Posts Tagged life lessons
Drop the Anchor…
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on August 11th, 2010
Yesterday I shared how I had been in a little funk. It amazes me how the simple act of “coming clean” can improve how you feel so quickly.
Sometimes the things that we are carrying around as baggage seem like a giant anchor that is just holding us back. Most people that have ever boated know that in order to move you have to pull up your anchor. It is possible to move the boat while it is still anchored, but it takes a lot more power and you won’t get any place to quickly. Once that anchor is pulled up, however, that boat will cut through the water with relative ease.
Why is it so hard to pull up our own anchor? Once we do, things tend to go easier. Unfortunately, many of us choose to simply walk around dragging that anchor around like it is attached to our body like an arm. It’s time to pull up anchor and move forward.
The things that have been holding us back or dragging us down are only able to do so when we give them permission. Pull that sucker up and go!
See you tomorrow!
Headin Home!!!
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on June 26th, 2010
I’m sitting in the Las Vegas airport a proud man. I was able to find supper that was healthy and within my calorie range! Sounds like a little thing, but airports have been my place of struggle for many years. I had a salad from Baja Fresh. I asked them to hold the fried tortilla strips and cheese and had salsa instead of dressing. I ate it and am typing this blog completely satisfied. They didn’t even look at me like I was a creature from another planet when I asked them to make my salad a little different.
Next stop was to get something to drink. I’m off the pop now and thought maybe a bottle of tea would be good to drink. Guess what the second ingredient was on the “anti-oxidant rich” green tea was. High fructose corn syrup. On the diet it was crystallized fructose and phenylalanine or whatever. I got my water bottle out and filled it up at the fountain. I have worked to hard to start taking shortcuts.
Speaking of shortcuts, today I decided that rather than going on a regular hike that I was going to climb the mountain across from the resort. It really is a mountain. It was a 1 mile hike straight up the side. I found the trailhead and took off. Even though it was steep, the trail was well marked. For a while. As I climbed higher and the terrain got tougher I began to question my common sense.
About 3/4 of the way up I saw an opening that looked like a good way to go, a shortcut. From where I was standing it looked like it would definitely be easier going once I got up a short wall. I scaled the wall and was in a deep crack in the mountain. I continued about 20 feet before I came to a dead end.
I was left with two options. Sit there and wait for someone to get me or turn around and go back the way I came and try and find a different way. Well I wasn’t about to wait around for someone to figure out that I had been an idiot and come looking for me. I went back down scaled the face I had climbed up, which was much more intimidating standing on top looking down. I made it down and continued up the way I should have the first time.
When I got to the top of the mountain I thought about what had happened and how that relates to my own life and quite possibly yours. When things got a little difficult I started looking for a shortcut. I knew that if I stayed on the path I was on that I would eventually get to the top. When the good idea buzzer went off in my brain to look for the easier way, it sounded like a good plan. It wasn’t.
How many times in life are we on the right path when an easier route seems to appear. We all want to get where we want to go quickly. The problem is that often times our “shortcuts” are anything but that. We start out on the shortcut with best intentions only to find out it was the wrong decision. It is those moments that we have to get real with ourselves. We can sit there and cry and wait to be rescued or we can turn around, go back the way we came and get back on the path that we know is going to take us to our ultimate destination.
Often times when I take a shortcut I will stand there and think “Why did I do this again?’ I may stand there paralyzed by the thought of having made a bad call; almost as if doing nothing is somehow better than acknowledging I screwed up and head back to where I went off track.
I couldn’t have asked for a better lesson to learn on my last day at The Biggest Loser Resort. Today I know where I want to go and that taking shortcuts isn’t going to get me there any quicker. For me it’s time to stop taking shortcuts and stay on the path that I know is going to take me where I want to go. How about you?
No More Shortcuts!
In my next blog I will be giving a recap of my entire stay at Fitness Ridge as well as sharing my numbers from my 2 weeks there. (I am not disappointed!)
See you tomorrow!
The Self Fulfilling Prophecy…
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on June 17th, 2010
Many people have heard the term self fulfilling prophecy at one time or another during their life. Although having heard it, many have never thought about what it is.
