A former reality show contestant’s story of loss gain, loss, and quest for redemption

By Jonathan Eiseman

To see Erik Chopin burst through a picture of his former self on The Biggest Loser season 3 finale is like watching a case study in you-can-do-anything-you-set-your-mind-to feel-goodisms. The onetime 407-pound man has reduced himself to a muscular 193 pounds, and looks like a walking, talking Bowflex commercial, minus the shitty industrial music and homoerotic tendencies. However, the most impressive feature of Erik during this moment is not his newly chiseled abs, biceps, or jawline. It is his smile. His confident, toothy grin—a feature hardly seen throughout the entire 13 episode season—may be the most important feature of the entire show. It just leaps off the television and screams, “Hey! Look At Me! I Did It!” At that instant, Erik Chopin is a man who can do anything he sets his mind to.

Sadly, this is not the man who sits down at a Long Island Starbucks on an unusually warm winter Saturday. The jawline is gone. The biceps are gone. The abs are gone. And the smile, the cocksure grin which landed him a ‘Got Milk” ad, an endorsement deal for diabetes prevention with a major pharmaceutical company, and a whirlwind of motivational speaking tours in all parts of the country, is gone. It has been replaced with the stare of a man who fears that his best days are behind him. The man who sits down wearing a blue tracksuit and holding a large cup of black coffee weighs over 300 pounds.

“After The Biggest Loser I had a really great year and a half,” he says wistfully. “I was working doing these speaking tours, I was making a lot of money, and I was doing something that I really loved. It seemed like it was my calling.”

The money was nice, but more important was the fame and the recognition.

“During that year and a half I got recognized at least once a day, It was a great time,” he says. “People would come up to me and tell me I was an inspiration. That was the best. I liked it, and I liked being able to help people.”

Chopin’s journey to becoming The Biggest Loser began when he ballooned to 407 pounds and finally convinced his wife to let him attend an open casting call in New York City. He knew that the producers were looking for specific types of people, and he was going to be the loud, funny one. He accidentally caught a break when his zipper busted right before he was about to go meet with the producers.

Chopin was angry at first when it happened, but then decided that it was something that he could use. As the other various hopefuls shared their tales of woe due to being overweight, he stood up and shouted, “Look at me I’m so fucking fat I can’t even zipper my own pants!,” showing the busted zipper and causing everyone to burst out laughing. Shortly after everyone was sent out, Chopin was told by a producer to stick around. It was then that he knew that he had a legitimate shot of getting on the show.

Chopin did get on the show, and after wishing he could get kicked off for the first six weeks of his stay at The Biggest Loser facility in the Simi Valley, something started to change, both physically and emotionally. When Chopin looked into the mirror, he had a face again. He had a neck, and a chin, and a jaw, and for the first time in a long time, he actually felt good about himself.

“I realized just how depressed I was for all those years. I just really hated myself for so long because of how big I had gotten. And for the first time in a long time I didn’t completely hate myself. And all of a sudden I just decided, ‘I’m gonna win this thing.’” And he did. After developing a close relationship with Bob Harper, his trainer from the show, and putting effort into his exercising, Chopin lost 214 pounds and won the $250,000 prize. This started what Chopin considers to be one of the best times in his life. He toured the country giving motivational speeches. There was a life-sized poster of him in his local gym. It was the urge to “not be the fat guy on stage telling everybody how great and easy it is to lose weight,” that kept him working out constantly and kept the weight off.

Like most former reality stars; however, Chopin’s fame dried up. After a year and a half of touring the country, there was a new Biggest Loser, and Chopin’s ability to support his family by doing speaking tours began to disappear.

“I really thought that this was going to be my new career. But eventually the calls stopped coming, and then my wife got pregnant with our third child, and I needed a way to make a living.” Chopin got a job selling retirement plans, and began to get depressed again. And he started to put the weight back on.

He started to avoid going out in public as much as he could. He used old pictures as his Facebook page, and made up excuses to stay away from Biggest Loser reunion shows. He became sedate, started drinking more, and got into fights with his wife. But the final straw came in the form of a text from an old friend.

After having avoided the latest Biggest Loser reunion show on Oprah, Chopin got a text from Bob asking, “How much do you weigh?” While he didn’t know the exact number at the time, he knew it was a lot. He decided that the first thing that he had to do was to publicly admit that he had gained all of his weight back. He called the producers from Oprah, who flew him to Chicago the next week to talk about his struggles with weight loss. In June of 2009, he allowed the Discovery channel to film a documentary on him, where he weighed himself for the first time in over a year, clocking in at 368 pounds. He realized that this time that he had to take a different approach to losing the weight.

“For The Biggest Loser, all I was focused on was winning. I just assumed that after I won I could coast. Now I realize that there is no end goal, this is a process, not a finish line.”

Chopin has been working out for the past year, and has gotten himself down to almost 300 pounds. He accepted a challenge from Bob to appear on the weigh-in for The Biggest Loser season 9 finale in May, and is actively working towards that goal. He is in the process of becoming a life coach. He wants to host webinars about weight loss, and hopes that he will be able to help people.

“What I was doing before was a waste of my life experience. When I was giving those tours after the show I realized that my life had been empty before this, and I was just filling it up with food. I know now that helping people is my calling.” While this may sound silly and self-indulgent (there’s definitely something about the word ‘webinar’ that induces gagging), while Chopin says this, something amazing happens: his smile comes back. Its not as pronounced or as vibrant as it was on his finale, but it’s definitely there. He beams as he talks about his plans for the future, and it’s enough to make you wonder if helping people actually is this guy’s life calling. Maybe there is some sort of force in the universe that Chopin, with all his ups and downs, gains and losses, understands and could bring to people, the word ‘webinar’ be damned.