The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss (3 page)

So, yeah, we’re all up against it. With temptation raining down all around, it’s not for nothing that close to 70 percent of American adults are fat. You heard me, 70 percent! Yet when it comes down to it, the buck must stop with the person who’s lifting the fork up to your mouth: YOU! You are to blame for making choices that got you to this point in your life. One day, you decided to stop caring about your health and well-being—maybe your relationships, your job, and your feelings, too—and started to settle for less in every area of your life. Then, once you gave in to accepting less . . . well, eating became even easier.

Maybe you’re asking yourself, why should I take weight-loss advice from a TV guy? True, I am a TV guy, but first and foremost, I’m a problem-solving guy, and always have been. I was the kid in school who everyone came to with their problems, including my twin sister. She’s now a pediatrician, but when she was struggling in medical school, I spent a lot of time countering her glass-half-empty temperament with my glass-half-f coaching. Back before email and texting (when you actually had to write letters by hand), I sent her cards and letters encouraging her to hang in there—to live in the solution, not in the problem. I know sometimes I sound like a fortune cookie, but the things I believe in work. I had no idea that she kept every card and letter I ever wrote to her until twenty years later, when I turned forty, she bound them all up into a book and gave them back to me as a gesture of thanks. I love her for it, and for the effort she made to go from negative to positive thinking. She is now a very successful doctor because of that effort.

This is all by way of saying that I love nothing more than seeing people learn to fight for their dreams, then go on to achieve them like my twin sister did. I live for it. And my natural inclination to jump in and help people with their problems has served me well in my role as a producer. Of course, it’s the role of all the shows’ technicians—the trainers, the nutritionists, the doctors, and others—to guide the show contestants through the day-to-day rigors of weight loss, and they do an amazing job. You can see that on-screen.

However, when the cameras are off, I’m often the one who swoops in to stop the contestants from zipping up their suitcases and quitting, then getting them fired up enough to master the Herculean tasks in front of them—because I know they can do it! From the day they walk in the door to try out for the show to the day they walk out, I’m the guy on a mission to lift them up when their motivation is flagging and talk them down when their willpower is lagging. I give them pep talks. I call them. I text them. I get in their faces. For that reason, I’m the guy whose picture they tape onto their elliptical trainers and angrily scream at at night—then hug the next morning because they’re so proud of what they’ve accomplished. I’m the guy who holds them when they cry and the one who tells them they need to get back on the treadmill even though they’re swearing they can’t take another step. I’m the tough-love dad who challenges them to do more than they have ever done before. After they leave the show, I still keep in touch and mentor many of them as they continue to forge new lives for themselves. One former cast member, Pete, sends me a picture of himself every year on the anniversary of his final weigh-in. He is still as lean as the day he left the show more than 10 years ago.

Pete:
Before

Pete:
After

The Biggest Loser, Extreme Weight Loss
(originally called
Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition
), and the other transformational shows I’ve developed over the last 12 years have allowed me to meet some of the most amazing people. It’s my job to inspire them, but they inspire
me
. Working on the shows has also given me a bird’s-eye view of the difficulties overweight people contend with every day—although not for the first time. Everyone in my family, immediate and extended, except me, has struggled with their weight at one time or another.

Despite what I do for a living, many of my family members have a very different outlook on food, nutrition, and exercise than mine. Technically, my twin, the pediatrician, knows there’s a difference between having a sugary cereal versus a flaxseed waffle for breakfast—she studied nutritional biochemistry at Cornell and finished in the top of her class! But when she feeds her daughters, I see in her what I see in thousands of busy working moms: Sometimes, it’s just easier to go for the box of cereal when you have a kid to get to school and patients to care for. (Recently, she has converted to a plant-based lifestyle, and I am so happy!)

My younger sister has struggled with her weight since she was a teenager, and I know her quality of life could be so much better if she dropped some pounds and made it a priority to set an example of living healthfully for her kids. But once again, as an accomplished lawyer and single mom of fraternal twins, she constantly sacrifices herself for the sake of her busy schedule and mom duties.

My mom, for her part, went to Weight Watchers every Monday for almost 25 years (“Mom,” I tell her, “it’s not working . . .”) and has an aversion to exercise. When I was growing up, a hike for my mom was trekking through Bloomingdale’s, and that’s still pretty much how things stand today. Her theory is that you’re only allowed so many heartbeats in your life and that working out uses them up too quickly. (I wish I was kidding!)

My dad has an even crazier story. He was the COO of a very large hospital on the East Coast and is one of the smartest businessmen I know. Forget the fact that he’s in a medical environment every day; he thinks that eating 15 pieces of bacon for breakfast and three sausage sandwiches, hold the bread, for lunch, is a diet (“because Dr. Atkins said so”). One day, he walked into a meeting at the hospital and felt a pain in his chest. He took out his key card, quietly let himself into the cardiac unit, and proceeded to have a heart attack. Within 15 minutes, they had a stent in his heart. How lucky is that? If he’d been home, he probably wouldn’t have made it. So after this traumatic episode, I’m thinking,
This is it, now he’s going to change, finally listen to his son, and lose the weight that probably contributed to sending him into the cardiac unit.

“Hey, Dad,” I say, “you’re going to change your life now, right? Eat better, exercise?”

