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Family teams up to lose more than 500 pounds

/ Source: TODAY

The Dean family of Omaha, Neb., had always struggled with their weight until one day they decided to make a change — together. The family made a commitment to help one another get in shape and in just 12 short months they dropped more than 500 pounds. Tony Dean has written a book about his family's experience called “The F.A.S.T. Diet: Families Always Succeed Together.” Here's an excerpt:

About three months before we started the F.A.S.T. diet, I was working in my home office in the Millard subdivision of Omaha. (F.A.S.T. stands for Families Always Succeed Together. It has nothing to do with speed — though if you stick to it you will see results quickly! — or with fasting, as in not eating.) Julie, my youngest sister, worked as my assistant, and we had a little office set up in my basement. When we weren’t working, we loved to watch the hit TV show The Biggest Loser. I was amazed to see how fast other fatties like us were losing weight. (You should know that in the F.A.S.T. diet lexicon, “fatty” is an endearing term, not an offensive one. The message behind the word fatty is “We love you, now do something about being fat!”)

However, as we watched these TV fatties get thinner and thinner, I couldn’t help but notice that the participants were in an ideal environment for losing weight. They got permission to leave their jobs and families for three months and do nothing but work out with the best trainers money could buy at a world-class facility on a beautiful mountain with hills to climb and a forest to hike. When the contestants returned home, gym equipment and a new fridge filled with all the right foods were waiting. If that wasn’t enough, they were competing for a $250,000 prize, and the entire world was watching them — talk about accountability! I remember one episode in which a contestant sneaked down to the kitchen at 2:00 a.m. and took a brownie out of the fridge. As she carefully looked around to make sure no one was watching, the music from Jaws kicked in. You could just feel the entire world gasp — “Whoa!” — when she took a bite.

With all of this support and accountability, not to mention the possibility of a great reward, how could the contestants not lose weight on that show? The only better motivation I can think of would be a treadmill that worked like an ATM — each time you burned a calorie it would spit out a $20 bill. Wouldn’t you love a machine like that? And wouldn’t you love to have all the help and privileges enjoyed by TV show contestants?

Unfortunately, losing weight in real life is exactly the opposite. Average, hardworking people struggle to afford a gym membership, never mind top-dollar trainers who charge between $50 and $250 for a training session. Most of us would lose our jobs if we took three months off to lose weight. As for food, where do I start? On nearly every corner is a fast-food place more than happy to sell you a burger and a shake that total 300 calories more than what you need to consume for the entire day. In the real world, temptations are everywhere.

However much we envy the contestants on The Biggest Loser, they still have a powerful lesson to teach us: even though they have been given every advantage and put into the perfect setting to lose weight, they still cry and complain, “I can’t do it.” When I first heard them say this, I wanted to scream at the TV, “What do you mean, you can’t do it? What other advantages do you want?” But then one day, while my sister and I were discussing the show, I realized an important truth about losing weight — it isn’t easy, even in an ideal situation. This realization led me to the secret to losing weight: accountability. Since losing weight is so difficult, you just can’t do it alone. You need to be part of a team that will help you follow through when you are weak and not able to do it by yourself.

The contestants on The Biggest Loser had a lot of people watching them, and this motivated them to keep going. And then I had a brainstorm — I couldn’t get a TV audience to watch me and keep me motivated and accountable, but I could get my family to do it. In fact, we could all do it for each other. I could create a program for my family so that none of us would ever have to struggle with our weight again.

I turned to my sister and said, “Hey, Julie, I have an idea. What if we were to create our own weight-loss program? We could call it ‘The Dean Family’s F.A.S.T. Diet,’ for Families Always Succeed Together. I could learn everything we need to know about food and exercise, and then we could get the whole family together and present it to them.

“The secret to this show has nothing to do with weight loss and has everything to do with support and accountability,” I went on. “So we need to create teams that each person must check in with every day. If anyone starts to slip, they have to call their teammate and say, ‘Help! I’m just about to eat a whole pizza by myself!’ It would be the teammate’s job to help them through their weak moment.”

Thinking some more, I said, “We could take pictures every week and weigh in every Saturday, and I could create a simple website with before and after pictures.” I paused for a minute to wait for Julie’s response to my idea. She was floored!

“If you don’t do it, I will!” she said. She was glowing and could barely work for the rest of the day. That didn’t work out so well for me, because, as I said, she was my assistant. But despite all our excitement and enthusiasm, we did the worst thing we could have done. We procrastinated and did nothing.

Three or four months passed, and every once in a while one of us would bring up my idea again, but still we did nothing. (People are capable of doing great things, but sometimes, even when that greatness is right in front of us, we persist in doing nothing.) Finally, one night in November 2005, the whole family was at a birthday party at my parents’ home. Julie came to me and said, “Maybe we should present your idea to the group.”

