Posts Tagged exercise
Almost Time To Go Home…
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on June 24th, 2010
I can not believe how quickly the time went here at Fitness Ridge. I also can’t believe how much I have changed in those two weeks. I am really excited to be going home and know that I am going to be a better husband, dad, and man. I can’t wait to implement what I have learned here at my position at Vision Quest Sport and Fitness as a life coach. My time here is also going to help me in my speaking career.
When I left The Biggest Loser I was scared. I had been so focused on winning the show that I had blinders on and sacrificed in other areas of my life. I am leaving here feeling prepared to handle the real world. When I left the show I focused on all the things I could “never” eat again. Leaving here I am focused on all the things that I will be able to enjoy and the different foods I will be implementing into my diet. Diet as in what I eat daily, not as in a restrictive regimen that stresses me out.
I don’t know how much weight I have lost here and I am not really concerned about it. I know that continuing to eat the way I have learned to here and exercising daily will yield the long term and lasting results that I want to achieve.
Tonight I went to the store with some friends to get some pictures developed. As we were waiting I walked around and looked at the foods that I usually crave when I am trying to lose weight. The things that have been triggers. As opposed to wanting them and thinking “After I weigh in on Saturday, I am going to get some of this.” I looked at the calories and ingredients and thought about how much of other nutritious food I could have for the same amount of calories.
I think one of the things that is going to help me the most is having a schedule. Eating at 9:30, 12:30, and 5:30. Planning my workout times and my workout schedule. I have always prided myself in being carefree and being able to just “roll with it”. That hasn’t worked too well. I am going to structure my days for success in all areas, diet, exercise, work and personal. I am really excited.
I think the coolest thing I have realized this week is that it is ok to appreciate the work I am doing. I am also proud to have learned that things don’t always have to be hard. If I do the things I need to each day, success in all areas will follow.
This has been a great experience. I want to thank my wife and kids, Brad and Chip at Vision Quest Sport and Fitness, and The Biggest Loser Resort for allowing me the opportunity to once again change my life!
See you tomorrow!
Day 3 At Fitness Ridge…
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on June 16th, 2010
Have you ever taken a long trip in the car to a vacation destination? Think about it. When it’s time to leave you are so excited to be going. When you are about half way you start to think “We should have flown”, “Why are we still driving?”, “When are we going to be there?” Sound familiar?
I started a trip on Monday here at Fitness Ridge. On Monday I was so excited. On Tuesday I was sore but still excited to be here. Today I was exhausted. I didn’t want to get up for the 6 am hike, I really wanted to go get a big huge breakfast. I didn’t want to work out as hard as I knew I could.
The good news is that I did get up, I didn’t go out to eat, and I did work out as hard as I could. The question is why do we start out so fast on a journey only to lose momentum. I believe it’s because as good as our intentions may be, often we will look back at past experiences and draw upon those as opposed to focusing on the experience that we are currently having.
I’ll be the first to admit that I have always been a fast starter only to lose a little focus on the way to my destination. Instead of pushing through, sometimes I will decide to start over. This cycle repeats itself and it seems that I am not making any progress and eventually come up with a reason to focus on something else.
If you haven’t noticed, my hikes this week are my reflection times. Today I realized that it’s not enough to start a journey, we need to finish it. Sure it would have been easy to take some time off, come up with an excuse why I needed a break, but the reality is that I didn’t and don’t need a break.
Today was Wednesday, fittingly refered to as hump day. We have to be willing to get over that hump in order to move forward toward our destination. Even though we may not feel like it, we have to press on. If we continue to give up and start over every time we face difficulties we will never get anywhere, much less the place we really want to be.
To sum it up, today was a day to look at today, not tomorrow or a month from now but right here in the present. I had to decide not to give up and start over another day. I had to push through today in order to get tomorrow and once again transform my life in the days, weeks, months, and years to come.
We will never know what we are capable of if we give up before we give ourselves a chance. Press on!
See you tomorrow!
