TONIGHT

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• CBN Article on Gov. Huckabee
• ARKids First program
• Gov. Huckabee featured on The Road to Health

E-mail a friend

Tavis: I am pleased to welcome here in studio tonight the popular governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee. Currently, he is the second-longest serving governor in all of the U.S. And this summer, he takes over as chair of the National Governor's Association. Congratulations, I think, governor. Ha ha ha! Along with former president Bill Clinton, Governor Huckabee is chairing the new American Heart Association initiative to stop childhood obesity. The governor has some firsthand experience with the subject. Take a look at the governor a couple of years ago. He weighed over 280 pounds. Doctors told him he'd be lucky to live for another 10 years. And now take a look at the governor now. Looking handsome and fine and trim and fit, and, might I add, having just run the Little Rock marathon back in March with a very good time...I saw that time, governor. His new book is called "Quit Digging Yourself a Grave With a Knife and Fork. A 12-Stop Program to End Bad Habits and Begin a Healthy Lifestyle." Governor, nice to have you on the program.

Governor Mike Huckabee: Tavis, it's a real pleasure to be here.

Tavis: So how's it feel? You look great. How's it feel?

Huckabee: It's great. You know, people ask me, "Do you feel better than you did before?" And truthfully, I don't have a frame of reference. I'm doing things now at age 49 that I couldn't do when I was 17 years old. So I don't have a capacity to go back and say, "This is better than when I was 30 or 25," 'cause I couldn't do what I'm doing now, even when I was 25 or 30.

Tavis: What got you to the point where you said, "I gotta change this"?

Huckabee: It really was the doctor sitting me down and saying, "Here's the deal. You're a type-a personality. You've just been diagnosed type 2 diabetes. And if you don't make some changes--and I'm talking serious changes--here's the last decade of your life and what's gonna happen." And when he described what diabetes was gonna do to me, I thought...I just didn't have it all figured out like that. So I haven't taken medication now for diabetes in 2 years. I've totally reversed it. My doctor now tells me I will live as long as if I'd never been diagnosed, and I'm completely symptom-free and I plan to stay that way. I want to live a little longer than what that initial diagnosis was.

Tavis: So tell me how you did it.

Huckabee: Well, the simple way is to say, as he told me, it's not rocket science. You have to burn more calories than you consume. But the real issue was I've lost enough weight to fill a boxcar over the course of my lifetime, lost and gained and lost and gained and usually would gain back more than I lost. And I had the experience of so many people--I put the focus on losing weight, and that never worked. I ended up always being unsuccessful because when the focus is on weight loss...weight loss has a beginning and an ending. This time I said, "My focus is not on losing a certain amount of weight. I'm gonna get healthy. Health is gonna take the rest of my life." The second thing that I had to do was to learn what was it that was causing me to not be able to make the change. And when I identified some things that were hindrances and learned what I had to stop doing before I could start taking the right steps, it was like an epiphany. And honestly, Tavis, it hasn't been as difficult as I thought it was gonna be once the switch was flipped inside me. Because it's a lot more about what goes on in your mind rather than just what goes on in your mouth.

Tavis: So you're telling me that you don't miss the good stuff, the stuff that tastes good to you but is so often bad for you?

Huckabee: I remember that it was good but, you know, when I look at it now I don't have that incredible conflict like I used to when I'd try to get rid of, let's say, sugars and stuff. I don't eat sugar. I don't eat processed food. Don't eat a lot of fried foods anymore. Used to say, "Oh, I really want it. Oh, wow." I'm all torn up inside. Now I look at it and I remember what coach Frank Broyles at the University of Arkansas told me. He said, "Governor, nothing will ever taste as good as it feels to be thin." And I just look at the cheesecake and I say, "Hmm. So what?" It feels good to feel good.

Tavis: Let me ask you a question that's a bit politically incorrect to certainly ask of a politician, but let me ask anyway. Tell me how this...this new look has boosted your confidence. I ask that because you gotta have confidence and a certain amount of ego to even run to be governor of a state. So you weren't lacking in that arena to begin with. But I can only assume when you walk into a room now, you walk a little straighter, you know you look better, you got more con...-I mean, has it impacted you in that way at all?

Huckabee: Well, I certainly feel like people aren't looking at me saying, "Oh, Lord, I hope he's not in an airline seat next to me." Oh, my gosh. Going into a theater, you can see people saying, "I hope there's enough seats where he can get those 2 and won't have to sit by me." So there's a sense in which there's a relief, and it's wonderful when people come up as they do now and they say, "You look great." And that's so much better than coming up and grabbing me and saying, "Leon's getting larger."

Tavis: Ha ha ha!

Huckabee: So it's really been a nice thing to get the positive reaction as opposed to the old ones before.

Tavis: What's happened in your state, and I say this respectfully, but Arkansas--I've been to Arkansas many, many times. Loved visiting Little Rock where I get most of the time. Not the healthiest place...to live. I've been to Bentonville, down at Wal-Mart's. Been to Arkansas many times. Arkansas not the healthiest place, given what you guys eat there a lot--but it's not the only state on that list--but has it made an impact with the people of your state seeing their governor lose this weight?

Huckabee: Well, it has, and I get people who come up to me, write me, e-mail me literally by the scores every day. "Governor, my wife and I have lost 60 pounds. We decided, by golly, if you can do it, we can, too." A lot of it--there's a couple of factors. They were factors for me, and I think they're factors for other people in Arkansas and the rest of the south, but really across America. Number one, in the south, we fry everything. You know, if it can be eaten, it first has to be battered, fried, then pour gravy on top of it, which would just kill ya. But the second thing is, many of us grew up just a few pockets full of change above poverty.