Simply put, our beliefs affect our behaviors. Most of the time it is the negative beliefs that will manifest themselves. As I was working out this morning I started thinking about some of my own thought patterns in the past and how almost all of the negative things I said to myself did or began to become true.
Let me give you an example. When I first won The Biggest Loser, I would read the internet and see that people were saying that I was going to gain all of my weight back. I had never met these people, these people didn’t know me, but somehow what they were writing about me stuck with me. At first I would say that they had no idea what they were talking about. After being away from the show for nearly a year, I did begin to gain weight. When I first realized how much weight I had gained, my thoughts weren’t: “I’ll just get back to work.” They were: “Oh my gosh they were right.”
I was letting what other people had said affect me so deeply that I began to talk to myself in negative ways. I remember thinking, “You always do this, do something great for yourself and then try and wreck it.” Do you see the pattern? Rather than appreciate the weight I had kept off and work to re-lose the weight I had gained, I began to behave worse. It is almost like, rather than try and prove the nay-sayers wrong, I has trying to prove them right.
There will always be detractors to your success. People who don’t want to see you succeed. DO NOT be your own biggest detractor. Think about what you are saying to yourself. The more negative things that you dwell on, the more negative things YOU are going to produce. There will always be plenty of people who will tell you that you can’t do something. The only person who can make you not do something is you.
I have had my struggles with weight, but I am going to win because I believe I will. As I have mentioned in some of my past blogs, I have hit a plateau and the numbers haven’t been dropping. I am not going to sit back and say, “Well I guess this is just what I am going to weigh. I’m not going to be able to be as fit as I would like.” I am going to focus on the solutions. I have seen progress and know that I can reach the level of fitness that I desire.
One thing I do know is that having a negative attitude can only hinder my progress. How are you speaking to yourself? Are the words you are using going to help or hinder your success?
I hope you will work with me to change from negative self talk, which will lead to self defeat; to positive self talk which will open doors in life that you may have thought were permanently closed.
What an Interesting Day!
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on May 20th, 2010
This morning Suzy and I got the boys up at 5am to drive to Portland to be a part of the taping for the premier episode of The Biggest Loser’s 1oth season. We were excited to go down and see our friend and Suzy’s trainer Bob Harper and meet a couple of this seasons new contestants.
All was well as we crossed into Portland from Washington. About a mile into the state of Oregon we were chatting along when WHAM. We were hit from behind by another vehicle. I quickly jumped out of the car to check on the boys in the backseat. We got hit hard and I was worried about them. They seemed fine. The guy who hit us wasn’t so lucky, his car was mangled but I think he was fine as well. His car actually went under us for the most part so we were still able to drive our car. Needless to say we were a little late to the taping.
When we got to the shoot it started to downpour. Not the little mist that we are use to here in the Pacific Northwest, but a full on cats and dogs storm. As we trudged to the shoot site we wondered if maybe this was a sign that we weren’t suppose to come. When we got to a bridge where people had been waiting all morning we were swarmed by people wanting pictures and autographs. I have to admit, it was a lot of fun to feel like a celebrity and the boys handled it really well. Being treated so nice took our minds off the earlier events of the day.
Right when it was time to start rolling cameras the rain subsided and the birds even began to chirp. We watched as new contestant hopefuls were announced and weighed in and then we went for a walk with a huge group of Biggest Loser fans.
As we were waiting for the walk to begin a lady came up to me to ask a question. She was a former athlete who was having some struggles and asked me because I too was a former athlete. We talked about our identity and how we saw ourselves. I also explained that it can be difficult to change our mindsets from always working hard to earn a championship and transitioning into exercising to live a healthy life. We talked for several minutes and I have to believe that my brief time with this lady, who was extremely nice, was meaningful.
As we drove home I realized that even when things aren’t going as planned we can still impact others. Today I learned the value of being able to not sweat the small stuff and appreciate the bigger picture. Yes our car is wrecked and we will have some doctor visits, but all in all we walked away pretty lucky, as it could have been much worse.
I am so glad that we continued on with our journey for the day and didn’t let a setback hold us back!
Still On Track….