Are You Pushing Yourself Hard Enough?
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on February 16th, 2010
This morning I had the chance to workout with some MMA guys at my gym. For those of you who don’t have a clue what MMA is, it’s mixed martial arts or most commonly known as ultimate fighters. These guys are tough and their workouts are even tougher. After my workout I realized how easy it is to fool ourselves into thinking we are working harder than we are.
I have been training seven days a week for nearly three weeks now. I am feeling good and am glad that I still feel pretty good after I get done with a workout. I have been chalking it up to the fact that I am getting into pretty good shape. Today I realized that the reason I have been feeling so good after my workouts is because I have been holding back.
I think a lot of people feel like they are working hard when they workout by themselves, some do but a lot of them aren’t going as hard as they think they are. I for one know I work harder when I work out with a group. First, it’s a pride thing. I don’t want to look like a sissy. Second, we tend to feed off the atmosphere we are in. If we are in a group that is working hard we tend to work harder.
It’s easy to slip into a comfortable place when we are doing workouts. Most of us do the same thing every time we step in the gym. I, for one, see other people doing stuff sometimes and wonder if I could do what they are doing. I’ll admit it, sometimes I will even go and try it after the person has left.
There comes a certain boost to an ego when you try something new and succeed. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. We can get ourselves all kinds of messed up in the head when we try something and fail. Here is what I think. Try it anyway. Try a new class, try doing a group workout, try doing a workout that you think is impossible. Give it an honest try. If it is hard, do the best you can. If the class is an hour long and you don’t think you can make it, just keep moving the entire time and try to go a little longer each time.
I think you will amaze yourself if you will just give yourself the opportunity. Next time you go to workout ask yourself, “Am I really pushing myself?” I hope you can answer yes!
See you tomorrow!
A Fantastic Friday…
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on January 29th, 2010
Today was just too good of a day to write about Biggest Loser stuff. I took my boys, Rex and Jax, to the zoo and we had a blast. We got there around noon and us being the wild and crazy guys that we are closed the joint down. I have never really been a big fan of the zoo but my boys love seeing the animals so I decided that today I would take them on my own. No mom to keep an eye on all of us.
I think the best part of the day was seeing how adventurous my sons are. Rex wanted to jump off anything he could climb on and his little brother Jax was trying his hardest to keep up. Today I decided to let Rex be the tour guide. Wherever he wanted to go we went. If he wanted to run we ran. If he wanted to sit, we sat.
It was a blast and we did very little sitting. I have always said that if we as parents played like our kids, there wouldn’t be very many overweight parents. Have you ever seen a two year old at the zoo or any other park? They are a little balls of endless energy.
Today I spent the afternoon chasing two little balls of energy and it was fun. I wasn’t beat like I am after a workout but I definitely expended more energy than I would have sitting at home watching television.
There are multiple benefits to getting out and playing with your kids. Here are a couple that I want to emphasize today. Playing with the kids gets both the kids and us active. Being active with kids at a young age and showing them how to have fun being active can help them develop healthy habits that can last a lifetime.
I love seeing my boys, especially Rex right now, love running. As I was chasing him all over the zoo, I wasn’t upset. I was hoping that he never loses the excitement that he has for exercise today. GO PLAY WITH YOUR KIDS!
See you Monday!
Life After The Biggest Loser…. Part 4
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on January 27th, 2010
“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!
Life After The Biggest Loser…. Part 2
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on January 22nd, 2010
Yesterday I talked about what it is like having people know you and how contestants are real people and how we should all be nice to one another and give hugs. Well, that is kind of what I talked about. Today I am going to talk about how The Biggest Loser changed me personally.
Before I went on the show I was angry. As most people know, I was a college wrestler at The University of Iowa. I pretty much blew it there. It wasn’t a talent issue, it was a commitment issue. I was more committed to partying and telling people I was a wrestler than I was to training and actually being a wrestler.
