Former ‘Biggest Loser’ winner from Arizona opens up about regaining weight

Ali Vincent was a loser. The Biggest Loser. In 2008, the Arizona resident lost 112 pounds but admitted she struggled with keeping the weight off. She said she was able to maintain a healthy weight for eight years.

She said that people would tell her if she could just keep the weight off for five years then she’d be fine. It was something that stuck in her mind and it kept her focused.

“I was very vigilant and conscious.”

After the show, she set goals for herself. She started doing races. She completed an Iron Man and other athletic challenges. There was her TV show “Live Big With Ali Vincent.” However, things changed.

The development of plantar fasciitis, a condition that causes heel pain, made working out and just daily life terribly painful for her. She stopped setting athletic goals and things started to spiral downward.  Around the same time, her TV show was cancelled.

“At that point I had already started to gain weight after I trained for the Iron Man in 2012,” she said.

Vincent said she’s always struggled with striking a balance with the ups and downs of life.

“I struggled with depression before the show and after the show,” she revealed.

Depression set in as she lost her drive. The weight started to come back slowly.

Eventually, all the weight she had lost came back, as she admitted in a Facebook post.

“I was just so embarrassed to even admit that I had been on the ‘The Biggest Loser’ because I looked as if I could be on ‘The Biggest Loser’ again,” she said.

She was experiencing yo-yo dieting — the effect of losing weight and gaining it back again.

Dr. Terry Simpson with Southwest Weight Loss said the effects of yo-yo dieting can be devastating. For Ali, it was like she was stuck in a hole with no way out.

“Of course I know what to do — we all know what to do — but I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to pull myself out. I didn’t have the strength to pull myself out,” she said.

As the weight came back she started to berate her and it became a negative cycle that fed on itself. She said she created that cycle but it was not easy to pull herself out. What made it worse is that she said she knows what she needed to do, but she felt stuck.

“I beat myself up for knowing better and still not being able to do better,” she said.

After hitting her absolute rock bottom on her wedding anniversary this year, she decided that now is the time to get healthy again.

“I signed up for Weight Watchers,” she said. “I signed up to walk into the door on Saturday morning, which was the next day. It was the hardest thing I’ve done in years.”

The road has been difficult, but Vincent is determined to get back to where she is happy with herself. She said she does not want to rush into losing weight. She wants to do it in a healthy way, and this time it’s not entirely about losing weight. It’s about maintaining a healthy lifestyle both in body and mind.

“How I got so far was that I let the fear of something unknown become something bigger than it could have ever possibly been because I felt shamed. I didn’t need to feel shamed, and I don’t have to feel shamed, and so I’m not going to.”