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on February 15th, 2010
I want to thank my readers who asked if I was still on track with my blog and workouts. I am! There was a glitch on my site and my new posts were not appearing on the home page. I believe it is taken care of now. To all of you who sent me messages asking how things were going, thank you. If you hadn’t asked I probably wouldn’t have known anything was wrong. The post are now up so I hope you will go back and read them.
I had an amazing talk with a good friend of mine last week. We were talking about getting and staying on track and he said something that really resonated with me and I think it will be beneficial for all of you as well, regardless of where you are at in your life right now.
I was telling him how in the past I have always felt like things need to be difficult for me in order to feel like I am accomplishing anything. When I was losing weight I felt like it needed to be hard. When it came to finances I felt like even though I have plenty of money I still feel like I should be struggling for some reason. In my speaking career I have felt like there should be times where I don’t have a lot of events booked so that I work harder.
Turns out I can be an idiot. Life doesn’t have to be a struggle. More times than not we make it a struggle so that we have an excuse in case things don’t work out like we plan. If we make losing weight hard we have a reason to give up. “It was just too hard.” “There must be something wrong with my metabolism.” “I don’t know what’s going on with my weight.” We build excuses for ourselves based on not only our own experience but the experiences of others as well.
My friend listened intently and then said this. “I don’t care.” I was a little taken aback. How could he not care after I had just spilled my guts to him. The answer is simple. It doesn’t matter what you’ve always done, what matters is what you are doing now. Things don’t have to be hard just because that’s the way it’s always been.
He then took a sheet a paper and drew a line on it. He pointed to the left side of the line and said that the left side reprresented the past. He didn’t care that I had won The Biggest Loser. He didn’t care that my parents had gotten a divorce or that I didn’t do as well in school as I should have. He didn’t care anything about those things and neither should I. What happened in the past doesn’t have to affect us today. If I am going to be truly successful I need to draw the line and move forward.
I have talked for hours about the importance of not reliving the past. For some reason the first place I go when things get tough is straight to my past experiences. Not the good ones that show I am capable overcoming, but the bad experiences that lead me to think “See, this is what you do all the time. Now you have done it all over again.”
It’s time to draw that line. I have had tough times in the past but I have also had good ones. Times that showed me that I am tough and that I am an overcomer. For all the bad times there were a lot more good ones. The good ones are the ones we need to draw strength from. The bad experiences are like an anchor that is weighing us down. Until we pull that anchor up we can’t move to a better place.
I hope you will join me in drawing that line and striving to not cross back over. Let’s draw from the positive things in our life and stop setting ourselves up for defeat by reliving and speaking the negatives. We have too much life to live to allow ourselves to be weighed down with those negative anchors.
DRAW THE LINE!
See you tomorrow!
Are You a Do-er or a Gonna Do-er?
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on February 5th, 2010
Yesterday I talked a little about how we can’t change others, only ourselves. I want to talk about how our actions speak louder than words. By changing ourselves we can encourage those around us to make changes without saying a word. I am going to share how I use to be a “gonna do” person instead of a “do” person.
For a lot of years when I was struggling I would tell people about what I was going to do. I was going to lose weight, I was going to quit drinking so much, I was going to go back to school. Let’s just say I was going to do a lot of things.
Nearly every week I was gonna start a diet. I was a lot like people you have seen or maybe even yourself. On Monday I would show up to work with my water and a salad for lunch. On Tuesday I would show up with a salad, a sandwich, and a water. On Wednesday I would have a sandwich and a pop. On Thursday a sandwich, a pop, and a bag of chips. On Friday I was like “Forget it, let’s just go out for lunch. I did pretty good this week.” This pattern would repeat itself pretty regularly.
The other thing I was always gonna do was cut back on the drinking. On Saturdays when I was good and drunk I would tell my friends that “After tonight, I’m done.” They would laugh a little and then say “OK Hoover, whatever you say.” I use to get upset and think to myself “Why don’t they beleive me? They should be encouraging me!” Again, I said this on a regular basis but never got around to actually doing it.
It never dawned on me that the reason people didn’t get excited for me is because they were constantly hearing me say things and never doing anyting. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to see me do things they just knew from my past that I probably wasn’t going to follow through. It wasn’t meaness, it was past experiences.
