The TV show “The Biggest Loser” has been on for quite a while now. It is extremely popular, and is touted by many to be an example of triumph over adversity. But, there are a number of vocal opponents, especially in my industry–the fitness industry.
Among the charges against the Biggest Loser are that it sets up unrealistic expectations, uses unhealthy methods, is all hype and no substance, and is in fact perpetrating a fraud.
Of course, they are totally correct on most counts (except fraud, that’s going too far). But, that isn’t the point. What is?
In short, I don’t think you are so dumb that you need we trainers to monitor your television habits lest you fall into a pit of self loathing. I think you are smart enough to tell the difference between a TV show and real life.
Entertainment is entertainment. The Biggest Loser is first and foremost an entertainment reality TV program that does a very successful job of selling advertising. But, it is about a subject that hits home for every American (and increasingly, the rest of the world). I don’t believe it’s my place to call someone stupid for liking to watch (or God forbid, feeling inspired by) The Biggest Loser. I don’t think it is my place to tell the contestants that they don’t have a right to do the show, simply because it might be unhealthy.
Is the UFC good for us, or the contestants? How about the WWE? No matter how you look at it, getting kicked in the teeth is not healthy. It is the choice of the contestants themselves to go onto the show in the first place. It’s been 8 years that the show has been on. They’ve likely watched every season before they got on themselves. They know what they are getting into, they are adults, and who are we to tell them they can’t.
Again, we aren’t asking the guys at the WWE to quit doing what they are doing because it’s bad for their health. We just want to watch Triple H slam a metal chair over the head of The Undertaker. What’s wrong with that?
The detractors of the show feel like they are doing the “average overweight person who is desperately looking for a weight-loss secret” a favor. As though, somehow, a fat person is also less intelligent than their thin counterparts, more susceptible to TV hype.
I trust people enough to be able to watch TV without falling off the deep end. It’s just TV for God’s sake.
Instead of that kind of silliness, I’m just going to lay out what I think are the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of The Biggest Loser from the perspective of fitness coach. You can decide for yourself whether you want to continue watching it.
And just for fun, I’m going to do it in reverse order.
The Ugly
Certainly not ugly
The ugly of The Biggest Loser is worse than the bad. There are real health dangers involved for the contestants themselves. During the first few months at the ranch, these very obese people go through workouts, and have workloads, that are absolutely insane.
Most athletes don’t even train for 6 to 8 hours a day. Those that do built up to it for years in advance. It is very dangerous to throw the contestants into a workout program like this out of the blue.
The show has already had a few disasters and hospitalizations. There is real risk that someone is going drop dead eventually. I know the show says that they have doctors monitoring them at all times, keeping track of what they eat, etc. And I’m sure they do (given the risk of a law suit), but the producers need to watch out.
Diet is another issue. Many weeks, the contestants are reported to be getting under 1000 calories a day. Given their daily workloads, they are likely burning anywhere from 2000 to 5000 calories. Do the math. That is scary.
Of course, one sure fire way to lose weight is to create a calorie deficit. And whenever you are training a severely overweight person, this is a must. But, a deficit of 500 to 1000 calories is more than enough to accomplish that goal.
If you up someones workload to the level that they are doing on the show, then you up their need for glycogen, protein, and all sorts of micro-nutrients that are impossible to get enough of on such a low calorie diet.
When you overwork someone, and artificially keep their calories so low, you actually impede their progress, and (ironically) cause them to be less likely to lose fat. Instead, they’ll start to break down, lose muscle, become stressed out (via massive levels of cortisol)–all progress stalls.
Top athletes train like maniacs, but they also eat like maniacs. Remember all the news stories on Michael Phelps diet? He eats upwards of 12,000 calories a day so that he can train for the same number of hours as the contestants on The Biggest Loser. See the problem?
As a coach, I almost never see genuine overtraining in anyone other than my competitive athletes. But, these contestants are getting hammered. They are nearly all massively overtrained by the 3rd or 4th week. Some crawl out of it, others get booted (voted) off the show.
And then there’s the weigh in. Competitors have been known to use any means necessary to drop every last pound for the weekly weigh in. They’ll dehydrate, workout with heavy sweats on, not drink water for 24 hours, etc. Not healthy. Potentially life threatening. But, again, it is their own choice.
They chose to go on the show and they chose to dehydrate to make themselves more competitive. High school wrestlers do it all the time to make weight. I don’t condone it unless you are under the supervision of someone who knows what they are doing, but it is hardly anything new.
Of course, all this craziness makes for great TV. The farther down the hole these people go, the more emotional they become, and then we get the crying sessions, the yelling, the storming out of the gym, etc. But, it is dangerous. Make no bones about it.
The Bad
Yoga is never enough
The Bad isn’t as bad as the Ugly. These objections aren’t life threatening, but they aren’t good. The primary problem in this category is the idea that The Biggest Loser gives people at home, who hope to lose a lot of weight themselves, an unrealistic picture of how to do it.
It is certainly unrealistic. Who has time to do 6 or 8 hours a day of working out? Who’s got the self control to do all that exercise, and then only eat 800 calories?! I’d be at Crispy Cream every day (those of you who know me, know how true that is).
Losing more than 1 pound of fat per week is unrealistic for most. Some people can do it. And when you are 200 pounds overweight, then it is in fact likely that you will lose more than a pound of fat per week. But, it is never easy. It is brutally hard.
