‘We are obsessed with weight': Bob Harper on life as a trainer on The Biggest Loser

The Guardian

2 days ago

In Netflix's new documentary about The Biggest Loser, Joelle Gwynn, a contestant on the televised weight-loss competition, has a message for her former fitness trainer: 'Fuck you, Bob Harper.' Gwynn was a contestant on the US show in 2008, and she has just watched a clip of Harper screaming at her to 'shut the fuck up' after she failed to run on a treadmill for the specified time. 'Oh, and your little dog too,' she adds.
The Biggest Loser was a phenomenally successful TV show. It ran for 18 seasons in the US, attracting more than 10 million viewers in its prime and spawning more than 30 international versions, including a UK iteration presented in 2012 by Davina McCall.
The show was undeniably the making of Harper, who went from being a farmer's son who dropped out of university because he couldn't afford it, to an American household name who appeared on The Traitors US and RuPaul's Drag Race. He is 'really proud' of the years he worked on 'Loser', as he refers to it, and has little time for its critics.
'That Joelle, she just does not like me, does she?' he says with a grin when he speaks to me via Zoom, having just finished watching Fit for TV: The Reality of the Biggest Loser, the new documentary in which he also appears. He is calling from his chic, monochrome New York apartment, where his 'little dog', Ralph (after Ralph Lauren), is darting around behind him. Days away from his 60th birthday, the reality TV star says he has 'learned to not take things personally'.
For the uninitiated, each season of The Biggest Loser was filmed over a 30-week period, and brought together a group of people who wanted to lose weight (and who, like all good reality TV contestants, often had deeply harrowing back stories). Contact with their friends and families was cut off, and they were sent to live on a ranch, put into teams and assigned a trainer (such as Harper), who guided them through an intense workout schedule. Outside the gym, the teams faced 'challenges' and 'temptations' for which they could win prizes or immunity from elimination. Each week, the contestants were weighed, and those who had lost the lowest proportion of their previous body weight risked being sent home. At the end of the season, $250,000 was awarded to the remaining contestant who had lost the most weight.
The rigid format meant that being as thin as possible – not necessarily as healthy as possible, though contestants were monitored by health professionals – became the primary goal of the show, and huge emphasis was placed on the way contestants looked, with dolled-up finalists walking on stage alongside sad, washed-out holograms of their pre-show selves.
'We're all obsessed with our looks,' Harper says in Fit for TV. 'Because aren't we?' he says when I ask him about it. 'I know that probably sounds really shallow, but I have worked in the fitness business for a long, long time. And yes, I want to be as healthy as I possibly can', as do 'all the people that I've ever worked with', but looks are 'a huge part of it … I want to look good when I go to the beach.'
Harper's own looks were also important when it came to The Biggest Loser. The roles played by him and Jillian Michaels, the show's other original trainer, partly involved being eye candy for viewers: thin, ripped examples of what the show deemed to be desirable. Harper has a number of tattoos, which were 'a real issue' with the producers, 'because they didn't know what the American audience would or would not respond to'. He was made to wear long sleeves to cover them up – until, Harper says, on one non-shooting day: 'I didn't have a shirt on when I was training and they saw me and they were like, 'Oh, he looks great. He can show whatever he wants.''
Producers also worried about him talking about being gay on the show. Harper came out at 15, but didn't discuss it publicly until a conversation he had with a gay contestant was shown on The Biggest Loser in 2013. 'Everyone was kind of nervous about that,' he says, but his view was: 'Why would I not talk about it? I'm not ashamed of who I am. I never have been.'
Born in rural Tennessee, Harper says he was 'definitely different' from his parents and two older sisters, and as a young adult he moved an hour south to Nashville to look for work. The owner of his local gym took him under her wing, and he began teaching fitness classes, which took him to Los Angeles, where his clients included Julia Roberts and Ellen DeGeneres. Thanks to the film stars and Hollywood agents who attended his classes, his name was put forward when producers began discussing The Biggest Loser, and he went on to become the only trainer to appear in all 17 seasons, between 2004 and 2016, as well as the one-season 2020 reboot, in which he was the show's presenter.
The Biggest Loser 'was the hardest thing I've ever done,' Harper says. Even on 'dark days' when there was no filming, the trainer was busy leading 'more sensible, low-pressure workouts' – those days were 'when we got all the real work done', he says. He tired himself out to the point that after one season, he got shingles, and remembers being so hungry on set that he would sometimes eat the snacks that had been provided for the contestants in temptation challenges.
'Temptations' were one aspect of the show with which Harper did not agree. They involved bringing the contestants into rooms full of high-calorie food, which they had to decide whether to eat (which could win them advantages in the competition or the chance for a treat, such as visiting family) or refuse, to prevent weight gain. He tried to push back on these challenges to the producers 'all the time', he says, but he and the other trainers 'didn't have a say in it'.
Such challenges, as well as filming techniques such as shaking the camera when a contestant fell over to make it look as if their weight had caused the ground to move, were 'designed to make you draw conclusions about fat people', says the author and activist Aubrey Gordon in Fit for TV. When I ask Harper if he thinks the show made fun of fat people, he says he can only speak for himself, but 'that's something I would never do and have never done'.