I was tempted to procrastinate some more, but I thought about the huge potential health benefits for the people I love the most and that got me motivated. I asked my parents and siblings to meet me in a back room for five minutes. We handed the kids to our spouses and went to my parents’ room. I can still remember the moment as if it were yesterday: a group of overweight and unhealthy people looked back at me, everyone in loose pants or sweats and shirts so tight the buttons were about to pop off. We looked pitiful.

I made my announcement: “I have figured out the missing ingredient to successful dieting, and I now know why diets fail. I have also figured out a way that we can all be as fit and healthy as we have ever been in twelve months, and then maybe we can motivate the world to do the same thing. We could spend the rest of our lives being thin and healthy, all the while helping millions of other people to achieve the same goals. We could become role models for our kids and relatives and inspire them to live healthy lives. We could all become the people we really want to be.”

Almost everyone was looking at me wide-eyed. There were two skeptics, my dad and my sister Tracy. But everyone else was ready to hear more right away.

“There are several problems with dieting today,” I went on. “First, there is so much information, much of it incorrect, and there is almost no way to tell what is true and what is not. I can tell everyone exactly what they should and shouldn’t eat.” (This wasn’t exactly true. I wasn’t crystal-clear about nutrition at that point, but I knew I could quickly learn what I needed to know.) “I also know what each of us needs to do for exercise, depending on our age and current fitness level.” (I had spent over $12,000 on more than two hundred personal training sessions, so I was pretty familiar with what kind of exercises we would need to do.) “Last, I will show everyone how many calories they need to eat in a day to lose weight and remain healthy. Then, we will all write down what we eat each day and track exactly what is going into our bodies.

“The final piece is actually the family itself or, better yet, the team that our family will become. We are very fortunate to have an amazingly close family. We need to use our greatest resource, which is each other. We will create one big team of eight, then each week we will break the team into two-person teams. Every other week we will rotate partners for variety. If anyone is tempted to cheat on their diet or exercise, they always have to call a teammate first and ask permission. Your teammate is responsible for trying to talk you out of cheating, but if he or she can’t, then you can cheat. Every day you will have to schedule a time to call your teammate and talk about what you did the day before and go over your numbers. Finally, we will weigh in every Saturday at 8:00 a.m. and track our results. What do you think?”

The reaction was pure excitement. Even the skeptics were excited (although still a bit skeptical).

“Let’s talk about it over the next couple of days and decide when we are going to start. After all, the holidays are coming up, and we can’t be dieting around the holidays. We are fatties, loyal to our fatty traditions.” Of course, putting off the choice of when to start was more procrastination. The idea could have died right there, but fortunately the fire never cooled. The whole family was talking nonstop about my idea.

Finally, almost everyone agreed to start at the first of the year. Looking back, I think, Are you kidding me? If that had been our final decision, we never would have made it. I’ve learned since then that when to start a new program is always an issue once you have decided to lose weight. After all, you can’t start in November, because there is Thanksgiving, right? December isn’t good, because there are more holidays. January naturally seems like the best time since it is the start of a new year, but it never works out because suddenly you get very busy at your job again after all the days off. It’s too hard to get to the gym in February because of the snow. One excuse follows another, and pretty soon it’s November again.

A few days after our first meeting, I called everyone in the group and said, “If we are going to do this, we’ve got to do it now.” They all agreed. On November 30, we would meet at my house for a weigh-in, a videotaping, and pictures. If we were ever going to learn to control ourselves, having a thirty-day head start before Christmas made a lot of sense to me. It was a beautiful sight when everyone showed up on that day, like looking at a blank canvas and being the only one who really knew that it was about to become a Monet.

Each time someone stepped on the scale, you could see how disappointed he or she was. But it didn’t matter; we were all there for each other. The teamwork started right away: “That’s all right, Jamie. You can do it.” But we still wondered how we had let ourselves get this heavy. Why had we settled for these overweight, out-of-shape bodies?

I was the cameraman and the interviewer for the individual pictures and videos. I had created a set of questions to ask my family, and their responses were unbelievably similar. Each of us had unique issues, but we shared many of the same problems. Most of us had sore backs and knees, and we all got winded when we went up a flight of stairs. We were all afraid that we were being terrible role models for our kids.

When I finished videotaping, I was amazed at how we all shared the same goals. We wanted to lose weight. We wanted to get healthy. We wanted to be good role models. We didn’t want to live at the doctor’s office when we were sixty years old. As individuals, we had never made any real progress toward these goals. But now that we were a team, things were about to change drastically.

Excerpted from “The F.A.S.T. Diet” book by Tony Dean. Copyright 2008. Reprinted with permission of Random House. All rights reserved.