A great friend of mine, who is only 30 or 40 pounds overweight, recently sat down to talk to me about losing weight. I suggested that to start she simply start by doing 20 minutes a day, every day, of something physical. Nothing too complicated. Get up in the morning, do a few sets of wall push ups, and some jumping jacks, for example. If you can do just 20 minutes of light exercise every day for a month, you can build in the habit, and we can build on that.
Funny thing was, even that seemed like too much. The prospect of doing something everyday was daunting, and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t even supposed to be hard. She’s a hard worker in every area of her life. But, she’s not yet built the habit of daily exercise, and that is a tough habit to build.
The people on The Biggest Loser are going well beyond 20 minutes a day, or even 1 or 2 hours a day. There is nothing easy about their diets and exercise routines. They can lose 100 pounds or more in a season because they are dedicating every waking hour to that pursuit. And they have a large staff cooking their meals for them, trainers pushing them in the gym, and no access to cheat foods.
At home, you don’t have any of that. Instead, it is all on your shoulders. Sure, you can hire someone like me to write you routines and push you in the gym. You can hire a nutritionist to make you a diet plan. But, I am not going to go to your house at 5am to wake you up and drag you into the gym (sorry, you can’t pay me enough).
Unless you’re rich, you aren’t going to be able to hire someone to cook all your meals. And there is no way you can avoid the temptations of the modern world with a Star Bucks on every corner, fast food coming out our ears, and supermarkets where the junk is cheaper than the good stuff.
At home, it is all up to you. That is hard. Much harder than what the contestants on The Biggest Loser have to face.
A second problem is that extreme weight loss almost never works long term in the real world. People who lose fat fast tend to gain it all back at a rate that is higher than those who lose the same amount of weight, but did it slower. I’m convinced this is because when you do it slower, you build in something that is more important that the numbers on the scale–consistency. Losing weight fast robs you of the time it takes to build habits. If you are going to keep the fat off, you HAVE TO change your habits forever.
Changing your habits is not a matter of will power. If it was, we’d all be able to do it all the time. Changing your habits is about time. The longer you plug away at something, the more ingrained the process becomes in your neural pathways. Baseball pitchers can do what they do only because they have done it for so long. When you first started learning to ride a bike, you fell off–a lot. But, after plugging away at it, you made it a habit. Now it ain’t nothing.
On the show, they don’t have time to build in a habit of exercise and healthy eating that will last a lifetime. They take people out of their real lives and put them into fantasy land for a few months of high-action television. And when these people get home, they have no way to integrate what they were doing in fantasy land into their real lives.
If you want to lose weight and keep it off forever, you have to start out by building in the routines, and make both exercise and diet a major part of your day to day life. You know, your real life. The one with kids, a job, bills, and no time. Once you do that, you’re on the road to seeing a level of progress that is even more impressive than what happens on The Biggest Loser.
The last problem is the in-your-face advertising. This season’s sugar-free gum ads are just wacky. Every time Bob Harper pushes some gum on one of his trainees, I burst into laughter. It’s become a farce. But, in today’s world, how shocking is that, really?
The Good
Looking Good Now
Alright, no more bashing the show. Now I’m going to tell you what I think is good about it.
There are two things that The Biggest Loser makes abundantly clear, that so many clients I’ve had didn’t believe (in their heart of hearts) until they saw the show. The first is that losing extreme amounts of fat (over 200 pounds) is actually possible. The second is that it is not going to be easy.
For nearly 2 decades Americans have been blaming obesity on genetics. Sure, we knew fast food was bad for you, and that we should workout more, but in the end, our parents were fat, and that is why we were fat. We were a country in denial.
The Biggest Loser has brought obesity to center stage and made it the most popular subject on television. It shows some of the heaviest people in the country doing what we as a nation previously thought wasn’t possible. They lost the weight. They really did it. 8 seasons in a row, this program has taken mega-fat people and brought them down to size. You can disagree with their methods, hate the hype, and I’m sure you could certainly do without the over-the-top advertising. But, there is no denying that these people lost a LOT of weight.
Secondly, the show does a great job showing the contestants in a lot of pain. That may sound bad, but as a trainer, I think that it’s a good thing. If you want results, the results you are dreaming of right now (I know you have dreams about changing your body–because we all do), then you have to work your ass off. Period.
Now, obviously, I would want you to work into it slowly, get up to speed for a few months, and meet some benchmarks that I’ve set into place before we get too crazy. But, hard work has to be on the horizon if you are going to get anywhere.
The contestants on The Biggest Loser are suffering. They’re crying. They’re whining. And, in the end, they are succeeding. This is a good message. Sometimes things that are worth doing are very hard, but if you fight through it, you can come out on top, and you’ll be a better person for it.
Conclusion
So, there you have it. Coach Nick’s version of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of The Biggest Loser. Sure, the show has it’s problems, but the contestants are doing it of their own accord, and we have no right to stop them. The show is hyped up like crazy, and it portrays an unrealistic way of losing weight for the average person at home. But, in the end, it is only an entertainment TV show, one that shows real people in struggling situations, losing an amount of fat that too many people fear is impossible to lose.
On the balance, I’m for it. Besides, it’s just fun to watch.
