The Biggest Loser and Me.

A new season of The Biggest Loser started last night. It's one of the few programs that my husband and I watch together. And cry together. Man that show always manages to squeeze at least one tear out of me before it's over. This season they are the biggest contestants yet.

And I feel so bad for them.

Their first challenge was to run/walk a mile. They were so out of shape that two people had to be taken to the hospital when it was over. One of whom was so serious that she was still there a week later. I've never been 400 pounds or even 300, but I've been over 200 and it sucked.

It was uncomfortable, tiring and humiliating. It isn't too hard to see how people can get even bigger. There is a lot of shame when you are over 200 pounds and the way to deal with that is to eat to dull the pain, then you feel shame over that and then you eat some more. Rinse and repeat until you have gained another 100 pounds. It's sad and I've been there.

My journey to weight loss actually started with The Biggest Loser a year ago. We were watching a weigh-in and my husband asked, "Do you weigh less than her?" And I couldn't answer.

Because I knew I weighed more.

I just sat there and cried. I cried out the pain and humiliation of my big, strong and athletic husband knowing that I was so fat. I always told him that I weighed less than him. But he didn't know that it was only by 5 pounds.

I'm sure people saw us on the street and wondered what he was doing with me. My husband is 9 years older than me but I was the old woman. We didn't match anymore and I was ashamed.

I had actually tried to lose weight for two years, but to no avail. I had my thyroid checked, saw a nutritionist, and went to three different doctors asking them why I couldn't lose weight. Nobody had any answers for me. After the third doctor's appointment where the doctor said, "Are you watching your portions? Some people think they are eating healthy when they aren't." It dawned on me after I left the appointment and was in the parking lot that the doctor didn't believe me.

No one believed me.

As the realization dawned I started to weep. Not silent tears, but big ugly sobs. I realized that every "expert" I had seen had said basically the same thing as that last doctor. They probably just looked at me like another fat person who sat around all day stuffing their face and then told everyone else that they were on a diet. Right then, as I sat in my car, I had flashes of other doctor's appointments. Not for me, but for my daughter.

She's is not fat. She takes after my husband. She is tall and muscular with no fat on her. But for her 4 year check-up her doctor said that, "Her weight is fine now." Stop, gives me the head to toe eye sweep. "But you need to start watching what she eats now." Huh? This was the kid who five minutes earlier said that her favorite food was salad! Didn't matter. My being fat was a walking billboard for everyone else. I might as well have painted the words, "Lazy. Eats like a pig." on the front of me. That's what everyone thought anyway.

At a surgical consult for my daughter's hernia I got the same thing. The doctor looked at her hernia and said that it wasn't a big hernia, but there could be complications when she got older.

And bigger.

(Yet another head to toe eye sweep.) Yes, Doctor, I get what you mean...

After that day in the parking lot of my doctor's office I had to have a "come to Jesus" with myself. Did I want to admit defeat? Nothing was working anyway. Was I really not trying as hard as I thought I was? Was it time to just say, "I'm fat and I will always be fat."?

I ate my way up to 215 pounds, but I couldn't figure out how to eat my way out of it.

Luckily, my husband had an idea. Our gym had a program called Lifestyles 20/20. I had looked into it a couple of years before when I first started to try to lose weight. It cost thousands of dollars and - at the time - I thought it was a ridiculous amount to spend to lose weight.

But that was at the beginning of my journey. That was before I had started Weight Watchers and gained two pounds the first week. (My husband lost 25 pounds by changing nothing other than eating the healthy dinners I prepared.) I tried Nutrisystem, lost 9 pounds and then promptly stopped losing. Then gained it back. I counted calories on my own and religiously wrote everything I ate into a journal. Nothing happened for two years.

I kept going because I figured that I had to at least be healthier because I ate healthy and I exercised regularly. I may be fat, but I was healthy! Anyway, back to my husband's idea.

He said that maybe I should check out 20/20 again and see what it entailed. He said that he was willing to pay for it if it would help me. The man that had seen me fail at countless diets over the years believed in me even when all of those doctors didn't!

We don't spend money easily. This was desperation. My final hail mary pass before giving up. We talked about it before I started the diet and we decided that this was my last try and if it didn't work then it "is what it is". I would just need to live with the weight.

Luckily it wouldn't come to that. The first week I lost over 5 pounds. I really expected to gain, I always did before. I was exstatic! Come to find out that I wasn't eating ENOUGH calories!

Go figure...

I also wasn't eating enough heart healthy fat. (I spent my whole life avoiding fat in any form; this was a revelation.) And the last piece of the puzzle was that I was intolerant to grains. Not carbs, those I really needed to keep my energy up. In one week I had two servings of grains and gained a pound. Nothing else in my diet had changed. Basically, I needed to eat whole foods.

Not 100 calorie snack packs. Real food with real ingredients. I was and still am amazed.

As of today I've lost 61 pounds and am at my goal weight. Who knew? I certainly didn't that night when I watched The Biggest Loser with my husband and he asked me a simple question.

That night I never would have guessed a year later I would be my own Biggest Loser.