MY BIGGEST LOSER EXPERIENCE.
Let me preface this by saying that If I wrote about every aspect of my Biggest Loser experience it would be a hundred pages long! So I’m gonna try to sum everything up. If you have any questions about BL please let me know and I’ll try to answer them the best I can.
THE CASTING CALL
I honestly feel that my experience with this show was fated since the day I was born. The way Biggest Loser came into my life is nothing short of intricately crafted fate.
I distinctly remember laying my couch watching television at 4:00 in the morning. While having a heated debate with myself over the importance of sleep, a commercial came on promoting a Biggest Loser casting call that was to be at Universal Studios later that day.
I don’t know why I was up that late or why I was watching that channel at that very moment, but in retrospect I can only assume that it was destiny.
After watching the commercial in it’s completion, I decided I had nothing to lose (except for like 150 pounds.) I jumped up, got in the shower and got ready to go.
I didn’t get a minute of sleep. I didn’t even tell anyone I was going …I just went
By the time I got to Universal City Walk, think I was like… 368th in line.
There would end up being almost 800 people by the end of the day.
Waiting in line was the absolute worst! I was by myself and my phone was dead, so I had nothing to do but THINK. And for a casting call of this magnitude, you cycle through a million gray hair inducing “what if’s.”
For myself, I instantly got discouraged looking around at the hundreds of more deserving applicants waiting in line with me. I would say that compared to everyone there, I was SMALL in size. Which says a lot considering I was 336 pounds at the time.
After about a 4 hours wait, it was finally my turn. Me and 9 other hopefuls sat around a large circle table inside a City Walk club called “THE GROOVE”
Sitting two chairs to my left was the casting director, whose name I can’t remember for the life of me. She introduced herself and one at a time we took turns telling our story.
I was second to last, which means I got to hear eight of the most heart wrenching stories I’ve ever heard in my life before It was my turn to talk. I remember everyones story was so compelling compared to mine.
By the time it was my turn, I just assumed I wouldn’t make it.
So when the casting director told me I was next, I didn’t talk about the pain of growing up fat or the stress it caused on my present day life…. Instead I rapped.
Yup that’s right. I rapped.
It’s lame I know! But while wasting time in line, I constructed a short a rap that told the entire story of my life as a fat kid. I’m not sure what possessed me to do such a thing. I guess I thought It would make me stand out somehow…
When I finished, I remember hearing a hesitant applause from the people at my table. I instantly felt embarrassed! The vibe I got from everyone at that table was that I was some punk kid who was making light of an incredibly serious situation. My stomach was in knots and I remember thinking “wow, I blew it.”
So I went home
& that was the end of it…
until I got a call back.
THE HOME VIDEO
Hours, days, weeks went by and I didn’t hear anything back from Biggest Loser
So I naturally forgot about it.
At the cattle call (pun intended) we were told that if the show was interested in you, you would get a same day call back.
I waited
& waited
& waited
and no one called me.
So I just assumed they forgot about me and I moved on.
Then, on one epic spring morning, I got a phone call from someone at casting.
“Hey, I remember you did that funny rap for your interview. Would you mind making a video and sending it to us?”
I was so surprised that they even remembered me. I later found out that I was one of the few, if not only, finalist who made it to california without getting a same day call back at a casting call.
I think someone at casting told me this, or maybe it’s just something I feel it to be true but
THE ONLY REASON I MADE TO CALIFORNIA WAS BECAUSE OF MY HOME VIDEO.
(I’m gonna quickly digress so I can show you this video. I’m super embarrassed of it, but if it got me there, I can’t be too mad at it right? Ok, So here it is… no making fun)
After they saw my home video, BIGGEST LOSER started talking to me every single week! Every email asking for more and more information. I kept thinking
“they must like me, why would they need to know so much about me?”
I knew that the deadline would be in the beginning of May. If I didn’t hear anything positive by May 9th, then I knew it was all over. All the high hopes and dreams I had for this show would be gone forever and I would forever doomed to a life of mediocrity.
