Chris Powell's Choose More, Lose More for Life by Chris Powell

she was fifteen, Rachel weighed 315 pounds. Still, she didn’t feel fat! When she looked in the mirror, she saw a beautiful young woman.
    That began to change during Rachel’s last year in high school. She realized that when some people looked at her, they didn’t see a likeable, interesting girl; they saw a fat girl. She knew she needed to do something abouther weight, but she had no clue where to begin. Assuming that if she ate less, she’d weigh less, she tried fad diet after fad diet. She just got tangled up in confusing numbers and calorie counting. After a week or two, she’d give up or move on to another plan. Nothing lasted.
    Rachel went to college hoping she’d get her life back, but instead she kept eating the same unhealthy way she always had: one huge meal at a time. She starved herself during the day, then ate at night—two thousand or more calories all at once. The pattern seriously messed with her metabolism, which made it deadly for her weight. She had no clue about the damage she was doing to her body.
    In three months, Rachel packed on eighty more pounds, reaching her highest weight—399 pounds. It was difficult for her to walk and even to breathe, let alone play the sports she loved. When she went home on break, her family was shocked. She started to give up on her dreams of achieving something great someday. She was completely miserable.
    Health became a big problem for Rachel. Her doctor told her that she’d never be able to have children at her weight and ordered an ultrasound on her thyroid. When the doctor at the clinic asked her how much she weighed, she took a guess and said 350 pounds—too much for the clinic’s table! Then Rachel heard about Lap-Band surgery and figured it was her key to success—to changing her life. But she didn’t qualify for the operation. One setback after another took its toll.
    Now what? Rachel decided that the NBC show
The Biggest Loser
was her ticket. When she was turned down, she tried to move on. She got a job teaching at a small Christian school, but she still couldn’t control her eating and her weight remained a problem. As the gym teacher, she couldn’t do half the exercises she taught the kids! She had always loved to play sports, and now she couldn’t. Something in her mind clicked: Rachel wanted a good life, not one wasted on misery. If she was going to improve her life, she had to make some big changes. This was her moment of clarity—she just didn’t know how to turn that clarity into action.
    Then Rachel got a phone call about a new show, ABC’s
Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition
. She figured it wouldn’t hurt to try out. So she wrote a letter to me and poured her heart out about how badly she wanted to transform her life, and promising to give my program her all. In tryoutsshe proved her determination. When I invited her onto the show, she was ecstatic. Little did she know that her life was about to change forever!
    As we started working together, Rachel could feel the confidence I had in her—confidence that she didn’t have in herself. For once in her life, she really believed she could drop hundreds of pounds, and she was ready to do whatever it was going to take. After some deep soul searching, she challenged herself to lose 50 percent of her body weight. It was a commitment to herself, but she also hoped she could become an inspiring example for other desperate people. This vision of her future was her motivation.
    Before she met me, Rachel didn’t know what a carb was. But now she learned all about the importance of carbs and the impact that nutrition has on her metabolism. She learned which foods could help her lose weight and which she should avoid. How to make balanced meals, how to control her portions, how to spread her meals out over the day: Rachel learned how to feed her body without hurting it.
    One of the key elements of any successful long-term program was especially valuable for Rachel: the ability to cheat! Being