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For Thomas, Losing Made Him a Winner

Posted on: Thursday, 23 March 2006, 12:00 CST

By Bart Mills, The Lima News, Ohio

Mar. 23--For Pete Thomas, winning was a good thing. But losing was even better.

Thomas, a real estate investor from Ypsilanti, Mich., came away from the second version of the reality contest "The Biggest Loser" with $100,000 and, more importantly, a new body. In the nine months following the show's beginning, Thomas lost 185 pounds. That made him the contestant who lost the largest percentage of body weight and a considerably more wealthy and busy man.

"Actually, the money hasn't really changed my life that much. But we got our health back. I lost 185 pounds and my wife lost 70. That's what's really been life-changing," Thomas said.

It was the combination of exercise and diet that eventua lly helped Thomas slim down. Today, he walks around with a body fat percentage in the single digits, compared to the 51 percent body fat he dragged around in his 400-plus pound days.

Of course, just as Thomas didn't lose his weight in a day, he didn't gain it that way either. He was pretty fit in his youth. But as he got older, workouts and healthy eating gave way to the daily rush and poor eating habits. During his first 14 years of marriage, he gained 10 pounds per year, despite trying about every fad diet that came along.

"My weight loss struggle has been ongoing and the seeking of solutions has been ongoing," Thomas said. "We tried Atkins, NutriSystem, the grapefruit diet ... everything. But none of them were ever long lasting. We always got results, we always lost weight, but we were never able to sustain the weight loss."

For Thomas, the secret to sustainable weight loss finally hit home while he was on the TV show. It was then that experts finally explained to him the math behind weight loss.

"Before, typically what I was told was cut back. But nobody told me how. If I cut out breakfast, I'm eating Snickers for lunch. If I cut out dinner, I clear out the whole fridge by midnight," Thomas said.

Thomas stands by a mantra he learned while on "The Biggest Loser" -- modification, not starvation. Now he and his wife run nearly an hour a day, plus do a half hour, four days a week, of resistance training. And they make smarter choices about the food they eat.

"When you learn the basics it is not a struggle at all. What it comes down to is weight loss and weight maintenance is a math problem. Cut back what you eat by so many calories a day or work out and expend those calories and you're going to lose that amount of weight," Thomas said. "Of course, the best way is to combine the two. Exercise has its own individual benefits and eating healthy has its individual benefits."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Lima News, Ohio

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Source: The Lima News

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