Who’s a Loser?

Victorious Ali Vincent on Life, Love and Losing It on National TV

by Aline Lindemann

Ever since she got famous, Ali Vincent can’t get a break.

“At the grocery store, people look into my cart to see what I’m taking home to eat,” she says. “At restaurants, they ask the waiter what kind of food I’ve ordered.”

Vincent isn’t complaining.

“It’s great,” she says with a good-natured laugh. “It keeps me in line!”

That’s classic Ali Vincent: upbeat, energetic, relentlessly enthusiastic. Give her the stage, and she explodes like an uncorked bottle of bubbly. Ever since taking top honors last year on NBC’s top-rated weight loss reality show, The Biggest Loser, Vincent has been in high gear. Despite a rigorous schedule of interviews, photo shoots, and appearances to promote her new book, she appears utterly tireless.

“This is the kind of energy I had as a kid,” admits Vincent, an Arizona native. “I lost it when I was so overweight.”

She’s not overweight any more. The now-svelte Vincent dumped 112 pounds on national television, all the while letting millions of strangers in on the details of a childhood that led to lousy eating habits and an adult weight of 234 pounds. Raised by a mom who preferred to be the life of the party rather than the provider of a stable home life, Vincent sees now how her chaotic childhood led to a lack of caring for her own well-being. She ate. Food was her friend.

Her childhood safe haven was a spot on a competitive synchronized swim team. Daily training kept her active and physically fit. “I didn’t even think about what I was doing as exercise,” she says today. “It’s just what I did.”

By her teen and young adult years, things began to change. An injured knee and subsequent surgeries to repair the damage kicked her out of the pool. With nothing to replace the intense training regimen to which she was accustomed, Vincent filled the void with more food.

“As an athlete, I’d eaten anything I wanted and never thought about calories,” she says. “I was so naive; I didn’t even know that 3500 calories was equal to one gained pound.”

Without a new fitness routine to keep her active and healthy, Vincent—slowly but surely, five pounds at a time—began putting on weight. “Ten years later,” she says, “I was more than a hundred pounds overweight.”

Vincent enjoyed only limited success with diets and weight loss programs, but losing a ton of weight on national television wasn’t part of her plan. Her grandmother was a Biggest Loser fan, and Vincent got sucked into watching a Season Three episode of the show with Grandma one night.

“I was mesmerized by the winner’s energy, his confidence,” she recalls. “I wanted that again. I was ready.”

Vincent’s mom, Bette-Sue, joined her in a quest to get onto the show, which was among NBC’s biggest hits. The pair knew that, in four seasons, Loser had yet to produce a female winner, which added to their incentive to get Vincent enrolled as a cast member. “I’ve always known that I wanted to do something for women,” she says today. “This was my chance to represent.”

Vincent became one of Season Five’s 20 contestants, and within days of arriving at King Gillette Ranch—the show’s 
location, 45 minutes outside of Los Angeles, with cameras posted in every room—she learned a lesson that’s become the basis for her subsequent and ongoing success.

“I learned the importance of goal-setting,” she recalls. “That without goals, there are no failures to deal with. And there are no successes to celebrate, either.”

Even tiny goals are worth having, Vincent learned from the show’s hard-hitting physical trainers. Her first time on the treadmill, they started her with baby steps: one minute on, one minute off. Even a goal as small as getting through that first minute was cause for celebration, and her confidence grew. “I keep that accomplishment in mind when I feel intimidated by challenges that seem monumental,” she says all these months later, “whether it’s hiking to the top of Camelback Mountain or speaking in front of a thousand people.”

Keeping things in balance is Vincent’s other means of maintaining wellness. Prior to being on Biggest Loser, she was a busy hairstylist who skipped meals in order to squeeze in more clients. She realizes now that this was a crummy plan that led to rushed and unhealthy eating habits. Now, even as her life has become exponentially more complex, she makes time for herself and for food—healthy food.

It’s one of the disciplines Vincent promotes in her just-published book, Believe It, Be It: How Being the Biggest Loser Won Me Back My Life, which details her challenging weight-loss journey and provides encouragement for people interested in leading a healthier life. She amps up the basic notion that weight loss is “calories in, calories out” by advocating food portioning and the importance of a varied exercise routine, both critical for maintaining a healthy weight. 

Vincent also writes about the importance of identifying reasons for holding on to unhealthy habits. “If you don’t deal with the mental and emotional stuff, it’s impossible to have long-lasting growth,” she says. “In my case, excessive eating enabled me to avoid taking personal responsibility.”

Vincent’s coping mechanism—a diet high in salt, sugar, and caffeine—led to ongoing weight gain, followed by even more self-doubt. And when your diet is so out of whack, she says, your energy level is like an out-of-control roller coaster. Looking back at those years, she remembers thinking that she was happy but knows that it was all just pretend. She loved being a hair stylist, but knew she wanted more.

“We’re all here to make a difference in our world,” says Vincent of her post-television fame, which she plans to use to remind women that they need to take care of themselves. She hears from women, young and old, who care for so many people around them that they sometimes lose themselves in the process. As “an ordinary person who went on an extraordinary journey,” Vincent knows what it’s like to convince oneself that one doesn’t deserve true health and happiness.

“I have an amazing opportunity, and I’m using it to advocate love and wellness,” insists Vincent, who wants women to know that they don’t need to go on national television to do the same. They can, Vincent says, begin that process simply by redefining beauty.

That’s easy for someone who’s dropped a hundred pounds in front of the world to say. But Vincent swears that it was that very experience that changed her perception of what “beautiful” actually means.

“To me, beauty is about strength and confidence,” she says without a trace of irony, “and not about how much you weigh.” 

Associate Editor Aline Lindemann learns something new every day.

Ali Vincent on digging deep:

“Once you understand where you’ve been, you can start to figure out where you want to go. Start picturing what you want your future to look like—and I’m not talking about after you’ve lost the weight. I mean, what types of relationships would you create? How would you contribute to your community? How would you continue to challenge yourself physically? And at work? You need to know where you are and what you want before you can create a productive, happy future.”

About giving back:

“There are so many ways to give back. For me, it’s meeting and talking with people all across the country and working on my Believe it, Be It Foundation. When you’ve been able to achieve your own goals, you have the power to help other people figure out what their dreams are, show them how to take the steps. And I think that’s how we stay alive and in the moment, aware. That’s the epitome of health: openness and connection.”
Excerpted with permission from Believe It, Be It: How Being the Biggest Loser Won Me Back My Life, by Ali Vincent. Copyright ©2009 Rodale Books.