Ship Shape - An Interview with the Navy Wives of The Biggest Loser: Special Edition

Jessica: When the prize was announced, I was like, “What the hell?” I had absolutely NO need for a nanny! And if you’ll remember, the camera didn’t show the reaction of the Navy wives, just the Marine wives.

Tami: “Nanny for a week” gave me absolutely no motivation towards winning that challenge, that was the worst idea they could have come up with. Now if they would have said we would win a cruise... that might have been a different story, I would have been pushing us out of there. The Marine wives seemed happy about it though – maybe that’s where the difference in age comes in.

Jessica: I heard from the crew that it really actually was a close race, but I don’t see how. We sucked! You didn’t see the 25 pound weight drop on my knee, you didn’t hear us grunting and cussing, you didn’t see one of the buoys sink before we could grab it. But excuses, excuses. We lost the challenge. The finger can be pointed at each person on the blue team. No big deal though, because we won where it counted.

And why on earth anybody would think we should have known how to row a boat is beyond me. Does a brain surgeon’s wife know how to perform a lobotomy? Do the Marine wives know how to disassemble and reassemble an M-16? Actually… I do, from my time in the Army! It was all in good fun though, and I laugh every time I see the boat challenge.

Brian: I agree that they milked that. I’m sure when your husbands come home on leave, water is about the last venue they want to see.

Dari: We made the comment to Caroline that if they made it a spa trip for a week we may have been more motivated to win. Give us a spa trip, don’t give us a nanny! I think by the time they taped our show the budget was running thin. No pun intended.

Brian: Yes, puns are far too unsophisticated for you cussin’ Navy wives!

Brian: One staple of these “Special Edition” shows has been the gifting of food, a fridge and gym equipment at the start of the second episode. Instead, your guys got dinners. As much as I like sea bass, where’s your fridge?

Dari: Like I said, I think their budget was running thin.

Tami: We got robbed when it came to the gifts, and equipment. I still don’t understand that! I like to eat, but I can go out to eat if I needed someone to do the cooking. Where's my new kitchen appliances??

Tina: Jessica, Tami, the Marine wives, and myself all lived in military housing. Dari rented. So, sorry, no fridge for us. We could have gotten the food put in the cabinets for us like the other families, but what could we say? I was pissed when I first saw it, but once those W9 tax forms started coming, I was grateful.

Jessica: You know, that was kind of a sore spot with us. But at least we got the experience, ya know? As Dari said, maybe they ran out of money when they got to us, I don’t know. I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, but DANG!

We did get personal training sessions and a one-year membership at a local gym. But then, so did all the other contestants on all the other shows.

And no, they didn’t pay our way to Hawaii, we did that ourselves. We had a lot of personal expenses that went along with this adventure. We paid for the care of our children in our absence, whether while we were at the ranch, in Hawaii where they taped the reuniting with our husbands and my vow renewal, when they would come to our homes to do tapings, when we went on other locations for tapings, and more.

Some of us had to fly family members to San Diego to care for our kids. Remember, our husbands were deployed at the time and we’re military families with no family near. For instance, Dari had to fly her mother from ISRAEL and I flew a niece and her two children in from Kentucky to take care of our families. Huge expense. Not to mention certain clothes we were asked to bring with us to wear at the ranch and other locations.

So, we didn’t really end up with $12,500 in prize money. There’s tax on that money too. We were given a Precor Elliptical that retailed around $6,000, but even though we used those machines in production of the show, we still pay taxes on that too. I’m not bitter about it. It’s just one of those things, ya know? I’m happy that I had the opportunity to participate in the show. More… or better… prizes would have been awesome though!

Brian: Tell us how difficult it was to maintain (a) the diet, and (b) the workouts back in the real world.

Dari: In the beginning it was so scary to leave the security of the ranch. I felt like we were part of a cult no one understood. In the days at the ranch we learned so much, and were so scared to screw up.

Tina: It was harder to maintain the eating habits because we were required to purchase the foods ourselves. Reality kicks in at home when you are buying for a family of five.

We received a one hundred dollar gift certificate to a local grocery store. We had to of course add our own money in to that to shop. Multiply that by the time we were home and you have an extremely high added expense, and the bill was not picked up by the show.

Jessica: I agree, at times it was difficult. A lot of times, I find that my boys and me eat on the fly going to their sport activities or other events. When my husband came home, it made it a bit tougher because although I wanted to be a positive influence on their diets, I didn’t push it off on them. And with me being from the south, it’s hard to find something low calorie equal to the taste of pork fat!

There was nothing really hard about going to workout, but I had some knee issues that prevented me from working out as hard or as long as I wanted to. Life sometimes dealt me something that I had to work through with my diet and exercise, but if I slipped, I got back on track. I wasn’t perfect in my eating or my workouts, but I adapted it to fit my lifestyle.