I don’t think I am much different from a lot of people in wanting praise for the things I want to do and not wanting constructive criticism for the things I say I am going to do and then don’t. We all want to look good in others eyes and not look like a failure. Unfortunately, when we don’t follow through we start to talk about what we are going to do next as though to somehow make up for what we didn’t do.
It’s a vicious cycle and it leads nowhere. We need to start small with the changes and then check them off as we go. More importantly, we need to follow through. It’s easy to set big goals and talk about all of the great things we want to do. It can be difficult to actually do them.
I rarely tell people all of the things I am going to do now. I just do them and let people see the results. One reason is that a lot of the things that I tend to do seem downright insane to others. For example, competing in the Ford Ironman World Championships having never done more than a sprint triathlon before. The other reason is that I have learned that my actions speak louder than my words.
In the words of the great Nike slogan, Just Do It! That being said, when we begin to take action more than likely those around us will too. If you want to encourage someone close to you to lose weight, lose weight yourself first. If you want to get a better job, start looking and preparing yourself. We can’t just sit around and wait for things to happen for us. We have to be do-ers instead of gonna do-ers! Have an awesome weekend and go do something!
See you Monday!
What I See When I Look In The Mirror…
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on February 3rd, 2010
There is a strange phenomenon that occurs when you lose weight with someone close to you. When Suzy and I were on the show neither of us really noticed the changes that were happening physically. It seems like when we see a person everyday we are less likely to notice the changes in appearance that are taking place.
It seems like the last person to see the change in us when we lose weight is us. When I got home from the ranch everyone was telling me how good I looked but when I saw myself in the mirror I saw the old me. In the same way that we may not notice a weight loss in a person close to us, the opposite is also true. It may not be immediately obvious when the same person we saw lose the weight starts to gain it back.
After Jax was born Suzy said she was going to take six weeks and then get back to working out. At the six week mark she started working out again. By this time I had gotten pretty lazy. Suzy would ask if I wanted to go for a walk and I would go begrudgingly. When I saw Suzy working out everyday, I didn’t see her as someone who needed to lose weight. I saw her as someone who was suggesting that I needed to lose weight.
There hasn’t been a day that has gone by that I haven’t thought my wife is the most beautiful woman in the world. When she said she was unhappy with her weight I couldn’t figure it out. I seriously thought she was crazy. That is when I realized that I was being an enabler. Not just for my wife, but for myself as well.
By not being supportive of her feelings I was basically telling her that her feelings about herself weren’t valid. By telling her she didn’t have to work out I was giving myself permission to not work out as well. Although I was trying to show her that I loved her “just they way she is” I was doing more harm than good. Of course we love the ones closest to us just the way they are. What are you suppose to do when you love them but they don’t necessarily love themselves?
I’m not saying Suzy didn’t love herself, she didn’t love the way she looked. Not supporting her was like nonverbally saying everyday “It’s fine with me if you aren’t happy just don’t bother me with it because I think you look just fine.” Unfortunately that type thinking was more of a reflection upon myself than it was on my wife.
If I could just get Suzy to be happy with not working out and just carrying some extra weight, maybe I could do the same. It is a little sad but a lot of times in relationships if one person decides they need to make a change the other person takes it personal. As if them wanting to improve themselves somehow means that we are lacking.
For me it was “If Suzy wants to lose weight, she must really mean that she wants me to lose weight.” Oh whoas me! How could she be so selfish as to want something better for herself. There must be something wrong with me. Suzy wanted to be healthy and be an example for our kids like we had talked about since before they were born. I wanted to somehow be healthy but not have to put so much effort into it.
In 14 months my wife had 2 babies and I was the one feeling sorry for myself when I looked in the mirror. Selfishness not only sabatoges the ones we love but ourselves as well. When I finally took a good long look in the mirror I realized that I did in fact need to make some changes. Changes in the way I really saw myself, not how I thought others saw me or how my wife saw me but in the person I saw staring back at me in that mirror everyday.
See you tomorrow!
Surprise Surprise….