It was on may 6th that I got the call.
I remember exactly where I was when I found out. I was in a supermarket buying snacks for a friends party. I truthfully don’t remember anything that was said other than “You’re going to California!”
Everything else was a blur. I was so excited at that moment. I thought
THIS IS IT!
This is my moment!
My life has just officially changed forever.
CALIFORNIA
The week before I left for California was a tough one. Never before have I felt such paralyzing loneliness.
For The Biggest Loser, there is a chance that you’ll either make the show or that they will send you home in a week, so you have to plan like your leaving home for 5 to 6 months. One of my biggest challenges was clearing my schedule from May through October. I dropped out of all my summer classes (my last semester mind you!) and I had to leave behind each and every person who matter to me without even telling them where I was going.
Biggest Loser took confidentiality pretty seriously. So I was going through maybe the most stressful situation in my entire life without any one to talk to about it.
That’s really when the loneliness crept in.
At night, I found myself cruising around vacant streets, taking good hard looks of everything familiar with the hopes that I wouldn’t forget it. I found myself going to shady bars with shady people, just so I wouldn’t be alone.
There was so much crap going on in my head that I just needed a distraction from it all.
Needless to say, I wasn’t really myself that last week.
A left Orlando International Airport on a Friday morning. I thought that I would be filled with so much excitement that the loneliness i was experiencing wouldn’t follow me to California …but of course it did.
My plane ride was long and boring. It only gave me more time to think. One of the things I thought about was an email I got from the casting director saying that I was not allowed to talk to the other finalist once arriving in Los Angeles. Apparently this is to keep growing relationships fresh for when the cameras are rolling. I didn’t think too much about it at first. I didn’t realize this meant I had to be almost completely silent for a week straight.
I got off the plane at LAX and met someone from casting in a distant parking lot next to a big van that had “Biggest Loser P-6″ signs on all the windows. I was the second person in my van. There would eventually be five people in my group total and that group was to be the only group of finalist I would have interactions with that week.
My group was made up of an elderly woman, a middle age man, a middle aged woman, and a young girl with a cute hat. I didn’t say a word to any of them. I only offered polite smiles and cool guy head nods.
It’s sounds exaggerated, but I feel like I didn’t talk that entire week. Sure I would say stuff to people from casting or doctors or TV producers, but my appointments usually took up a very small part of my day. The rest of my day was spent watching NETFLIX in my Four Seasons hotel room.
Even around the other people in my group, who would occasionally talk regardless of any rules, I would usually stay pretty silent. And within that silence, the loneliness I felt at home only intensified.
It got so bad that I thought maybe I’d be happy if I didn’t make the show. Which wasn’t true! I did want to make the show! More than anything! The pressure was just getting too much for me. I couldn’t take it anymore!
For 8 days I sat in a hotel room just waiting.
I was losing my mind.
And then it happened… Two people from casting politely knocked on my door and informed me that I did not make the show.
It’s funny… I remember the most ridiculous details of that week. I remember the D-List celebrities I saw at random restaurants. I remember watching House Hunters in the waiting room of the doctors office. I remember the filtered orangey smell of my hotel room. But from that moment on, from the moment I saw the faces of those girls from casting walk in my hotel room, I knew that it was all over… and everything else is a total blank.
It felt like someone told me my best friend died.
It just… It didn’t feel real.
It wasn’t until after I got home that it truly set in, that my mind was able to fathom that my once in a lifetime opportunity had passed me by. Biggest Loser was the only way I knew how to do this. Without Bob Harpers help, I would surely spend the rest of my life as a sad obese man.
UNLESS…
unless I could find a way to loose it all on my own.
Could I find a way to do that? Was there really a way?
Was it possible that MAYBE I didn’t need Biggest Loser after all?
Perhaps all I really needed was just a push in the right direction….
