BIGGEST LOSER "22" -- WEEK ONE

We just wrapped up Week One of Biggest Loser "22" and it seems like quite a good start. This is the first time for this new leaner, meaner, shortened version of Biggest Loser, and everyone's pretty excited.

For ten years, Biggest Loser has always been 12 weeks long and there've been lots of success stories. Still, I was wondering how we could be more effective, because even the best groups still had a dropout rate as high as 50%.

Most of those people drop in the first month, so I was thinking, what if we shortened it to 7 weeks? Would more people stay, figuring they could see the light at the end of the tunnel?

Biggest Loser groups also tend to morph into two smaller groups: one getting great results right away, but the other not doing quite so well. Obviously, if you were in the half doing great, the work was worth it. But if you were struggling a little bit, it was often easier to just give up.

Really, they just needed to be patient and keep doing what they were doing. Then in week four or five, things would start to click. But lots of people gave up before that happened.  So the goal was to help more people get better results sooner, so they could get some momentum going.

Since it was going to be shorter, we were going to have to step it up. I'd been experimenting with ways to kill the down time while I was presenting information. Last time out, I did some lectures while they were on the Treadmills, Bikes, Rowers, and Ellipticals. This worked pretty well so I decided to do ALL our presentations that way.

The goal for Week One was to "Just Get Moving." There they were, tromping and pedaling away, while I told them who won that week, and how much they all lost. It was pretty cool.

I also had a captive audience for our other main topic, which was "Knowing How Much You're Eating." So we talked about that while they got some interval training at the same time!

Then we used the mat time to do a quick dumbbell weight routine. During that part of the workout, we talked about the main focus of Week Two, which is "Caring about the Quality of your Foods."

Covering the material this way kept them moving the entire time, and kept the whole weigh-in and workout to just an hour. It used to take quite a bit longer because there was always so much important information to present that first week.

Finally, if we were going to help them get better results sooner, we needed to help them out more during the week. I've been posting their daily workouts for awhile now, but we decided to give them free access to all our classes during the week as a bonus!

So for the first time ever, we had a bunch of Biggest Losers during Boot Camp Workouts and KickBoxing classes too. A few of them did 5:30 Boot Camp, walked on the treadmill from 6:15 to 7:00, and then did Biggest Loser for an hour. Wow.

I've always heard "If you've got a big goal, you've got to take big action!" They're definitely doing that, and I hope more of them are going to be happy with the results.

Some people very happy with the results are this week's Biggest Losers. Christy Henry finished first, losing 10.4 lbs and 4.5% of her body weight. Avoree Gore was second, losing 7.2 lbs and 3.5%, and Tracy Whitaker came in third, losing 5.4 lbs and 3.1%.