A Conversation with The Biggest Loser Runner-Up Rudy Pauls

If contestants are competing for $250,000, does that mean that some people stay in the gym 20 hours a day? Is the gym ever off-limits?

The gym never closes. We always had open access to it but you do have to find a balance to your workouts. A lot of us would get up and go on long walks in the morning. I would get a four mile walk in before I even ate breakfast. Then I'd eat breakfast and either go for another walk or do my first workout in the gym. You need to learn a balance between your eating, your exercise and your rest. Rest is very important. It's the one thing I ended up lacking when I got home, because of the work schedule I had. I was working 10 to 12 hours a day minimum, trying to spend time with my family on top of that, commuting to and from work, preparing my own meals. I would really only get five hours of sleep a night if I was lucky. While on the Biggest Loser ranch, I would get eight hours a day, even if it was broken up, which you you need when you push yourselves as hard as we were.

Are there always cameras in the gym or are they mainly there when [trainers] Jillian and Bob are on set?

There are cameras all over the house, every room except for the bathrooms. Otherwise, there are cameras everywhere. Most of the time, those cameras are used to make sure we are okay but if something interesting is happening, they will record it. Very rarely you actually see footage from those cameras on the show and you can tell. The high grade cameras only come in on the shoot days, whether it's a challenge or a work out. I want to say that if it is a seven day week, the cameras are there four or five. We do have dark days but those dark days, believe it or not, are to our advantage because we get the most time in the gym since we don't have to interview or do any of the other things involved in making a TV show.

How often are Jillian and Bob in the gym? Are they there every day or do they come in certain days of the week?

[At this point, Rudy asks an NBC publicist to "chime in" on the answer, "Am I allowed to just be honest with that one?"]

PUBLICIST: Well, they usually come in when they're shooting most days but they are also going back and forth doing publicity and appearances for the previous season. It depends on their schedule. They are there most days that they are shooting but not all of them. They don't go to challenge days but they are there on weigh-in days and other workout days.

RUDY: We do have other trainers on our dark days that come in. We have support while we're there but then again, you have to do it yourself.

Right, so you don't have as personal of a relationship with the other trainers as you did with Bob and Jillian?

I don't know. They're there with us too, helping to motivate us. I still will talk to some of them as well. They're definitely driving forces in what we do. They help us get to the end goal.

One last question. The New York Times quoted Jillian as saying that there can sometimes be a dark side to the Biggest Loser that viewers don't get to see: contestants going to extreme lengths to lose the weight since there is a large sum of money involved. Without being specific, have you seen that kind of behavior from your competitors? Not drinking as much water, not reaching the required number of calories a day?

If they did, I did not hear anything about it. I always felt on the show that I became very good friends with almost everybody on the show. We all considered ourselves family members. Some people saw me as a big brother or uncle or whatever you want to call me, but people confided in me a lot in what they did do. And I didn't hear anything about people being unhealthy. One of the things we all sat and talked about early on was how we wanted this season to be different from what we had heard had happened in past seasons. We didn't want to be any of these horror stories. We didn't want to be any of these crazy fad diets or things. We wanted to do it right and healthy and come out here in the end looking that way. Myself and Danny, we knew how close our competition was going to be at the end and we said that to each other the day we left. Not just for the appearance of the show but because we're both fathers and it wasn't worth risking our own health or our safety just for $250,000.

PUBLICIST: The contestants are always medically supervised throughout this entire process. And there are many safeguards in place to make sure that contestants are not taking extreme measures.

RUDY: Very much so, and it's appreciated, from my point of view, because you don't want to see somebody get hurt trying to get healthy.

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