Jessica Limpert and Ramon Medeiros stayed active after their time on The Biggest Loser in 2011. The couple — who met on the show's 12th season and later married — spent their time after the finale touring the country as motivational speakers talking about their weight loss success and working as celebrity trainers at the Biggest Loser resorts.
But soon after the show ended, they both started to slowly regain the weight they had lost — 154 lbs. in Medeiros' case and 80 lbs. for Limpert — and struggled with the fact that the world was seeing them revert back.
"We did all this in the public eye so there's always going to be scrutiny and I think we just weren't prepared for that in the aspect that it came on," Limpert, 36, told Today. "It's not even that we received a lot of bad feedback as we continued on with our lives and gained weight here and there. It was more of we didn't learn to develop that thick skin and feel confident inside."
Medeiros, a tattoo artist, said that they hadn't worked on their self-image through the ups and downs of losing weight, and once they saw the numbers go back up it was hard to swallow.
"We had a bad body image of ourselves," he told the outlet. "… We didn't really know how to accept our bodies and we didn't really know how to gauge what we were feeling and seeing. So in our eyes, we didn't look the way we wanted to look or things didn't happen what we thought was going to happen."
They both regained around 100 lbs. and would try different diets, sometimes losing 80 to 100 lbs., but never able to keep it off.
"We always achieved success with each new diet or plan but couldn't find longevity with a sustainable lifestyle," Limpert wrote in an Instagram post.
As they gained, both started developing health issues. Medeiros had sleep apnea and started using a CPAP machine to help him breathe at night, and Limpert, a former ICU nurse who now specializes in laser aesthetics, had one memorable night when she, too, struggled for air.
"I possibly stopped breathing in the middle of the night and I woke up gasping and feeling like I couldn't breathe," she told Today. "That was my real wake up call."
They had both discussed getting weight loss surgery but always decided against it because they thought of it as the "easy way out" when they had previously been able to lose weight through diet and exercise
But in January 2021, they decided it was time. Limpert was up to 358 lbs. — 184 more than when she left The Biggest Loser — and Medeiros was 385 lbs., up from his final weigh-in of 201 lbs. They decided on a vertical sleeve gastrectomy (VSG), where portions of the stomach are removed to limit how much they eat and reduce hunger pains.
"We realized no matter what diet plan we followed that there was something working against us and surgery was the fix to remove that hormone to help us get our lives back," Limpert wrote on Instagram. "Surgery starts the process but you put in the work — watching your diet, working out, journal, mental health check ins and more. To keep this lifestyle sustainable without looking for a quick fix is the mentality that is fueling our journey."
In the year since their surgeries, Limpert is down 156 lbs. and Medeiros has lost 130.
Limpert seems "so much happier all the time," her husband told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in October. And Medeiros is "the same person, but there's a little more light," she said.
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