2 Weight Loss Success Stories at  

This is a tale of two fat men and their quest to lose big.

 

Their journey began 8 months ago, when both were morbidly obese and at high risk of premature death. That's when they became contestants on The Biggest Loser, the popular NBC reality show that challenges dangerously overweight people in a weight-loss competition. Almost instantly, the men's waistlines -- and lives -- were dramatically transformed. In fact, after just a few weeks on the show, their combined weight loss totaled more than 160 pounds. (Tune into the season finale to find out their final weight-loss numbers.)

 

Do the math, and you might think losing that much fat, that fast, is impossible. But these guys are clear proof that it's not. So how'd they do it? You're about to find out. 

 

Chicken-Fried Everything

Ed Brantley, 31, is a laid-back southern chef from Raleigh, North Carolina. At his first-day weigh-in at the ranch, he tipped the scales at 335 pounds. (The ranch, if you're not familiar with the show, is the Biggest Loser campus, located about an hour north of Beverly Hills.)

 

You wouldn't be surprised at Brantley's weight if you saw him dive into a meal of fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, meat loaf with brown gravy, buttered biscuits, and sweet tea. That's what he cooks up every day as owner of a catering company. And before Biggest Loser, that's what he wolfed down after he untied his apron.

 

"I wouldn't eat until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, because I didn't think I deserved it. Not until my work was done," Brantley recalls. "When everybody was fed, okay, bring it on. I had earned it. And did I eat."

 

Brady Vilcan, 37, from Houma, Louisiana, is part Native American from a small tribe called the Chitimacha. He weighed 341 pounds when he started on the show. How so?

 

"Well, in South Louisiana, anything that moves, you fry it," he laughs. "That's the food culture down there. All the cardiologists line up to study us. We're in the high-cholesterol capital of the world."

 

Then the men came to the ranch with their wives, Vicky Vilcan (246 pounds) and Heba Salama (294 pounds). And their lives turned upside down.

 

No Picnic at the Ranch

Double doors -- one marked "Bob's Gym," the other "Jillian's Gym," referring to the two competing trainers, Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels -- open to a facility that looks like the University of Florida Gators weight room. It's a musclehead's nirvana, jammed with free weights, benches, medicine balls, and banks of elliptical machines, stair-steppers and treadmills.

 

The sparkling new gym stands in stark contrast to the downtrodden dorms the contestants live in. The rugs are shabby. There's bad '70s art on the walls. It smells of college-dorm sweat on a hot September day. It's sticky and damp; empty yogurt cartons and no-cal iced tea bottles litter the floors. On this day, the kitchen stinks of bait because someone forgot to take out the trash and the remnants of last night's fish dinner.

 

As nasty as the place seems, nobody wants to leave. That's because this is where the big weight comes off. "You are working out 6, 7 hours a day," says Vilcan. "And you've got these trainers kicking your tail."

 

The ranch routine doesn't vary much. Wake at 7. Eat breakfast. Hit the gym for weight training. Have a midmorning snack. Go for a run. Eat lunch. Get back into the gym. Break for a snack. Go for a hike. Dinner. Evening workout. Sleep. Start over.

 

"The workouts are hard, but I'll tell you what's harder," says Brantley. "The swarms of people around you all the time. I'm sick of these children [the show's producers] telling me where to be and what to do all the time. The mental side is the toughest."

 

The contestants undergo emotional lobotomies during the first week at the ranch. Not only do they find it difficult to get used to the cameras, lights, and mikes, there's no TV, phone, Internet access, or any other contact with the outside world. But worse, they're forced to examine why they got so fat. 

 

"These people didn't get lazy and have too many margaritas on vacation in Cabo," says trainer Jillian Michaels. "You're dealing with people who are suiciding slowly. You've got to get to the bottom of what is psychologically motivating them to self-destruct."

 

Whether you're bordering on obesity or you would simply like to become fitter and trimmer, here are six strategies -- both psychological and physical -- from Brantley, Vilcan, and the Biggest Loser training team that might inspire you to lose big.

 

 

Go on to the next page for six winning weight loss strategies...

Find a good reason to lose. It took some time, but Ed Brantley finally realized he had a food addiction. "The cravings would come and I would be like, 'hey, let's get high,'" says Brantley. "I was literally hooked on the euphoria of eating." It didn't help that he and his wife, Heba, had a full social calendar with many an opportunity to wine and dine. "If we want to have children, and we do, we knew we had to change our lifestyle and take control of this," he says.

 

Brady Vilcan took a hard look at his life and realized he was setting a poor example for his two kids. "We rarely got a lunch break at CVS," says Vilcan, a pharmacist. "I'd often go all day without touching food. If Vicky cooked, I might have three large servings. But mostly, I'd pick up cheeseburgers or pizza." He would also bring candy home from the pharmacy for the family. While watching TV he might have two or three bowls of ice cream. "My grandfather was heavy. I remember going to Weight Watchers with my mom when I was a kid. Now my 4-year-old daughter, Lucy, outweighs my 7-year-old son, Chance. We've got to break this chain."