Long story short, I quit the team and left school only a few credits short of a degree. I had never quit anything in my life up until that point and once I learned how easy it was to quit, it got easier and easier for me to do so. I went from being a 177 pound athlete to over 350 pounds in a very short time. The bigger I got, the less I cared.
I drank a lot and ate a lot. Prior to going on the show it was not uncommon for me to put down two bottles of rum in one night. I don’t know what happened after they were gone. I just know that I would wake up and they were gone. Food was something that I used to medicate when I couldn’t drink.
I would go through the McDonald’s drive through and order two value meals. Even though I knew I was going to eat both of them, I thought maybe the person handing me the food would think I was getting them for two people. The other thing that I use to do was eat them really fast. Like somehow if I ate really fast the calories wouldn’t count! I will talk more about this at length on another day and how those habits still affect me today.
My friends knew me as a Chris Farley type (I did have a spot on impression) who was the happy, fat, drunk guy. I had lots of friends that were girls but none that were really interested in being my girlfriend. I became resigned to the fact that this was how my life was going to be. After all, I deserved it for blowing it at Iowa. Let me summarize my life in just a couple words. I was a miserable mess.
Fast forward. I show up on the ranch weighing 339 pounds. You may not believe it but I actually lost weight before taping began because while we were sequestered before the show I couldn’t drink. I also didn’t want to look like a pig so I didn’t eat very much. Kind of ironic isn’t it? I weighed over 300 pounds but didn’t want people to know I ate bad!
Even though I was obese I thought I could still do things like I did when I was a college wrestler. I couldn’t. It was a deflating moment. I finally realized how bad things had gotten for me. The infamous clip of Jillian and I talking or should I say her talking and me bawling my eyes out has recieved several thousand hits on Youtube. As rough as it was, that breakdown was the beginning of my transformation on the inside.
I was still angry, still walking around with a chip on my shoulder and still fat, but I was beginning to change whether I knew it or not. Like I have said before, when I was on the ranch we didn’t have TV, internet, magazines, or much else besides gym equipment to keep us occupied. What I did have was myself.
Sometimes being alone with yourself is very frightening. Especially if you have no idea who you are or that the person you thought you were really isn’t you at all. When I was finally forced to be alone and deal with my issues I went through the same range of emotions that people go through when they experience a loss or a death of someone close to them.
Along with losing weight I was losing years of baggage and in essence, my old self. It wasn’t until I arrived home after being on the ranch for all those months by myself that I realized just how much I had changed.
See you tomorrow!
The Reality of Reality Weight Loss….
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on January 20th, 2010
I seriously just erased an entire blog because I didn’t like the way it sounded when I read it. I want to talk about some of the realities of being a contestant on The Biggest Loser but I don’t want to bash the show. I want to talk about what life is like after but don’t want to sound like I am making excuses. Here is what I am going to do. I am going to type what I am thinking and not worry about what others say and here’s why.
I WAS THERE! I was actually on the show and know what it has been like for me. I can only speak for myself and what I have experienced. There have been 7 seasons since I was on the show. Things may or may not have changed and just like any other experience in life, people who have been in the same situation can have dramatically different experiences.
I want to talk about the big topic of discussion that I have been reading a lot about lately. In a recent magazine article, I read about the type of support available to contestants after leaving the show. Back when I won there wasn’t a whole lot. Please remember that I was on in the infancy stage of BL. Before the show was as big as it is today. None of us, especially the producers, could have ever imagined what BL was to become.
That being said, I don’t think anyone could have imagined the impact being on the show would have on an individual and their life after being on the show. I have talked to recent contestants and am glad to hear that they have access to support. I am lucky in that I met my wife on the show and we could lean on each other. I can’t imagine going home to a spouse who had no idea what kind of transformation I had just gone through. Many people have had to do just that. They have had to go home and explain why they “seem different” or why they choose to no longer do some of the things they use to. Some people lose friends and some even spouses.