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on February 2nd, 2010
Rex was quite a surprise for us. As a good friend of mine likes to say,I couldn’t have been more surprised if I woke up with my head stapled to the carpet, when I found out Suzy was pregnant again. Jax, our second son, was definitely not on our schedule.
It was tough on Suzy because she was only a few pounds away from her goal weight again when we found out Jax was on his way. I was doing well too. This time we pretty much just let loose. We were dealing with a 5 month old and we just gave in. Once again Suzy and I packed on the weight together.
The odd thing is that since we were doing it together it wasn’t so bad in our minds. After all, I was just trying to make my wife happy. I guess that is one of the things about having been on the show together. I think it kind of gave us a false confidence. “We may have gained weight, but we can lose it when we want.” It was true that we could lose it when we wanted, but it was going to take a lot longer than when we were living on the ranch.
I talk all the time about how people in the real world shouldn’t expect to see double digit weight loss numbers every week like they see on the show. I know from experience that it takes hours of activity and pretty excessive calorie restriction to get those numbers. Knowing all this, in the back of my mind I thought I should still be able to do that.
I can’t. Not only can I not lose double digits each week, I don’t want to. I don’t want to live on 1200 calories a day the rest of my life. I like to eat food and enjoy it. I don’t want to feel guilty every time I eat something I’m “not suppose to”. I want to be able to go out to eat with my wife and have some bread. I want to enjoy living a healthy life.
After having our second son, Suzy and I decided to make it our goal to be a healthy family. Not a family on a diet with an exercise obsession, but a healthy family. We decided that we would eat healthy as a family and be active as a family. This meant taking the boys with us when we went for walks. It meant working our schedules out so that each of us could get our own workouts in. It meant making healthy meals and staying away from the fast food joints.
Suzy made all of the boys’ baby food. We never bought a jar of baby food from the store. Doing this made us more aware of how we were eating as well. Just before Jax was born we went for a hike. On the way down from the mountains Suzy wanted to stop and get some ice cream at Dairy Queen. Well, I didn’t want her to have to eat ice cream alone so I got some as well.
About 2 minutes after we got our ice cream Rex started squaking in the back seat. He wanted some ice cream. Suzy said “No Rex, this isn’t for little boys.” After she said that we both looked at each other. We couldn’t tell our kids not to do things if we weren’t willing to not do them ourselves. We tossed the ice cream.
We knew that Rex was getting old enough to see what we were doing. We couldn’t fake it anymore. This crazy life of ours has just gotten crazier as the boys get older but we are doing our best to change our family’s legacy when it comes to health.
See you tomorrow!
The Weight Gain…
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on February 1st, 2010
For about a year after the show I did pretty good. I was traveling a lot, making appearances and doing events. It was still pretty easy for me to stay on track. Suzy and I got married September 19th, 2006. After the wedding we were so excited about all of the things we were going to do. We planned to travel, Suzy was being asked to act as a guest correspondent for Access Hollywood, I had more speaking events than I could do, we were ready to enjoy our married life as a “celebrity” couple. It was so much fun.
As I said, we got married on the 19th of September and made all our plans. On November 1st, Suzy was getting ready to go to New York to do a photo shoot and interview. Before she left she went to the store and got a pregnancy test. I thought she was joking. She wasn’t! Less than a month after gettting married, Suzy was pregnant!
Plans changed. Suzy got on a plane and flew to New York. I was at home to think about what we had just found out. I’ll be honest, kids were the last thing on my mind this early into our marriage. Here we had all these big plans and now we had to make some serious adjustments.
I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to be a good and supportive husband but I didn’t know what would be the best way for me to do that. Suzy didn’t really enjoy being pregnant. Knowing that she was uncomfortable most of the time, I did what I thought would be the easiest for her. “Oh Honey, you’re not feeling very good? Let me go get you something. What do you want? Tacos, ice cream, want to just go out?”
I turned to food, my lifelong coping mechanism. I was freaking out and I turned to food! Suzy started gaining weight and so did I. The thing is, she was pregnant I was not. It just seemed like the thing to do. Sympathy weight, right? I didn’t even realize that I was beginning to pack on the pounds. My clothes still fit and I was still getting compliments at all of my events. I was oblivious.