 

Never skip a cheese stick. After six seasons with the show, nutritionist Cheryl Forberg, R.D., says the two most common mistakes made by nearly all the contestants who've passed through the ranch are skipping meals, particularly breakfast, and not consuming enough calcium. "They feel they don't have time to plan ahead, but skipping meals can lead to grabbing fast food and overeating because you're starving," she says. To keep their metabolism revving high, Biggest Loser contestants are trained to eat five or six times a day -- breakfast, lunch, and dinner, small meals made up of high-water-volume vegetables and fruits, whole grains and lean protein, plus two or three snacks. "Most people don't get enough dairy products in their diet," Forberg says. "Men need 1,000 milligrams of calcium. You can achieve that through three servings of milk, yogurt, and/or cheese a day. We encourage a low-fat cheese stick with a piece of fruit for between-meal snacks."

 

Weigh your filet. The first thing Vilcan did when he returned home from the ranch was buy a food scale. "Portion size can get away from you in a heartbeat," he says. "If you want to lose weight, you have to know what a serving is and how many calories are in it." Do you really need to order that 16-ounce filet when the 8-ouncer will fill you up? Each Biggest Loser contestant's daily calorie limit is calculated using a formula that considers starting weight, body-fat percentage, activity level, and goal weight. For Vilcan, it's between 1,750 and 2,000 calories, depending on how much he's exercising. "Realizing how much exercise it takes to expend the calories in food really puts things into perspective," he says. "I mean, look at these cheese fries from Outback Steakhouse. They're 2,900 calories. No friggin' way am I gonna eat that."

 

Start with weights, finish with cardio. Strength training with weights creates an afterburn effect that keeps your body churning through calories at a higher rate, even at rest. And it's widely known that muscle is more metabolically active than fat. So Biggest Loser contestants pump weights about 2 hours a day. "In the beginning we focused a lot on weightlifting to build up the muscle," says Brantley. "Then we switched to more cardio to shed the pounds." The key with cardio is to find something you enjoy doing to beat boredom. "I hated the elliptical; it was too easy, I didn't feel like I was doing anything. Now the spinning cycle, that's fun, and it is a real workout. I'll do 2 hours a day on that."

 

Pig out once a week. One day a week at the Biggest Loser ranch is designated a high-calorie day, when contestants can go over their calorie limits. "We do it to make the point that this isn't going to be a life of deprivation," explains Harper. "You can't sustain that. You want to develop healthy habits you can live with." 

 

The contestants typically choose to order out for burritos. "The next day, they really feel the effects of all the sugar and sodium-filled food," says Harper. "They feel like crap. They learn very quickly that a healthy body that's been exercising and eating right doesn't want all that fat and processed junk."

 

Book court time for 2015. The biggest lesson Biggest Loser contestants learn is that their healthy lifestyles don't end when the cameras stop. "There's no finish line. That's a big pill for people to swallow," says Harper. "Every single day for the rest of your life, you are going to have to make better food choices, and move around a bit more."

 

Michaels calls it "composing a life." "You use fitness to re-create a different set of experiences and attitudes: You go from past experiences of 'I'm a loser, I'm fat, I'm worthless' to 'I'm capable, I'm strong, I'm confident.' " Once you've made that paradigm shift, Harper and Michaels say, you've won.

 

 

Go on to the next page for four more top weight loss tips...

Harper's Secret Weapon

Bob Harper, who was a trainer for 20 years prior to joining The Biggest Loser, believes the brain is the most powerful muscle for weight loss. "I know that this struggle always has an emotional component," says Harper. "Losing the weight isn't all that hard; it's about understanding your relationship with food and taking control of your life." Here are his top tips.

 

Ask yourself a question. "Are you ready to change your life? That's the first thing I ask my clients. They have to decide for themselves if they are serious about committing. They have to intellectualize it and see the path ahead of them as a long-term thing."

 

Treat calories like coin.  "I'll limit a 400-pound guy to 2,200 calories a day. I tell him it's like you have a bank account with 2,200 calories in it. You can eat whatever you want; just don't go over the limit."

 

Eat to program your brain. "First thing I tell my people is that they've got to eat to lose weight. Eat every 4 hours. They know they have to eat within the first 30 minutes of getting up in the morning to set their clock accordingly. And that first meal has to have a good balance of protein, carbs, and good fats." 

 

Learn to cook. "If you are cooking your own food, you know exactly what you're putting in your body and how proper fuel makes you feel," says Harper.

1. Prev:Lose Weight to Transform Your Life:  
2. Next:Weight Loss and Career Advancement: