How I Lost 100 Pounds Because of Reality TV (And also hard work!)

How a lesson in identity reshaped my health.

I have been overweight for as long as I can remember.

The last day I remember being a healthy weight (probably around 175 pounds) was the week before I went to college. I was 18, coming off a summer working at Riverside Park in Agawam, MA (now Six Flags New England) where I was on my feet for up to 13 hours a day 6 days a week, so there was no amount of lunch break cheese fries that I could eat that was going to break me. There’s a picture of me smiling, looking happy. Looking healthy.

The worst picture of me came four years later. On my graduation day.

I look something adjacent to happy having made it through college, but I weighed somewhere around 275 pounds. Generously, you could say that I look jolly in the photo. Like I had just graduated a future mall Santa-in-training program.

Ungenerously? (A word, apparently.)

I was dangerously obese.

Turns out that eating at an all-you-can eat buffet for four years didn’t work for me. As proud as I was of leaving college as the reigning French Toast Champion (17.5 slices in one sitting, thank you very much) my body was not happy with me.

When I moved to Los Angeles in June of 2000, I decided to start losing weight.

I quit drinking soda, and immediately lost 20 pounds.

I met a vegetarian co-worker. I tried giving up meat and became an original “guy who shows up with his own veggie hot dogs” at BBQs.

I joined a gym and played basketball every Saturday morning. David Arquette tried to throw me an alley-oop. It went about as well as you could make up in your head.

For the next decade, I battled with my weight. In the good years, I got myself down to 215 pounds. There was literally one single day in 2003 where I got down to 199 before giving it all back. I probably averaged around 230 pounds.

In 2010, my son was born and there’s a few pictures of me holding him that remind me of that picture from my graduation day.

I look something adjacent to happy (mixed with a hefty dose of fear and exhaustion), holding this little football-sized person, but I weighed somewhere around 275 pounds.

Again.

This same year, I ended up working on a show named Ruby (This was going to be related to TV at some point!). The series was about a woman named Ruby and her battle to lose weight after weighing as much as 750 pounds. The show addressed not just the physical challenges of losing weight, but also the mental and emotional challenges of losing weight.

Mental and emotional challenges? I thought you just needed to change your diet habits to lose weight.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The single best thing about working in Unscripted TV is getting the opportunity to live in other people’s shoes.

And while Ruby was on camera, getting professional help for her battle with her weight, I was behind the scenes, off-camera, getting professional help for my battle with my weight.

I learned a lot of things working on Ruby, but here’s the lesson that has stuck with me for the 10 years since. It’s hard to lose weight because, well, it’s hard to lose weight. It’s hard to put in the exercise, change your diet, eat new foods, and every other reason why everyone knows that it’s a challenge. But it’s also hard to lose weight because even if you’re unhappy with how you look, it becomes your identity.

Who are you?

You are fat.

How can you be something other than what you’ve always been? It gets written into your code. This is what I look like. This is what I feel like. I don’t deserve better. I’m going to fail, because I always have. Of course I can have Pad See Ew today, it’s not that bad for me, it has broccoli in it!

The weight, I learned, acts like a shield of armor. But the only thing it’s “protecting” you from is yourself. Your own happiness, your own health, and taking control back of your own life.

At least this is what the nice therapist I was watching on my iMac at work was telling me. But was it true?

It took me another 5 years to find out.

On January 2nd, 2015 I weighed 234 pounds, and I decided it was going to be the last year I weighed over 200 pounds.

As I worked my way towards my goal, I found that I faced exactly what that nice therapist on my iMac at work had told me. I found that I identified so strongly with being overweight, I would always take a step back whenever I made progress along with a voice in my head reminding me who I really was. Not only would I physically stop making progress, my brain kept fighting me along the way.

230? Big deal, you probably just had that in water weight.

220? Of course the first 15 is just going to fall off, it’s not like you don’t have the weight to lose.

210? Don’t you dare forget about Pad See Ew!

200? This isn’t you. You don’t deserve this.

I made it to 199 for exactly one day in 2015 (with completely unsustainable under-eating), making it two days in my adult life under 200 pounds. Toldja!

I didn’t do it in 2016 either. Or 2017. Or 2018.

I’m writing this today not because I broke 200 pounds. As if. That goal was so 2019.

I’m writing this because I broke 160 pounds.

I’ve been wanting to write about my battle to lose weight for a long time, but I wasn’t going to do it until I was so far clear of 200 pounds that the number finally felt foreign to me. That it was no longer a number that identified me or felt like my identity. Before I felt like I could confidently tell someone else that they could do it (you can), I felt like I needed to be able to tell myself I did (I did!).

I spent most of 2019 in the 190’s, so it always felt like I was one burrito away from falling apart (One Burrito Away will absolutely be the name of my self-published autobiography).

Over the course of 2020, I’ve dropped another 30 or so pounds, and for the first time in my life, I finally feel like I’m in control. Along the way I (finally) learned that I can rewrite my identity. Health was a choice, just as was being unhealthy. I could pretend that I liked being the fat funny guy or the self-deprecating guy and that it’s just who I was or whatever excuses I gave myself along the way to not put in the work and make the change and commit to the change.

I didn’t lose weight because I worked on a Reality TV show. I lost weight because I put in the work to eat well, exercise, and track my calories. To treat my health as if it was a priority, not a chore. To listen to my body when it started failing me. That every day you face choices that will help you succeed.

But I did lose weight because when I hit those mental and emotional road blocks along the way, I remembered that nice therapist on my iMac, reminding me that whatever your identity is now, does not have to be the same one going forward.