It wasn’t until we were on Larry King after Rex was born and then were cut out of a Biggest Loser piece that we did that I realized how big I had gotten. When I saw myself on television again I was shocked. What on earth was I doing? How am I suppose to talk to others about being healthy when I looked like I did. I panicked.
It was time to go back to work. Suzy took some time after Rex was born and then we both started to get back to work. One of our biggest goals as parents is to ensure that out children do not have to struggle like we have with weight. We don’t want them to ever see us on a “diet”. That meant that we had to get things under control immediately.
We bought an amazing stroller and Rex got his first workout, a stroller ride, when he was about a week old. He has been active ever since. We both lost weight and were feeling good. We were adjusting to our new life with baby. When Rex was about 5 months old our lives were about to change yet again. Suzy was pregnant again!
See you tomorrow!
Seeds of Insecurity…
Posted by Matt Hoover in General on January 28th, 2010
I have decided that it is redundant to keep making the title of my blogs Life After Biggest Loser since everything I write about is my life after the show. After reading my blog a couple times yesterday I decided that I want to talk more about what I am going to call “Fat Person in a Skinny Body Syndrome” or FPSBS for the purposes of my blog.
As most of you know, I am not a doctor or psychologist so the things I am talking about are my own experiences. When you have been a contestant on a show like The Biggest Loser, people remember you one of two ways when it comes to physical appearance. What you looked like before the show or what you looked like at the finale.
When people see you in person who remember you from when you started the show they are very complimentary. “Wow, you have done a great job!” Those who remember you from the finale say “Wow, you have put back quite a bit of weight on!” They are both right.
If I had lost a bunch of weight in the privacy of my own home and people just learned through conversation that I once weighed over 350 pounds they would be like “Wow, that’s great!” Since I chose to do it on national television it’s a little different. The day I signed the contract to be on the show I signed up to be publicly judged by strangers.
Today I want to talk about how words from strangers and even people we know can take root in our lives and sometimes even cause us to self destruct.
Believe it or not, spring is just around the corner. This spring, farmers will start planting seeds in their fields. They will drop them in the ground and then cover them up with dirt. Even though we can’t see it underground, that seed is sprouting and developing a root system for whatever type of plant it is to become. As the seed continues to sprout the roots will take hold and become the support system for the plant as it begins to push it’s way through the dirt.
That little seed, once planted continues to work it’s way to the surface even though we can’t see it. “Great Matt, thanks for the farming lesson, what’s the point?” Here you go. Let’s imagine the words other people say to us are like that seed. They may something mean or discouraging and at the time we think nothing of it and just brush it off. We may even think to ourselves “What a jerk.” We bury it.
Maybe after a few hours we are sitting around and the words that person said come back into our mind. This time rather than dismissing the words we begin to dwell on them a little bit. If those words were seeds, we have just planted them in our mind. They have begun to take root if you will. Now is when the words that have taken root can grow in one of two ways. We can use them to fuel us to become better or we can begin to believe them and let those words bring us down.
I once had a lady at an event I was speaking at only a couple weeks after the finale, a time when I actually felt the best about my appearance, say I better watch it because I had already gained weight. A couple of weeks later she was kind enough to email me and tell me that I better get honest with myself because I was probably gain all my weight back.
At first I dismissed her as the ignorant person she was, but then I found myself becoming more and more critical of myself. Guess what I did. I cultivated those words into thoughts and actions that became detrimental to myself. I let a perfect stranger plant the seeds of doubt in my mind and rather than turning it into a positive began to feel guilty.
Thoughts like “She’s probably right”, “I’ll show her, I’m going to go eat whatever I want”, and “That’s what I’ve done before” consumed me. A perfect stranger! I started to punish myself and set myself up for failure because of words a stranger said to me took root. It sounds ridiculous doesn’t it!
As ridiculous as it is when you read what I just wrote, how many of us have done the exact same thing? If we don’t learn to appreaciate ourselves and our new body, it can be really easy for those seeds of insecurity to take root and undo all of the hard work that we have just done. A fat person in a skinny body is much more likely to go back to being a fat person in a fat body if they don’t plant new seeds and see themselves as the new person that they have become.
See you tomorrow!