Tavis: Mm-hmm.

Huckabee: And sometimes, people don't understand that when you're poor, you eat the food that stretches the food but also stretches your waistline. So many of us grew up eating a lot of macaroni. So the reason we poured gravy on everything and fried the food was because by the time you breaded it and fried it and put gravy on top of it, you could feed more people with a very inexpensive and a small piece of meat.

Tavis: Mm-hmm.

Huckabee: And those are the factors that give you sort of that culture of obesity.

Tavis: Mm-hmm.

Huckabee: Add to that, that that becomes your comfort. If you're poor, you don't have the option of saying, "I'm gonna go to the movie. I'm gonna get front row tickets to the Stones concert." What you can, though, always depend on is that there's gonna be food on the table, and that's the one thing that you will find plenty of in your life. So as you grow older, even if you grow out of poverty and, you know, get a good job and educate your way out of it, you still have those hankerings where you're--maybe your security is tied back to those days where you could eat all the gravy on top of all the biscuits that you could possibly put on the plate.

Tavis: Mm-hmm. Tell me more about the book and specifically about the 12-stop program.

Huckabee: People kept asking me how did I do it, and so I finally decided, "Well, I'll tell the story." I had no idea the resonance. A cardiologist just bought 20 copies to put in his waiting room to give to his patients because what I try to do in the book, first of all, is to tell an honest story. A reporter said, "Gosh, this is awfully sort of brutally honest for a politician." I said, "This isn't about politics. This is about the story of fighting poor health habits," and I said, "I knew that if I wrote this and glossed over the humiliation, the hurt, the emotional pain that people experience when they are battling with their weight and can't seem to overcome it, that people who read it would say, he doesn't understand."

Tavis: Mm-hmm.

Huckabee: So I wrote it so that it's a book that's pretty obvious. But the other side of it, it's not a guilt book. This is not a book to make you read and say, "Oh, I feel worse than ever." It's a book to encourage. I tell the story of one beggar telling other beggars where to find bread. Whole grain. But bread nonetheless 'cause I think that's what really has to happen is people who are sharing that we can make a change in our health.

Tavis: Mm-hmm. You and another governor of Arkansas, former governor Bill Clinton, have teamed up to deal with this issue of child obesity. Tell me how you and Clinton got together on this and why the issue of obesity in kids is so important.

Huckabee: Well, he called me a few weeks ago and asked would I join him for this Heart Association initiative on child obesity, and, of course, I was delighted to. One of the things that we've gotta do with the health issue is depoliticize it. This is not a polarizing issue. People who are unhealthy don't care whether you're a Democrat or a Republican. They wanna know "Is there any hope and help for me?" Well, it's been a real honor to be able to do this because I feel a sense of responsibility for all the bad examples and the many people I've probably led the wrong way. I hope to atone for it. But the reason this is so important, Tavis, is because we've got a nation whose kids are truly in an epidemic of obesity. 15 years ago, Arkansas children's hospital had never seen a case of type 2 diabetes in a preteen. Today, they see 8 or 10 of those kids a week and diagnose them, which means that these are kids who by their 20s have vision problems, will have a heart attack by the time they're 30, will be on full kidney dialysis before they're 40 and will never live to see a 50th birthday and are the first generation of young Americans who won't live as long as their parents and grandparents. It is something we absolutely have to address.

Tavis: Let me talk politics now even though this is not about politics. Bill Clinton didn't do too bad having been a former governor of Arkansas, and I'm hearing more and more talk. With an open field in 2008, I keep hearing your name pop up here and there. This is a wonderful story. It makes you much more accessible and approachable and much more the common man with the American people. So might the governor's mansion in Arkansas do for you what it did for one Bill Clinton?

Huckabee: Well, I don't know. I'd have to hear from about, maybe 50 million Americans to find out if that's a realistic possibility.

Tavis: Any interest in it?

Huckabee: Well, you know, I don't think a person runs for governor of a state would just totally ignore the idea, but I'm not ready to go out and declare anything or to make any intentions. I really do want to put a real focus in my last year and a half as governor on the health of the people of my state and the country, and who knows what'll happen?

Tavis: The south does seem to have a monopoly on the White House these days, so you got as good a shot as anybody out of the south, I would think.

Huckabee: Well, I think there's a sense in which governors have an advantage because they've dealt in the role of a chief executive. I think people from the south have some advantage because most folks can relate to maybe the heart of issues. You know, the average person out there is less interested in a person's political label as they are, does this guy understand what it is to know how tough it is to pay the rent the first of next month or to make a car payment or to pay the price of gas when it's over 2 bucks a gallon? Those are issues that, I think, governors deal with every day, and then perhaps that's why you see a lot of interest.

Tavis: Well, again, a very diplomatic answer to a question that, uh...ha ha! He didn't really want to address.

Huckabee: That's called questions and avoidance is what that means.

Tavis: We'll keep watching to see what he does next. He is the governor of Arkansas. Uh, the new and improved governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee. Governor, nice to have you on.

Huckabee: Tavis, my pleasure.

Tavis: Glad to have you. You're welcome back any time. Up next, actor Mark Harmon from the hit CBS series "NCIS." Stay with us.