“You are the Biggest Loser!”  The cannon goes off and the confetti flies.  I couldn’t hear, I was ecstatic.  I remember being pulled from interview to interview and then having a few minutes before I was taken off in a car and put on a red-eye flight to New York.

I didn’t sleep on that flight.  I had never been to New York and I had just accomplished one of the biggest goals I had had in years and was thinking about what I was going to eat the next day.  As you may remeber, I mentioned that I was a fish out of water when I got to LA.  I had no idea what was going on and now I was going to go to NY to be on about every major talk show on television.  Now I was about to find out how out of the water I was.

My plane landed at around 5 am and as soon as I got in the car I had an interview with my local radio station back in Iowa.  I got to be close friends with the morning radio show personalities Schulte and Swann since they had been having me in each Wednesday to do a recap of the show.  Next stop was Regis and Kelly.

I had no clue what was going on.  They held me in a little room and when it was my time I went out to do the interview.  I don’t think either one of them had ever seen the show and had no idea who I was or why I was on their show.  It was on their show that I learned you can’t swear on TV.  I said “fat a##”  They looked at me like I had just dropped the F bomb.  I didn’t do that anymore.

I spent the rest of the day going from show to show and magazine photo shoot to photo shoot.  I got a call from my state senator and other people I had never met.  The weirdest thing was when I had my first paparazzi photo taken.  I don’t think they knew who I was either.  They just saw me coming out of one of the shows through a private entrance and getting into a limo so I must have been phot worthy.  I was on the same press tour as Naomi Watts so they were probably waiting for her.  Imagine their dissapointment when I came walking out!

I was in NY for a couple days before it was back to LA to do the same thing on a different side of the country.  I look at pictures today from some of those shoots and I wonder what the heck I was thinking.  I say that because a couple days after the finale I was back up to 200 lbs.  I felt huge.  I wasn’t.  In my mind since I wasn’t 182, a weight I don’t want to nor will I ever be again, that I was a fat pig again.

I was a mental mess.  I had been so focused on winning and now that I had done it, I had no idea what I was going to do.  Every year I hear contestants say “I’m never going to go back to that again.”  I said it myself.  The thing for me was that I had lost weight so fast that my mind didn’t have time to catch up with my body.  I was a fat guy in a skinny body.

When I saw pictures I would get all uptight.  “Look at my chin, am I hanging over my jeans?”  I was so critical of myself.  I look at those pics today and I want to smack myself.  I looked great but I never gave myself credit.  I was hyper-critical of myself and was already beginning to set myself up to gain weight again.

I really was a fat guy in a skinny body.

See you tomorrow!

Biggest Loser, diet, exercise, Goals, life lessons, losing weight, Matt Hoover, weight loss

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010, 1:12 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.