David Brown started his journey on The Biggest Loser at 409 pounds. The story of how he got to that unhealthy weight is a tragic one.
His first wife died of cancer after the couple had two kids together. He gained a lot of weight and then his health took a turn for the worse after he was diagnosed with Type-2 Diabetes.
“I realized in that moment that I could not leave them behind without a mom and a dad and I had to do something radical,” he said.
That led him to the Biggest Loser Ranch, where David admitted it was tough at the start.
“You go from a relatively sedentary lifestyle to now working out 5, 6, 7 hours a day everything was a shock to the system when you’re talking about that kind of a change,” he said.
But that hard work began paying off. With each weigh-in, David saw that magic number falling, but the weight loss was only part of the change.
“The physical is what you see on the outside, the emotional is really the transformation that happened for me,” he said.
And in the end, it was again his family that was there to remind him why he was putting in all that work.
“I saw in their face, I saw it in their tears – they were just happy for me, they were just grateful like I was that I had this opportunity to get my life back in order,” he said.
And David didn’t stop when The Biggest Loser ended. Last month, he ran a half marathon, something he admitted wasn’t an option before the show.
“To be able to think a year ago at that time I was literally out of breath walking from the parking lot to the finish line to support my wife who was running,” he said.
David now tells people that last year he wasn’t living, he was just existing. Now he wants to use his experience to help others.
“What I would tell people is if you’re tired of existing, and you know what I mean when I say that, and you’re ready to live life, you have to make the decision,” he said.
David said he is now training for a triathlon later this summer and that the key to his success post-Biggest Loser has been to keep that next race just a couple of months away.