Pete Thomas entered NBC’s The Biggest Loser in 2005 with no concern about winning or losing. Instead, he just wanted help losing weight. He knew that he would lose the weight somehow, and go on to make millions by helping others.
Tipping the scales at 416 pounds, Pete hadn’t learned about proper nutrition or exercise due to his childhood lifestyle–frequent moves led by a mother with serious mental illness. While he didn’t win the grand prize, he did lose the weight. So much of it, in fact, that when NBC called him back after he’d been voted off and announced that they would be handing out a second prize to the person who had lost the most fat after leaving the show, Thomas stepped it up and won the $100,000 loot.
Thomas caught up with Attitude Digest’s editor-in-chief recently, to discuss goal setting, attitude, and more.
AD: I’ve watched your speaking demo, and you seem like a very high energy, goal oriented guy. It’s hard to envision that you ever struggled to set and achieve health goals. Has there been an internal shift in you, or a change in your mental energy?
You’d have to go back to my background. My mother struggled with paranoia and dementia, and we were often on the go. So I never learned proper eating and nutrition.
It’s very important to realize that people sometimes want to make a change. They really, sincerely want to make a change. That was my situation, but I did not know how.
Sometimes we need to understand that to achieve great goals it really requires you to put in great work and effort. So for me, moreso than an internal shift, it was really about having a team and coaches around me to get me to the point that I could manifest the change that I wanted to make. The internal shift happened for me a long time before, but I just did not have the tools and the teammates necessary to get me to where I wanted to go.
There is something to be said about having specific expertise–finding experts who can take you to the next level. That’s what I found on The Biggest Loser. Not only were there teammates and other people looking to be successful, but there were Bob and Jillian, who knew about weight loss and dealing with overweight people than anyone else on the planet.
AD: Is that what you are doing today with your Lose It Fast, Lose It Forever program? Are you coaching people in a similar fashion?
Absolutely. I have a business mentor who taught me, “The people who are most successful at any one thing, they learn their particular subject, and then they go on to teach it to others.” I came home from The Biggest Loser Ranch having lost 185 pounds in 9 months, and I had the specific goal of keeping it off for 5 years. To do that, I couldn’t just sit on my duff and hope that no weight would come back. I literally started the education process.
Over the course of time, people started asking me “What are you doing to keep the weight off? Why are you so successful when others haven’t been?” That’s when I took all the information I had learned during those 62 days on The Biggest Loser Ranch, and in the two or three years after, distilled that, and put it into a program, and now we teach it all over the country.
AD: Were you initially afraid the weight would return?
In the past, I had succeeded in weight loss, and gained the weight back, succeeded in weight loss, and gained the weight back. It wasn’t so much about fear but about education. I said, “This time, I have to figure out what I can do differently.”
I can’t say that it was a fear. For instance, I had confidence that I was going to lose this weight one way or another. I had so much confidence in that fact, that in 2002, years before The Biggest Loser was around, I took tons and tons of “before” pictures. These were ugly, nasty pictures that ended up being perfect, because The Biggest Loser wanted to see before pictures, and I had all these pictures where I’m wearing nothing but a pair of Underoos.
I’ve always had confidence that I was going to figure out the puzzle of permanent weight loss, especially for someone who is obese, and so when I came back, it was just about applying what I knew. I can’t say this any more succinctly. It was about setting and keeping goals.
But one of the things you talked about before was having an attitude. My attitude was always on success. I came up with a mantra for myself and called it having “perfect present tense personalized” goals. So for instance when it comes to weight loss, I had this saying. Initially I wanted to lose 140 pounds. But I said no, because I’m focusing on the negative side of the weight, like there is something on my back that I can’t get off. What I did is readjust my goals and made it a perfect personalized weight loss goal.
And I say now, “I feel sexy strong and great, as I maintain my weight at or around 238.” I changed that so that I have the rhyme in there that’s easy to remember, and focus on the fact that it’s present tense and it’s personalized for me.
AD: What do you tell those who are so overwhelmed with a lifetime of poor health management, that they don’t know where to begin, and don’t have that great attitude that you had going into it? What is the first step?
I cannot diminish the importance of educating yourself on the entire realm of health and wellness and the macronutrient ratios of nutrition.
However, I say that it has to start with your attitude. It starts in the mind.
I teach three things in my class. To be successful at health and wellness and weight loss you have to master your mind, manage your mind, and multiply your muscles. You notice what is first; it’s master your mind. And that’s the most difficult area to be honest.
