The Biggest Loser

Eonline.com

There are many things wrong with the picture of 24-year-old Rachel Fredrickson and I could have you play that game where you circle all the mistakes, but I think the biggest mistake in this picture is the fact that she is wearing a Biggest Loser shirt. Now in no way am I bashing The Biggest Loser because to be perfectly honest I watched it every single Tuesday night and even more embarrassing, cried at every single episode.

What The Biggest Loser aims to do is fantastic; they help severely overweight people find a balance in their life between food and exercising and the emotional struggles they face along the way. Each week the members of the ranch go through gruesome workouts, learn more about proper nutrition and compete in competition that really tests their limits.

Although they help these people lose the weight, I believe they are taken to some major extremes through the show. These people drop their lives and move to the ranch to devote all their time and energy into losing weight. They spend hours upon hours a day working out to try and lose as much  weight as they can for the weekly weigh in. If they don’t? They get kicked off the ranch. Their learning process? Done. The motivation they’ve been so used to? Gone. Once kicked off they are thrown back into the real world of fast food, frozen dinners and nights spent in front of the TV and somehow they’re expected to keep up the healthy habits they learned on the ranch in order to win the at home prize.

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(The picture above is Fredrickson’s transformation from the beginning of the show to when she left the ranch, three months before the final weigh in.)

I’ve watched seasons of The Biggest Loser before, but this one was different. This time I had an understanding of proper nutrition and exercise that I didn’t have before. I was able to realize that the endless hours of exercising were in no way healthy. Before coming on the show, these people see working out as a foreign concept and throwing them into something so brutal right off the bat is just plain unhealthy; so unhealthy that the first few weeks you saw people throwing up, having to stop because they couldn’t breathe or were feeling faint. Seems safe right?

Now the nutrition part is another story because as an audience you rarely saw what the members of the ranch were eating. A few times throughout the season they showed them eating healthy protein bars or snacks, but more for product placement for these brands than anything else. The Biggest Loser claims to have a nutritionist for the members of the ranch, so that is all we are given to believe.

After watching this season, I became disgusted with the way the show was promoting weight loss. Look again at the picture of this season’s Biggest Loser winner. The audience, other members of the ranch and even the three trainers were shocked at how Rachel looked, and not in a good way. Something even more shocking? She had lost 155 pounds putting her at a tiny 105 pounds in just seven months. Being 5 foot 5 inches and 105 pounds puts her BMI (Body Mass Index) at 17.5 which is considered underweight by the National Institutes of Health.

Time.com

According to an article on CNN about this issue, Dr. Steven Lamm, weight management expert and medical director of NYU’s Preston Robert Tisch Center for Men’s Health, said that The Biggest Loser is about extremes and that’s “not what we as a profession are looking at.” He went on to say that “if I were to see this in a patient, I would be concerned about their emotional stability.”

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/05/health/biggest-weight-loss/

Fredrickson just recently came out saying that she may have been a little too enthusiastic about making it onto the finale of The Biggest Loser. But she continued to claim that eating 1,600 calories a day and going to classes at her gym 6 times a day was healthy. The Biggest Loser is no longer a show about helping people start and maintain a healthy weight loss journey. It has become a show about doing whatever is possible to win $250,000 even if that means going to unhealthy extremes to lose the most weight.