With a Little Dehydration, Bloody Urine, and Starvation You Too Can Be a Biggest Loser

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During each season of The Biggest Loser, the episodes tend to get longer (last season's finale was three hours) while the amount of time viewers see contestants sweating and grunting in the workout room slims down. Mainly, this is because NBC packs those 180 minutes with Subway advertisements, reminders to forget disposable plastic bottles, D.C. field trips and challenges ripped straight from the Make-A-Wish Foundation's playbook (A makeover by Tim Gunn? Toss a football with Jerry Rice?). But that doesn't mean that the lengths taken by the Biggest Loser to shrink some of its contestants by over 50% is any less extreme. In fact, a New York Times article published yesterday declared that instead of a weekly PSA for weight loss, the series is a ticking time bomb.

Published on the eve of The Biggest Loser: Where Are They Now?, the article includes accounts by several alumni who describe the competition dangers. (The disclosures themselves are risky, given that each contestant signs multiple waivers and contracts threatening a fine of $100,000 or $1 million, depending on when the interview is conducted.) Ryan C. Benson, the first season winner who lost 122 of his initial 330 pounds, attributed his weight loss to fasts and dehydrating himself until he urinated blood.

Dr. Charles Burant, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, was not surprised:

"I'm waiting for the first person to have a heart attack. [...] I have had some patients who want to do the same thing, and I counsel them against it. I think the show is so exploitative. They are taking poor people who have severe weight problems whose real focus is trying to win the quarter-million dollars."

Even The Biggest Loser's medical consultant, Dr. Rob Huizenga, expressed some regrets over some of the show's decisions. About a one-mile race last season that sent several players into the hospital:

"If we had it to do over, we wouldn't do it. It was an unexpected complication and we're going to do better. [...] That challenge has changed a lot of the way we do things.

The show's producers still cannot monitor everything, especially what happens when the cameras shut off. Take for example, Kai Hibbard, the Season 3 runner-up who explained that after hours, she and other contestants drank as little water as possible and worked out wearing as many layers of clothing as they could find. In the two weeks after the show, Hibbard claimed to have gained 31 pounds, just by returning to regular consumption of water.

The Biggest Loser's drill sergeant trainer, Jillian Michaels, agreed that the contestants put themselves at risk when they "get a little crazy" about losing weight, but maintained that there was a much different explanation on how the show can straddle the line between health consciousness and health endangerment: "It's just part of the nature of reality TV."

· On 'The Biggest Loser,' Health Can Take Back Seat [New York Times]



Comments

  • JM says:

    Continued support for my theory that 'reality tv' will be the true destroyer of civilization.

  • Emperor Joshua Norton says:

    But maybe it will only destroy the people who would consider being exploited on TV (and the idiots who watch it), thereby creating more room for people whose IQs are above room temperature.
    A gal can dream.

  • lucas says:

    personally i hate the show. the kick offs, the money etc. it is no wonder that folks go to extremes.
    yes they are all unhealthy and yes clearly they need something to push them to lose weight. but it is handled all the wrong way.
    this 'spin off' show might do it better by going to their homes. perhaps a fusing of the two.
    here's what I would do.
    1. change the name. don't call it the Biggest Loser, call it the Biggest Winner. cause that is what these folks are really doing. winning the war against their own bodies and whatever made them so dang fat in the first place.
    2. follow them over the course of a year, even if not every second is shown on tv. you can fill in the gaps online.
    3. start with a full medical check up to show their health levels and eliminate a medical reason for the weight gain. let the doctors talk about why they need to lose weight (educating them and the audience).
    4. go to their homes and show them how changes like dumping junk food can be effective
    5. get the family in on it. make changes to make everyone healthier, have them help to encourage etc
    6. make it about who works the hardest not about just the numbers. sometimes you can have folks really trying and for whatever reason they can't break the plateau. but that number is deemed so important that folks do crazy stuff to reach it. and the number ignores things like water weight gain or muscle weight gain. both of which can happen when dieting.
    7. if you need a number make it a health based one, not just weight. create a list of criteria like weight, aerobic performance, diabetes risk, cholesterol etc. all those negatives of weighing too much. make the 'winner' the one who has the best overall improvement on all factors.
    8. and don't make the prizes so huge. smaller more personal prizes can mean as much when coupled with the added better health. someone tells the story of not being able to keep up with the kids at Disneyland and the embarrassment was a factor in realizing he needs to lose weight and get in shape. then how about a free week in Disneyland with the kids. and so on. yeah it's sappy but more meaningful to everyone.

  • Lucas says:

    personally i hate the show. the kick offs, the money etc. it is no wonder that folks go to extremes.
    yes they are all unhealthy and yes clearly they need something to push them to lose weight. but it is handled all the wrong way.
    this 'spin off' show might do it better by going to their homes. perhaps a fusing of the two.
    here's what I would do.
    1. change the name. don't call it the Biggest Loser, call it the Biggest Winner. cause that is what these folks are really doing. winning the war against their own bodies and whatever made them so dang fat in the first place.
    2. follow them over the course of a year, even if not every second is shown on tv. you can fill in the gaps online.
    3. start with a full medical check up to show their health levels and eliminate a medical reason for the weight gain. let the doctors talk about why they need to lose weight (educating them and the audience).
    4. go to their homes and show them how changes like dumping junk food can be effective
    5. get the family in on it. make changes to make everyone healthier, have them help to encourage etc
    6. make it about who works the hardest not about just the numbers. sometimes you can have folks really trying and for whatever reason they can't break the plateau. but that number is deemed so important that folks do crazy stuff to reach it. and the number ignores things like water weight gain or muscle weight gain. both of which can happen when dieting.
    7. if you need a number make it a health based one, not just weight. create a list of criteria like weight, aerobic performance, diabetes risk, cholesterol etc. all those negatives of weighing too much. make the 'winner' the one who has the best overall improvement on all factors.
    8. and don't make the prizes so huge. smaller more personal prizes can mean as much when coupled with the added better health. someone tells the story of not being able to keep up with the kids at Disneyland and the embarrassment was a factor in realizing he needs to lose weight and get in shape. then how about a free week in Disneyland with the kids. and so on. yeah it's sappy but more meaningful to everyone.

  • Jack_2 says:

    I have not seen a whole episode of the show but from what I have seen, i think it's exploitative (like all Reality TV shows) and dangerous.

  • I completely agree with the above comment, the internet is with a doubt growing into the most important medium of communication across the globe and its due to sites like this that ideas are spreading so quickly.

  • Hope this assists. And by the way, who cares if the phone stopped ringing -it doesn't mean you are unimportant. You need to learn who you are when you're alone and value your self outside of what others think of you. So as the Sage of Samos wrote on the Temple at Delphi -Know Thyself.