One of the great things about being on BL is that you learn to rely on yourself. One of the bad things about being on BL is that sometimes you start to rely on yourself too much. Rather than seek out help, which seems to be available now, we (I) just assume that it was up to us to fix it. After all, I lost the weight I can deal with this, whatever “this” may be.
I was bitter for a long time toward Jillian after the show because I didn’t feel like I got any support from her after the show. The reason being is that after the finale, I never talked to her again. I don’t know why or if I did something to upset her, we just have never connected again. It was dissapointing to me. When I gained weight I got embarrassed and thought maybe that is why we haven’t talked.
Just this past week we appeared on the Joy Behar show which Jillian was also on. I was nervous and thought “How is this gonna go?” We still didn’t get a chance to talk. During the show she said something that the casual viewer would have not picked up on. It was a simple comment about me completing the Ironman World Championship triathlon. When we left the building I told my wife that I wasn’t angry anymore. In fact, after she said what she said I realized something. I had been acting immature.
Let me use yet another analogy. Yesterday it was prison, today it’s highschool.
Almost every highschool team has a senior star. The kid who the coaches have spent hours, even years, developing and coaching. The reason this athlete has gotten to the level of being the star is because they listened to their coaches and worked hard. Let’s say this kid leads his team to a state title in their sport.
They go home and give a speech to the fans in their hometown. The people who have watched them progress into the athlete they have become are all there. The kid more than likely thanks the fans, their parents, and lastly their coaches. Everyone in the gym quietly wonders what is going to be like next year without this athlete on the team.
Guess what, a new kid will step into the old stars place! Want to know why? Because a good coach knows that they have a job to do. They can’t sit around worrying about whether or not the star that just graduated is going to make it on their own. A good coach prepares their athletes to live well after their time on the team has concluded. Of course from time to time they may think about some of the kids they coached in the past, but they have a job to do and a new group of kids to focus on. It is up to the athlete to implement the lessons they learned from their coach.
If you are having a tough time trying to figure out how this relates to BL and specifically my and Jillian’s relationship or lack thereof, let me break it down for you.
Jillian has a job to do. Her job is to train the contestants and get them to lose the most amount of weight possible while they are working with her. I know she genuinely cares about the contestants but she has now trained hundreds of contestants. It isn’t an option for her to personally check in on all of us. As much as I wish she could, it isn’t feasable and to tell the truth is a little selfish on my part. That day, after the show, I realized that even though Jillian and I haven’t talked since the finale of my season, she still cares enough to keep tabs on what I have been doing. Hearing her make that brief statement on Joy’s show was freeing.
Jillian taught me a lot, but just as the coach of any successful team she has to focus on the team she has currently. What I have to do now is implement the lessons I learned from her and take care of myself like a big boy.
See you tomorrow!
The Joy Behar Show Appearance
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on January 13th, 2010
This evening Suzy and I will be appearing on the Joy Behar Show. For those of you who don’t know she is, she is also one of the hosts on The View. It promises to be interesting as Jillian Michaels, a trainer from The Biggest Loser will also be on. I haven’t spoken to her since the finale of my season of The Biggest Loser. That was clear back during the second season.
I got the feeling that we were asked to come on to discuss the struggles that we have had since leaving the show. We haven’t hidden the fact that we gained weight and have been very public about our struggles and what we have learned.
We have also developed a program to help others get their health and life back. A program which we participate in as well. We really hope we get a chance to talk about it as well as share our perspective on weight loss and what true health is really about.
If viewers tune in to hear us bash the show, it’s not going to happen. We have an amazing life together. First because of God and second because The Biggest Loser helped us change our lives and allowed us to find each other. We will however be talking honestly about our thoughts on the show.
We are excited for this chance to share our story and our lives once again with America. As I mentioned above, Suzy and I have developed a program to help others who are currently fightitng the battle to lose weight. For information on this program please visit: http://livelikelosers.yolasite.com/ We want to help others gain their lives back and this program addresses all aspects of health, not just getting to a certain number on the scale.
I will share our experience on the show with you all tomorrow.