“Naw,” he tells me. “At 69 years old, these things happen.” The following Tuesday after the heart attack, he was at a local steakhouse finishing off a New York strip with a glass of red wine.

These things happen? You mean heart attacks? Come on! These things don’t
have
to happen if you use all that brainpower toward good! They’re my family, and I love them—but I knew from a young age that I didn’t think like them. And for what it’s worth, they think I am a little crazy in the opposite direction. Why do I exercise so much? What do I have against eating meat? They may be right; I can go to extremes. But healthy extremes. An error on my side does not give you a heart attack.

Plus, from an early age, I seemed to have a different constitution. I’d go out to play basketball and come back seven hours later. I couldn’t sit still. But it wasn’t always easy to buck the family way of life. Growing up, every night at eight o’clock, there was a race to the freezer to pull out the Breyer’s chocolate-chip ice cream. (My mouth waters just writing it down!) We each got a coffee cup and were allowed to mash as much ice cream as possible into its interior. By the time I got done with mine, it took two hands to lift it off the counter. The memories of that ritual give me a lot of happiness, but at almost 50 years old, if I was still doing that I would be in the same category as 70 percent of America . . . overweight and wondering how it happened!

Most days, my mom packed us kosher salami sandwiches, potato chips, and a vanilla creme Dunkin’ Donut for lunch. (I loved it! And it came with a note about how much she loved us.) But, in those days, every other family was doing the same thing. I didn’t even know there was another way to eat. About all we knew of vegetables was corn on the cob and maybe some tomatoes in the summer. (It was Jersey! You had to have tomatoes. We were famous for our tomatoes!) The Jersey culture went something like this: If you were happy, “Let’s go get a cheesesteak.” If you lost a game, “Let’s go get a cheesesteak.” Cheesesteaks solved every problem. They were used for both celebration and when cheering up was necessary. My picture still hangs in the most famous cheesesteak house in the United States, Jim’s Steaks on South Street in Philly. I can smell the grilled onions as I write this!

These days, I am so not that guy (and my kids are so not those kids). I made a conscious effort not to go down that path, especially when I discovered how great it felt to be fit and eat healthfully. I also happened to marry someone who is committed to feeding us healthfully. It’s my wife’s passion; therefore, it is my passion, too. If her passion was ice cream and fresh pastries that would also be hard to avoid. You are who you hang out with when it comes to food. Family pressures are especially hard to shake, and that’s something I’ll deal with at length in this book. Families don’t like outliers; if they’re fat, they want you to be fat, too. If they’re not fat and you are, it can be just as bad. Nothing can make your rebellious fingers dial pizza delivery quicker than parents who criticize your weight. We’ll talk about that challenge, too.

*  *  *  *  *

I know that you know how to lose weight. Eat less, move more—it’s not exactly rocket science. In fact, it’s simple; most problem solving is. I’ll give you an example. A few years ago, my oldest son, Cooper, came home from school crying.

“I’ve got a book report due in the morning! I forgot about it! I haven’t started it. What am I going to do?!” He was in a complete panic, tears streaming down his face.

“Okay, stop,” I said. “What’s step number one?”

“Identify the problem.” (As you can see, we’ve been down this road before—he knows the drill.)

“Well, what’s the problem?”

“I’ve got a book report that’s due tomorrow, and I haven’t even read the book.”

“Okay, great, what’s step number two?”

“Make a list,” he says.

And he goes on to make the list: read the book, do a drawing, write an outline, then write the report.

“Great. What’s step number three?”

He’s stopped crying now, and he’s completely calm. He looks down and says, “I know what step number three is Dad.”

“Well, what is it?”

“Go do it.” He was now in control of what a few minutes ago had seemed like an impossible situation.

Cooper started working on his report at about 3:00 p.m. He came down about four hours later, and said he was done. I asked him if he gave it his best.

“Dad, I am going to get an A,” he said.

“That is not what I asked you,” I replied. “Did you give that report your best work?”

“No, I did not do my best.”

I told Cooper to go back upstairs and give me his best. He did, and
then
he was right. He did get an A. In fact, it was one of the best papers he ever wrote.

This three-step solution solves just about any problem. My son is learning how to use it at an early age, but if you’ve never had much practice reaching step three, it can be difficult to change. Most people in life never get to step three, especially where weight loss is concerned. So what I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter if eating less and moving more is a simple formula for transforming the body,
if you don’t do it
. (And by “do it,” I mean do it for a lifetime.) You can know all the diet tricks and best ways to burn fat in the gym—in fact, you probably already do—but, of course, if you’re not putting them to use, the problem will not be solved. Replace the fat thoughts in your head with the mantra, “Do it.” Say it over and over to yourself! Every day, in every situation. Talking about your dreams of being a thin, fit person is fun . . . but actually being a thin, fit person is even more fun! So stop talking about it. Instead, “do it!”

One of the big goals of this book is to make a believer of you, to fire you up, and to help you realize that you actually have a deep well of strength and willpower inside you, just waiting to be tapped. But even more important, I want to help you truthfully answer the question,
Why aren’t I just doing it? What is stopping me from doing the work it takes to give myself a better life? Why don’t I think I deserve it?