Dudley man wants to be "The Biggest Loser"

Last week, we featured returning NC contestant Daniel Wright from "The Biggest Loser" (which returns Tuesday on NBC at 8 p.m.)

Today we talk with Dudley's Antoine Dove, the second of three NC contestants on the show.

At 23, Antoine came to the biggest loser about 100 pounds overweight, at 367 pounds. He says he believes that taking his quest to lose the weight public was what it was going to take to tackle it.

"I've always been heavy," he says. "I'm from eastern North Carolina. My aunt and uncle own a barbecue restaurant."

Antoine says he's always been driven and motivated when it came to school and career. But taking care of himself was another matter.

His moment of clarity came when he graduated from UNC-CH in 2008. In a congratulations card, his aunt wrote him a letter telling him to pay attention to his health. "She had lived like me, focused on her career and she had let her weight spiral out of control. She told me to take care of myself."

That was a wake-up call, but Antoine admits that in the back of his mind, something else nagged at him. His father died at 30 of heart disease and he wondered if he might end up the same way.

In part, the weight had already changed his career choice. All through college, Antoine says he wanted to be a doctor. When he got to Chapel Hill, he found out about the business side of the health field and that appealed to him.

But people also asked him how he could be a doctor and tell people to lose weight when he was heavy. "I said, you know that's a good point." He became a health policy administration major and is now a health insurance physician contractor in Atlanta.

Antoine, who definitely comes across as a go-getter on the phone, says having other Tar Heels at the Biggest Loser ranch, led to a nice camaraderie. "We had some good arguments about barbecue," he says. "Food wise and culture, too, we bonded. Growing up in the South is different. It's food-driven and it's not usually healthy stuff. It was nothing for me to see lard on the stove. It was nothing for me to have Sunday dinner with fried chicken. We were all able to relate on that level."

Now that he's got a new outlook on food, though, Antoine aims to change that dynamic. His goal this year: cooking a healthy Thanksgiving meal for his entire family.

"I want [the meal] to be educational," he says. "I want to teach the family about portion size. As I become comfortable, I want to slowly turn them on to it.

That's an ambitious goal, but Antoine is an ambitious guy. Plus sharing, he says, is what his Big Brother experience is all about.

"That's the point, take what you learn and pay it forward," he says. "Everybody in my family is big, except for my cousin. We think of him as the outcast," he says, laughing.