The reason I was able to lose the weight is because my mindset was correct. I was a student of self improvement and motivational speakers and the magazines that focused on success and being outstanding. I was practicing that in my business, and yet in my own health and wellness, I was not. The reason I was not practicing that was a lack of education , and not a lack of optimism or attitude. I had the attitude first, and then once I got the right set of tools, knowledge, and information, I was able to make headway.
We can relate this to anything in life. If you want to be a mechanic, and you want to tear down an engine in a certain amount of time, and all you have is a pair of pliers, it is going to take you forever. But if you have a complete set of tools and everything else that you need then you can accomplish your goals. There is a saying that success equals preparation plus opportunity.
AD: So has your health then influenced your attitude more? You had a great attitude to begin with, but how has becoming healthy then influenced your attitude?
If you think poorly about yourself, and then you suddenly become healthy, you are going to be fit, and you’re going to think poorly about yourself even still. If your mindset is that you are not valuable, you’re garbage. Okay, now you can run marathons, and you still feel that you are garbage.
You can work on both at the same time. You can feel confident and develop a proper mindset and a proper attitude towards life at the same time that you are losing weight. But you can’t think that weight loss is going to be the magic ticket to improving the way that you feel about yourself.
It’s been proven. The Biggest Loser was actually NBC’s response to the ABC show called The Swan, where they would take people who for lack of a better term were ugly ducklings and they would give them all this plastic surgery. But the people felt bad about who they were as people, and so their lives did not change dramatically, other than the fact that now, they just looked good.
If you have a negative attitude about yourself, and you eat because you feel nobody loves you and you’re garbage, then once you lose weight, what’s your normal coping mechanism? It’s to eat. This is the thing for obese people… I felt bad about myself because of my weight, and then I ate because of that, and then I gained weight, which caused me to feel bad about myself because of my weight. So you are really in this cycle of stupidity.
I say this not to others but to myself, because this was me. You can’t break out of that. I had a great attitude about business and about life, but because I could not manage this area of my weight, I would do things that were self destructive behaviors, going back and eating more. Once I got a third or fourth piece of that circle, which was education, now when I felt bad about myself I could exercise which would release serotonin which would improve my mood, so that I could replace food with exercise and say, “Ah, this is a piece of the puzzle that I didn’t have.” That really changes things.
But at the root of it all, you have to see yourself as an amazing individual. Coming from a Christian foundation, I believe that God has set each of us on the planet to do specific, unique things that no one else on the planet can do. If you just think that you are some schmuck like every other schmuck and you’re whole life is schmuckdom, you are not going to do anything great in your life. I believe we have to see ourselves as God sees us, and that is as unique individuals. I had that, but I still needed to take care of that 60-inch waistline.
AD: When you were on the show, did you feel that you had a chance of winning?
This is the odd thing, of all the things, I never even considered winning. My goal was much bigger. When I went on the show, I said to myself, “I have a very outgoing personality.” But when I went on the show, I reversed that. I didn’t want to be the black guy who grated on people’s nerves and got voted off.
I looked at the bigger picture: If I lose this weight, the millions that I can make down the road will far supersede the little bit of money that I can win here. I had to be quiet, because I needed to stay on the ranch as long as I could to learn the lessons that I needed to learn for life. On the ranch, I worked out four hours a day, and when I got home, I had to go back to the real world and work and so I worked out two-and-a-half hours a day.
Forty-five days before the finale, I hit my goal weight, and NBC called and said, “Hey, we’ve got this second place prize for all the contestants who have been voted off. If you lose the highest amount of fat of all the contestants who have been voted off, you can win this $100,000 prize.”
Now the money came into play. I said, “Why not push it a little further, and see if we can’t win that prize?” And so for the last 30 days, I freed up some time to build my workouts back to four hours per day, and ended up winning the prize. That’s the only time that money came into play.
I found personally that money is not the greatest motivator. You really need some intrinsic motivator related to your passion. My passion is helping the obese to achieve a new lease on life. I remember approximately 20 years ago when I first joined the church, I felt like God had dropped in my spirit three different things, that I was going to be: an athlete, a speaker, and a teacher. This was so strong in my mind that I went to my pastor and asked, “Do you think God calls people to be football players?” Mind you that I was 23 and had never played football.
