Meet Idaho's "Biggest Loser": Reality TV show helped Boisean find herself
Boisean Linda Houseman Woodall has enough energy to hold down a job, exercise up to two hours a day and — guaranteed to drive her generally supportive husband crazy — turn off the TV at night and DO something.
"It really is hard for me to sit still. I’m usually up the minute a commercial comes on, putting in a load of clothes. It’s an energy that I thoroughly enjoy," said Woodall, a 2006 contestant on "The Biggest Loser," a reality TV contest to lose weight.
Inspired by the TV show and motivated by her own steely persistence, Woodall shed a whopping 82 pounds the old-fashioned way — through diet and exercise.
But like many Americans struggling to lose weight and get fit, Woodall has found that the road to good health is paved with good intentions and a lot of potholes.
"I am really, really battling food, and the scale is creeping the wrong way," she said in a May e-mail. "I wish you could just lose the weight, and it would stay off, but that just isn’t the case," she said. "I have gained about 20 pounds back."
Thousands of Idahoans know just how she feels. More than half of surveyed Idaho women say they are overweight.
"The only thing I can say is that the blood pressure is good, the cholesterol is OK, and I think that is because I keep up on my exercise," Woodall said. "I don’t push as hard as I was when I was really trying to lose, but at least medically I’m doing well."
And she still is way ahead of her adversary — fat. She is 62 pounds lighter than her highest weight, 247 pounds.
"Just because you turn 50 years old doesn’t mean you’re dead and over with," she said. "We have a lot of years left. I’m not going to be one of those retirees who just sits around."
New clues show that the public health battle-cry on obesity may be sinking in. The percentage of Idahoans who are overweight began to level off in 2006, especially among young adults and women of all ages. The new numbers on heavy Idahoans look good, but it’s too early to call them a trend, said Jaime Hineman, program manager of the physical activity and nutrition program for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare.
The topic is hot, and researchers publish new studies nearly every day linking weight gain to cancer, depression, even an increase in colds and the flu.
The problem remains huge, said Dr. Christian Oakley, who performs weight loss surgeries at St. Luke’s Boise Regional Medical Center. "This is probably the leading health-care issue in the civilized world today," Oakley said.
Woodall, 56, has heeded the message. She dropped the 82 pounds from her 5-foot-4-inch frame in 18 months of exercising. Even before she went on "The Biggest Loser," Woodall had lost about 15 of those pounds on her own.
On the NBC show, overweight people vie with other contestants to lose the biggest percentage of body fat. The winner gets $250,000. In 2006, show producers picked one contestant from each state.
Woodall won the Idaho spot. She and the other 49 contestants spent two days at a California ranch for the premiere episode.
After that, 14 contestants were chosen to stay at the ranch and be on the show regularly. Woodall was among the remaining 36 contestants who stayed an additional seven days in California, under the tutelage of nutritionists, trainers, psychologists and other specialists in eating and moving.
Woodall appeared briefly in one episode, explaining her progress as she worked on her weight at home in Boise. Her weight problems had begun years earlier. The TV was a main character then, too. Depressed and alone with her kids after a divorce, Woodall ate for solace after work.
"I would … start eating the minute I walked in that door until I went to bed at night, and I would sit and watch TV, and it was like I constantly had to … be putting something in my mouth," she said.
Oakley, the bariatric surgeon in Boise, says that while some overweight people can lose pounds through diet and exercise — as Woodall is working to do — that doesn’t work for the heaviest of us. Sometimes surgeries, such as the gastric bypasses Oakley performs, are the only option.
He gets no arguments from Woodall or from Hineman, the physical activity and nutrition program manager at Health and Welfare. Hineman is trying to do something about our rising obesity rates on a small budget, $200,000 a year, and partnerships with health agencies statewide.
You may see some of the department’s material on staying fit at health fairs and other public events, but colorful pages explaining how to eat right and exercise go only so far.
Most people know an apple is more nutritious than a candy bar, but if we’re so smart about diet and exercise, why are we getting bigger each year?
The issue is complicated, but one key factor is that our food options are increasing and our eating habits are changing, Hineman said. Grocery stores stock shelves with high-calorie, packaged foods and soft drinks, and fast-food restaurants are plentiful.
Stacy Beeson, St. Luke’s Health Solutions corporate wellness dietitian, sees other factors. "We live in a society that tries to make us fat the minute we walk out the door," she said in an e-mail. "We have food available 24/7, we rely on virtual reality instead of the real thing, and we love gadgets and services that save us energy and time.
"A perfect example is: We expend 5 calories handing the drive-through cashier money, and they hand us back 1,500 calories," she said.
Why the information that it’s not good to eat fast food every day translates into behavior change for some people and not for others is a mystery with few answers in scientific studies.
For Woodall, motivation to make life changes built until she woke up one day ready to start. She was tired and depressed and eating more because she was depressed, an endless cycle of eating to dull sad emotions.
"I just finally woke up one day and said, ‘OK, enough of this. I just had enough of this. I’ve got to do something different, and I’ve got to do it for me.’ " She remembers the date — Jan. 3, 2006.
She had some things going for her already, including a love of exercise. "I’ve always tried to stay active," she says. "I play softball and pitch horseshoes. It’s a natural high."
She had a gym membership already. She scraped together enough money to hire a personal trainer with a tough reputation. During the six weeks they worked together, she went for one-hour sessions three times a week for the first two weeks.
Then, she went once a week for one hour. She learned resistance training, working different muscle groups each visit, starting with large muscle groups, working down to smaller ones and finishing up with exercises to strengthen her abdominal muscles.
Between sessions, she did interval training, working on the treadmill for 45 minutes, faster, slower, faster again. Sometimes, she started with 15 minutes at a pace so fast she almost couldn’t talk; at first, she could only walk. Then she began to run a little, say five minutes at 5 mph, then 10 minutes of walking at 3.5 mph.
For months, she exercised two hours a day and tracked every crumb of food that passed her lips. Thanks to "The Biggest Loser" and its nutritional counseling, she learned to like new foods, including hummus, a dish made of chickpeas, and tahini, a paste with a texture similar to peanut butter. She cooked couscous, which is a pasta, and edamame, young soybeans very high in protein.
Her husband ate with her. "He is a tall, slim man who can eat anything in the whole wide world," she said. But he prefers to support his wife and eat healthy foods.
But sometimes ice-cream bars taste better than couscous, and there’s the rub. "I can’t go back to eating seconds or having pizza with my husband," she said. "I have to make healthy choices."
When the scale starts to creep up on Woodall, she usually can trace the cause to her thoughts. That is another lesson from "The Biggest Loser."
Contestants wrote letters to themselves — anything they wanted about their weight. Woodall found herself writing about humiliating taunts she endured from other kids when she was young, and those children’s rhymes still haunt her sometimes.
Woodall wrote about children who are merciless without knowing it. As she wrote, she thought, "I can either crawl in the corner and be this little introvert and let that bother me, or I can make a joke of it first before they get to.
"So I was the fat, happy girl, on the outside." But on the inside she hurt. Writing the letter taught her why she eats too much — stress. Often, the cause is work.
She is winning her weight battle overall and hopes to teach an exercise class to show older people they can stay active. "I have my bad days, but then I wake up and start fresh with healthy choices and feel so much better and happy with myself."
"I haven’t completely gone off the deep end, because the good stuff is in my head," she said. Right now, it is her husband, Bil, who keeps her going. "He is the love of my life," she said. "He makes it all worth starting fresh each day."