I mention a study that showed an increase in anti-fat attitudes after participants had been shown episodes of The Biggest Loser. Harper hasn't heard of it, but thinks it's 'stupid'. 'The trolls that are out there just want to attack in any way, because people are going to have such a strong opinion when it comes to weight loss,' he says. He is keen to share examples of people who have told him they were inspired by The Biggest Loser: 'I really do believe that we did help a lot of people.'
But even if you buy into the show's 'inspirational' message, the fact remains that most of Loser's contestants regained weight after the competition had ended. When it comes to any kind of diet or fitness regimen, 'the success rate overall is very low,' Harper says. 'It's really sad, but it's such a reality.'
He is much happier to talk about the show's 'success stories', like Olivia Ward, who entered season 11 of The Biggest Loser with her sister, Hannah Curlee. She won, with Curlee coming second, and later named her child Harper in honour of the trainer. 'I was really touched by that,' Harper says, adding that he and Ward have remained friends: 'She's flying in for my birthday party next Saturday.' Ward 'looks better than ever', he is quick to tell me. 'And her sister Hannah, she looks great too.'
By 'great', he presumably means 'slim' – and though Harper says he is 'a firm believer that healthy bodies come in many shapes and many sizes', when I ask whether he agrees with Loser's simplistic categorisation of thin being good and fat being bad, he says: 'Well, fat is bad. Let's not kid anybody.'
Harper knows as well as anybody that those who look fit may still suffer from unexpected health problems. In 2017, at 51, he had what is known as a 'widowmaker' heart attack because of an undiagnosed genetic issue, which left him clinically dead on the floor of his gym for nine minutes. Luckily, there was a doctor present who performed CPR, and Harper made it to hospital in time. If it had happened while he was alone in his apartment, he says: 'I wouldn't be here.'
Having the heart attack 'fucked me up', Harper says. He struggled mentally with going from being the man working out in his 50s who could keep up with 20 and 30-year-olds, to 'a person that couldn't walk around a city block'.
Plenty of people from The Biggest Loser got in touch when they heard what had happened – but not Michaels. 'We weren't besties, but we were partners on a television show for a very long time,' he says, so it 'spoke volumes to me' that she didn't get in touch. But, he adds: 'I would not expect Jillian Michaels to do anything other than what she wants to do.'
Michaels was always the more headstrong of the show's original trainers, and she caused controversy in 2013 by giving rule-breaking caffeine pills to her team of contestants. Did Harper ever give his contestants any kind of supplement? 'Absolutely not,' he says.
In any case, the 2013 season marked the beginning of the end for Loser: on top of the furore over the caffeine pills, the show was further criticised when winner Rachel Frederickson appeared in the finale having lost a record-breaking 59.62% of her original body weight, with many viewers believing her weight loss had gone too far.
He and Michaels 'were horrified' when Frederickson appeared on stage for her final weigh-in, Harper says. He thinks her background in competitive swimming led to her extreme approach. 'You talk to any person who's an athlete. That's a different breed of person,' he says. 'And evidently this woman was like, I'm going to win this show and I'm going to do whatever it takes.'
Yet his 'horror' at Frederickson's extreme weight loss doesn't seem to have led to much reflection on his involvement in the show that encouraged her behaviour. Granted, he wasn't Frederickson's assigned trainer. Nor was he season three contestant Kai Hibbard's, he points out when I ask him how he feels about reports that Hibbard later developed an eating disorder.
There has also been criticism from contestants he did train, including Suzanne Mendonca, who appeared on the second season and in 2016 threatened to file a class action lawsuit against the show, complaining that she later regained 150lbs (68kg) , and that during taping she was 'dehydrated, vomiting and limited to eating 800 calories a day.'
Though Harper tries 'not to have too many regrets in my life,' he does concede that two moments that are brought up in the documentary – shouting at Gwynn and telling Mendonca that it was 'good' when she threw up because it would help her lose weight – were things he 'shouldn't have' done. But, he adds: 'You also have to remember, everyone that came on Loser, we were all adults.'
Well, except for the 'kid ambassadors', junior participants whose weight loss was documented in segments of some of the later seasons. 'Oh, I don't really remember that,' Harper says.
Does he think the show would get made now? He doesn't see why not, although he admits: 'It would have to be completely different.' But 'we as a society are just as obsessed with weight loss as we have ever been,' he says, pointing to the rise of weight-loss drugs. Harper doesn't necessarily promote those types of drugs, but says he is 'for anything that you need to get you on the path that you want to be on'.
When it comes to his own path, he says he is in his 'retirement era', but is still enjoying teaching hot yoga classes in New York. He is single, having broken off his 2019 engagement to his long-term boyfriend Anton Gutierrez, 'so if you know anyone …' he jokes. He is content with the life he has built for himself, and seems unlikely to be affected by conversations about the ethics of Loser that Fit for TV will undoubtedly bring back into focus.
'I knew what the show represented to me,' he says. 'I have nothing but a good experience and really good memories.'
Fit for TV is on Netflix, from Friday