He said, “No. What is better is that God calls you to abide in your calling. If you are a football player, God calls you to do the best that you possibly can.” So for years, this is just sitting in here and I’m not really walking it out at all because I’m incredibly overweight. But after the show, it was like voila. I work out and maintain athletic levels of body fat, and I speak, and I teach, but the money never crossed my mind as the incentive.
AD: So you set personalized incentives?
I believe they need to be directly related to you and your passions or family and friends. These are the things that are sustainable long term. When I teach goals in my class, I ask, “Why is it that you want to lose weight?”
We live in historic times. We need to ask ourselves what historic things are down the road, for you and your family. Will your daughter or grandchild play at Carnegie Hall or be a president or senator? Then look at yourself. Will you even be there to see that, if you don’t exercise or get your blood pressure under control, if you don’t exercise? Will you even be there to see your family do great things?
We all have this excuse that, “Well, I don’t have the time. My job needs me or my family needs me.” And I say this; all we have to do to test if they really need you is die. I promise you that they will go on. Take the time right now to learn how to cook, eat correctly, go to the gym and work out, go to the basement and spend time with yourself so that long-term you can be here.
At times I can be pompous; I think the world is a better place with me in it! That’s true of most people.
The world is a better place with you in it. We need you hear as long as humanly possible. It goes back to the premise that there is something that you can provide to the planet that no one else can provide. The longer that you are on this planet, the more you are blessing this earth and the people in it with your presence. So take some time, get your life in order, and continue to bless us with your presence.
AD: It seemed that your attitude has a huge role, the fact that you knew that you were going to lose the weight before you had any evidence.
Absolutely, and I come from a foundation of faith, and we say that faith is the evidence of things hoped for, and the substance of things not seen. With that, when I came back, my goal was to keep the weight off for five years. Well that is something unseen, so I had to have the correct attitude. So I set my 5-year goal, and I hit that. This year, March 1st, will be my 5-year anniversary. And I have 7 year goals, 15 year goals, and lifetime goals.
Of course my 15 year goal, I call my Harrison Ford goal. He filmed the most recent Raiders of the Lost Ark movie, and it was like 15 years in between that movie and the prior one. He was still able to fit the same sized pants and hat.
And I have my lifetime goals. So it’s taking those goals, having the correct attitude, and then personalizing them as well. I believe that has been a huge key of my success and is one of the things I try to teach my students.
AD: It’s amazing given your trauma in your childhood, did you always have that good attitude and sense of value in yourself, or is that something that you had to overcome and create?
Definitely it was something I had to overcome, but I was blessed. My mother, even with her struggles with mental illness, and I missed tons of school when I was young, she gave me the one thing that I think was the catalyst to me being able to make a life change, and that was the ability to read.
I remember learning how to read. I actually wasn’t going to school at this particular time, but my mother would bring comic books home, and I would look at the pictures and ask her what the words meant, and she taught me to read based upon comic books. Then there were years when I wasn’t in school, and I call it a form of ghetto home schooling, where she would bring books home and I would read to her, and there was one time when I thought I would want to be a doctor because she would bring home medical books. I was definitely not cut out to be a physician, but I thought that I was because of this.
That led to other things down the road when it came to school. On the one hand, I missed tons and tons of schooling. When I finally settled into foster care, I’d go to school on a regular basis, and one of the subjects you can’t skirt by on is math. All of these subjects where the foundation is reading–American history and social studies–and so I had an advantage in that area, because I had been reading all of my life. Even in the midst of bad situations, going from state to state, I had that foundation. I was in the sixth grade reading on the college level.
Now the one thing I couldn’t manage with reading was math. Math is a completely separate thing. I would always do bad in math, except for the year I had geometry, because that was all about reading. That was a great year for math!
Here is the thing, when you are having these down days, and I would have a down subject in math, I could balance it out with straight As in every other subject.
That’s the thing I teach people also, when you have a bad day when it comes to eating and all of that, we just can’t put too many bad days back to back. If you have one bad day and two good days, well the good days have outnumbered the bad, and you are on the right track.
I am a lover and reader of motivational materials. I read a book called Unstoppable. In that book is a gentleman who wanted to go to school in America. He traveled on foot across Africa telling people of his desire to come to America and study, and he accomplished that goal. I look at that, and it flips things in perspective. I do have that positive mental attitude. I believe that success is in each and every one of us.
My tag line is, “There is a winner within you.” We can definitely bring it out.
Tags: Attitude Digest, Biggest Loser, health, losing weight, Pete Thomas
