Posts tagged with: weight loss

The Biggest Loser: Head to Head Challenge

This week’s twist on The Biggest Loser was that each trainer was to pick one person to go home from his team and to go with him/her. That person’s weight would be the only one to count for the team for the week. Bob chose Daphne and Dolvett chose Conda, setting up a head-to-head challenge between the two women who’d just had words the night before over Adrian going home. There is a wee part of me that wonders if the show runners set this up for drama’s sake.

After Bob left, Chris complained to her black team that she felt betrayed by Bob not choosing her after she asked him after last week’s weigh-in for additional help. I think Jeremy had it right when he said that anyone left behind could have felt that way but they didn’t. None of them deserves special, extra help more than any of the others.

I didn’t have a good feeling about the black team’s chances at the weigh-in when I saw their low energy level in the gym. The red team had just come off a week without Dolvett, so they knew what to do and had a good team workout leader in Kim. The black team didn’t seem to have that.

Back in Michigan with Conda, we finally found out what happened in Conda’s past that set her on the path to being so defensive. While she was in high school, her parents split up what seemed like a happy family due to her father’s drug problems. Her mother told Dolvett that she believes Conda still hasn’t forgiven her father for that. Conda admitted that it’s the reason she and her brother, Jeremy, are so close, because they depended on each other during that difficult time. Even though she still rubs me the wrong way at times, I do see her beginning to change a little bit. Hopefully by the time the season is over, she will have dealt with more of her issues and set herself on a path to being a happier, healthier person.

At the ranch, the challenge had the teams digging their way through sand under logs in order to be able to get all their teammates plus a heavy dummy under the series of logs to the finish line. At stake were letters from home and a 1-pound advantage for their player at the weigh-in. The red team won, giving Conda that advantage.

The last-chance workouts had Conda working out with a high school girls basketball team and Daphne climbing the 103 floors of stairs in the Willis Tower (the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere) in under an hour. Yeah, I’m pretty sure I can’t do that. I loathe stairs.

At the weigh-in, the red team won Conda another 1-pound advantage, making it an overall 2-pound advantage, by losing the higher percentage of weight. That was the dedication in the gym working for them. Mark lost 10, Kim and Roy both lost 9, and Buddy lost 7. The lowest loss was Kimmy’s with 4. On the black team, the highest loss of the on-ranch team was Chism’s 7. Lowest was Megan, also with a 4. My favorite moment though came when Cassandra hit her weekly goal of a 6-pound loss to make her total loss 50 pounds since coming to the ranch. She was so excited. I just like her a lot.

For the portion of the weigh-in that counted, Daphne weighed first and lost 12 pounds. To beat her, Conda needed to lose more than 10 pounds. She came very close with a 10, at which point she started crying. As Daphne said, she was glad to win but it wasn’t good to see Conda cry.

I had another head-scratching moment at the final vote. Despite the fact that Kimmy only lost 4 pounds and Roy lost 9 and in the long run can probably help the team the most, Roy was sent home. Those voting for him questioned his dedication and his mental place at this point in the game. I know he missed some portions of the workouts, but he still managed to pull a bigger number. Oh well, I’m not seeing everything that happens, so I don’t know the whole story. And I have nothing against Kimmy. She seems like a nice person. I just found the choice interesting. It seems that attitude matters more to the red team than loss numbers.

What did you think of this week’s episode? Would you have kept Roy and voted someone else off? Do you think you could have climbed those 103 floors of stairs?

Happy Valentine’s Day

It’s Valentine’s Day, so I hope you all have a lovely holiday. Today I’m going to be hitting my local grocery store to buy the things I need to fix a special Valentine’s meal for the hubby. Today is the 20th anniversary of when he proposed. Picture me as a senior in college running around [...]

A Cautionary Tale

My husband and I were talking at dinner the other night about how long it takes investments to increase in value and how quickly a market downturn can take all that increase away in a blink of an eye. Well, weight loss and gain behaves in the exact opposite way, as I can attest to. [...]

Whew!

That sigh of relief you may have heard yesterday was me the moment I sent two books off to my editor. January was crazy with deadlines for me. I wrote two complete young adult books and revised them, and I revised my Harlequin Nocturne book that hopefully will be out next year. I had very [...]

Zumba Makes You Feel Better than a Cookie Does

I’m hoping that last week’s post about my struggles with motivation, and the responses to it, are the start of a turn around in my health and fitness efforts.  I have tried to do better this week.  It wasn’t always pretty.  I skipped Weight Watchers because I just could not face a bad weigh in.  [...]

Progress Report

By Nancy Northcott Well, here we are two months into my efforts to whittle down my weight.  I have to admit those efforts haven’t been as zealous as they need to be.  I’ve modified my eating habits but haven’t managed to get the exercise portion of the program going.  Even so, I’ve lost 1.8 pounds. [...]

Target February

Some of you might have noticed that I flat out forgot to do my regular post here last Tuesday. That’s just one of the side effects of my crazy January full of pressing deadlines. The other — I’ve done abysmally on eating and exercise this month. I’ve made some good food choices and gotten a [...]

The Biggest Loser, Face Off

This week’s episode of The Biggest Loser tackled the excuse of “I don’t have time to eat healthy.” So of course they had a food temptation. Contestants were faced with a Chinese buffet. (Interesting tidbit: There are more than 41,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., more than McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King combined.) Whomever at [...]

The Biggest Loser, Oops

I’m doing bullet points this week because I’m in crazy deadline mode this month, and my hair is on fire. * Alison told players that whoever has highest percentage of weight loss this week on the winning team gets to give immunity to someone on the losing team. * Alison asked for two volunteers from [...]

Helping Myself Eat Healthy This Winter

One of the secrets to succeeding with your New Year’s Resolutions, or goals as I like to think of them, is planning.  Planning and preparing for success help me continue my journey to become and stay a healthy writer. In order to lose weight or maintain my weight loss, I need to be careful with [...]

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