always ordering the cheesecake for dessert. Think of it as retraining your brain. You don’t have to make a zillion changes at once; in fact, I would make them one at a time (remember: dream big, but act small). You don’t want to overwhelm yourself. If you can’t keep up with a bunch of changes, you’re just going to feel bad about yourself, and you know where that leads . . . to the nearest fast food drive-thru.

And don’t discount the power of one change; it can have an unexpected impact. I’ll give you an example, not weight-related, but habit-related nonetheless. When one of my sons was younger, he came into our bedroom every night. From the time he could walk until he was nine years old, he’d appear nightly and get into our bed. No joke, 7 days a week for 9 years. We tried everything to get him to stop. Finally, we put a little mattress at the end of our bed so he’d get the message that he couldn’t sleep
in
our bed. It went on so long that I figured that by the time he was in high school, he’d be bringing his girlfriend with him. It was that bad. But surprisingly when he was nine, we moved to a new house, and he just never did it again. We never talked about it. We never said, “In the new house, you can’t do that anymore.” The change just snapped his behavior naturally.