My Latest Obsession

I said it out loud to my brother last night, so it must be official...I told him I was obsessed with the program The Biggest Loser. I am not kidding, I do not watch much network television, but I do put my life and family on hold for two hours every Tuesday night so I can me amazed by the last five minutes of the show. Brian tried to convince me last night that I could have taken his phone call and just paused the program or recorded it, but the thought never occurred to me! It was far more important that I catch the last half hour in "real time" and call him back later. I was sure Brian could wait, but The Biggest Loser...come on???


For those of you not fortunate enough to be familiar with the show, it is a reality based program that follows 20 morbidly obese individuals on their weight loss journies. The beauty of the program is that it is not as "cush" as I just made it sound. The people are split into teams, get their asses pounded daily by personal trainers, are taught how to make healthy food choices, are weighed in each week to see who has the greatest percentage of weight loss, and each week vote off one of the people who lost the lowest percentage of weight during that week. This is all in the name of getting healthy, losing weight, and winning $250,000!

The aspect of the show I enjoy most, and that motivates me most, is to see the dramatic change in the contestants at the end of each week. I particularly like to see the before and after pictures of the contestant who is voted off. These people look PHENOMONAL! Several of the men have lost over 100 lbs. each and two women are approaching that same milestone. One of the gals in particular, Ali, looks AMAZING!!!!! I believe her starting weight was 238 lbs. and as of last night's episode, she is down to 146 lbs! Eric doesn't really follow the show and when he was sitting with me last week as the episode was wrapping up and they were weighing in, he was shocked to find out she was one of the contestants and not one of the trainers.

Another part of the show I enjoy is seeing how competitive these people are. Every week there is a physical challenge of some type and it is crazy to see how competitive some of the contestants are. I am flabbergasted to see these once grossly overweight people compete and complete tasks that most "normal sized" people couldn't even pretend to. To think they they all walked onto the show with such poor physical health that some got winded just tying their shoes. Now, they can run for miles at a time, have crazy workout routines, and 5 of them just completed a triathalon of sorts on last night's episode!

Considering the fact that I was just watching a stupid t.v. show, I do have to say that watching Ali reach the 146 lb. mark last night actually kind of had a wierd affect on me. At 146 lbs., in my mind, she isn't too far off from weighing what I do (I'll keep you guessing as to just how close she is, after all, a girl has to have some secrets), granted, she's not as tall as I am, but you get the picture. As I mentioned before, I'm still working on losing a few pounds, which obviously means I'm not quite happy with the way I see myself in the mirror. It was very interesting to me to know what Ali weighed in at because all night long I kept telling Eric how great she looked. Then to put it in perspective, I started thinking about me. I am taller than her, weigh less, and yet I have a totally different perspective of how I see myself in the mirror. INTERESTING!!! I think part of it is seeing the before and after pictures of the contestants, seeing how far they have come, and having the comparison right in your face. Unlike those contestants, I don't have a significant amount of weight to lose, nor have I really ever, so for me it's a buldge here and a pooch there. As it should be, I'm sure my buldges and pooches getting smaller are a lot less noticeable to me and everyone else than the 87 lbs. Ali has lost on the show!

I guess the real moral to all of this is that if we all had a little motivation, a personal trainer, nutritionist, and 24/7 to dedicate ourselves to losing weight and getting healthy we could all probably do it too. When you're not competing for $250,000 something called life seems to find a way of getting in the way. Regardless, thanks to The Biggest Loser, every Wednesday morning I'm a little more motivated to head off to the gym for my "last chance workout".