By Cate Lecuyer
Salem News
March 17, 2008

BEVERLY — Rotarian Brad Hunt removed his wallet, his watch, his shoes and his belt before stepping on the scale. "I think my pants are falling down," he joked. "That's a good sign."

Like everyone else, he tried to weigh in before lunch during the Beverly Rotary's monthly meeting last Thursday. It was a well-calculated decision.

Beverly is in first place in the Biggest Rotary Loser Competition against clubs in Salem, Marblehead and Danvers. So far they've won the right to gloat at the gym, but when the contest ends in June, the team that loses the highest percentage of body fat — not pounds — will win $4,000 to be donated to the charity of its choice.

The contest is based on the NBC reality TV series "The Biggest Loser," which featured Marblehead resident Neil Tejwani in the last season. The Rotary's version was initiated, ironically, by Beverly Rotarian Kevin

Kelleher, who has never seen the show. Kelleher wanted to get his fellow members working out as a way to help shed some pounds — for good. The club has tried similar efforts in the past, but all too often it involves an intense diet for the duration of the program. When the program's over, Kelleher said, everyone goes back to his or her old habits — and old weights.

This time around they're looking at their body compositions over a period of months, instead of weeks. And they've gotten other Rotary clubs involved to raise the stakes. All the teams are working with professional trainers from their local YMCA's, hoping to make a lasting, lifelong change when it comes to diet and exercise.

"We're going to throw our clothes out this time," said Kelleher, who wore a black suit to the meeting for its perceived slimming qualities.

Fat, not pounds

Kelleher has lost 22 pounds since the contest started at the end of January. What really matters, however, is the amount of body fat he lost, said Andrew Walker, the health and wellness director at the YMCA of the North Shore. Walker used a device that looks like a video game controller to measure body fat on the Beverly team. That's the deciding factor in how the teams are ranked.

"Americans are over fat, not overweight," he said. "The issue here is losing fat tissue." Kelleher lost only 12 pounds of fat; the rest was lean body tissue, or muscle, which is what he actually wants to keep, because muscle helps burn fat. Muscle also weighs more than fat, so it's deceiving on the scale. Picture muscle as a golf ball and fat as a bowling ball, but they both weigh the same.

"Losing overall weight is misleading," Walker said. The trick is to add strength training to your workout, so you lose less weight overall, but you replace fat with muscle. The 14 participants on the Beverly team started with a total of 1,166 pounds of body fat and lost 8 percent, or 94 pounds, in the first month.

"We want to say we lost a whole person," said Beverly Rotarian Chris Lovasco, who's also the chief operations officer for the North Shore YMCA.

But Beverly can't get too comfortable in the lead. The results say they're ahead, but everyone showed up to last week's weigh-in, so it looks as if they lost the most. In the other clubs, not all the participants were there, so they went down in the books as having no change. In Danvers, for instance, only six of the 11 contestants weighed in. If everyone is at the April meeting, they could jump ahead.

"Danvers could come back," Lovasco warned. "They're a wild card."

And, the pressure is on. From now until June, the team that comes in last gets eliminated until only the "biggest loser" is left. But in true Rotarian spirit, everyone is a winner because everyone will have lost some weight, said President Don Kelley. Already, he feels lighter and more flexible, he said.

"It's really about movement, and the ability to move more fluidly," he said. "It affects everything, from choosing what chair you're going to sit in, to how you're going to bend over and reach for something. It's about your overall well-being."

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