While surfing through YouTube, I found "The Biggest Loser," it was the Australian version of the show which seems to be virtually the same but last for many more episodes. Because I had just started out on my own weight loss journey I was intrigued. I watched these morbidly obese people drop 3-15 lbs. per week! I didn't know whether to cheer or to be appalled. I was indoctrinated with the philosophy that slow weightloss is better weightloss and that it is better to diet slower in a sustainable way than to go on a very low calorie diet that cannot be maintained and that hasn't prepared the dieter for long term maintenance. In other words, crash diets lead to yo-yos.
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So, with an eye to finding out the good, the bad and the ambivalent, I started looking about for professional opinions on the methods used by the biggest loser.
First, let me say that it isn't easy to find anything on the internet about The Biggest Loser that isn't flattering because (I think) that negative stuff is highly discouraged. Contestants are under contract to not "go off the reservation" by saying anything negative about the show or the methods.
I found one of the early contestants that claimed he actually "peed blood" (okay, that can't be good) and others that claim they heavily dehydrated themselves before a weigh-in some gaining back as much as 20 percent total body weight in the form of water weight. NBC's take on that is that they don't approve, it isn't part of the process but sometimes people get ultra-competitive. Well, duh, if you have a quarter of a million dollars dangled in front of you, competition is the name of the game.
A piece about a piece on the Biggest Loser
So, what is the diet plan. From what I could gather, the diet consists of 7 calories per pound. So a 200 pound person would eat about 1400 calories. It is also said, that for the show, rather than 7, they aim for 6 pounds per calorie, so that same 200 pound person would subsist on 1200 calories...while doing six hours of exercise a day. Another article quotes 1500 calories and a third says 1100, but we can all agree that it is a fairly minimal amount of calories.
I find this troubling. I am sedentary and old yet my minimum intake is 1200 calories per day, more if I do any appreciable exercise. I can't imagine a 20-something, who is working their behind off, living on 1200 calories per day for three months. I suspect that it would throw the body into starvation mode and the moment one tried to "eat normally" one would easily put the weight back on.
I can already hear the other side of the argument: These are morbidly obese people for whom weight loss is not just optional, but imperative and given the health threats faced by their weight, any method of bringing them back to something approximating a healthy weight is a good thing to do. Yes, to an extent I agree, however I believe they are using far from optimal methods for one reason it gets ratings.
I have little quarrel with the type of exercise done on the show, and I think that making people more aware of healthy diet choices and healthy exercise choices is a good thing. On the other hand, watching people work out for six hours a day and using that as some sort of goal is likely to set many people up for frustration and ultimately failure. Working people simply do not have six waking hours for excersize and then when they see that their results are more in-line with reality (1-2 lbs per week) they are going to compare that to the losses documented on the show.
Here is an article on the exercise and the problems with the show:
Calorielab Article
Anyway, I am a bit torn between the obvious need for these people to change their lifestyle and the need for the producers to get ratings, which comes with these big weightloss numbers. Feel free to chime in or just use as an open thread.
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