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Time Magazine
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
The Most Revealing Moments From 'Fit for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser'
In the new Netflix docuseries Fit for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser, former contestants weigh the pros and cons of participating in the hit reality show, which awarded a cash prize to the person who lost the most weight during each season. On air from 2004 to 2016—and again in 2020—the show often pushed contestants to their limits with extreme exercise stunts designed to create drama for a reality TV audience. Over three episodes, producers open up about how they made an engaging TV show out of the seemingly mundane challenge of weight loss, while former contestants recall the physically grueling and often verbally intense nature of the fitness regimes they endured. Here's a look at some of the most shocking details. What drew contestants to The Biggest Loser David Broome, a co-creator of The Biggest Loser, says in the docuseries that he got the idea for the show after seeing a desperate 'help wanted' ad for a personal trainer to 'save my life' on a bulletin board outside of a gym. Once the show was underway, producers searched for similarly desperate contestants. 'We were not looking for people who were overweight and happy,' says producer JD Roth. 'We were looking for people who were overweight and unhappy.' Ryan Benson, an avid reality TV fan who won Season 1's grand prize of $250,000, knew he had to make a lifestyle change when he stopped getting roles as an actor because of his weight. Suzanne Mendonca, a Season 2 contestant, says she became obese when a car accident caused her to live a more sedentary lifestyle; when the show came along, she was looking to get her weight back on track. Joelle Gwynn, a Season 7 contestant, auditioned for the show after getting diagnosed with type II diabetes. Tracey Yukich, from Season 8, was struggling with infidelity in her marriage. 'I thought that if I lost weight, my marriage would be fixed,' as she puts it. Danny Cahill, who won the $250,000 grand prize on Season 8, was fed up after being teased about his weight since the third grade. When the show randomly came on TV at home, he watched and realized, 'This was my one chance to save my life.' The toughest moments on The Biggest Loser The contestants were constantly surrounded by junk food, which many of them saw as cruel. Everyone has food cravings, Broome counters when the subject comes up: 'I needed the show to be relatable to the rest of the world.' Some of the contestants were forced to live on 800 calories a day. 'Being sleep-deprived and hungry certainly makes it easier for people to get into fights, which would make for great TV,' says Jennifer Kerns, a Season 3 contestant who became a physician specializing in obesity. Archival footage of the show depicts trainers screaming at contestants and contestants vomiting on treadmills and falling while trying to do workouts on parallel bars. Gwynn recalls thinking, 'Are you trying to make me look like a loser?' One of the trainers, Bob Harper, admits that he dished out a lot of tough love, but argues that was the nature of the show and that he was trying to make an entertaining show for viewers: 'What's more important for weight loss? We all know it's diet, but that becomes boring television. You know what's not boring television? To see us in a gym yelling and screaming. That's inspirational. That's good TV.' The docuseries revisits a moment in the reality series when Yukich becomes dizzy midway through a 1-mile race on the beach. Her fellow contestants pick her up and drag her over the finish line, where she collapses. At the hospital, she is diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis, a muscle condition which can be life-threatening, and which can be caused by serious exercise. She recovers and stays on the show, more determined to succeed than ever. 'I just cheated death,' she recalls feeling, during an interview in Fit for TV. 'I didn't die. It's on.' The Biggest Loser's impact Fit for TV features a 2016 study on 14 The Biggest Loser contestants, which found that all but one of them gained back the weight they had lost. Their metabolisms had actually slowed down. Four were heavier than they were at the beginning of the show. While Cahill lost nearly 240 pounds to win The Biggest Loser, he had trouble keeping it off, weighing 340 pounds seven years after the show. He is one of the contestants featured in Fit for TV who wishes The Biggest Loser had provided care and resources for contestants after the show to help them keep the pounds off, such as a gym membership and counseling. But the show's producers say that it's unrealistic to expect a TV show to do that. The series ends with contestants reflecting on how The Biggest Loser helped them start the process of losing weight—a moment when they started to take their weight-loss journeys seriously. 'I can do so many things that I couldn't do before,' says Yukich. 'If I hadn't gone on the show and experienced everything that I did experience, I would have never had the strength to make some serious changes in my life.' She cites her new partner as one of those changes. Gwynn argues that the show's focus on dropping pounds quickly misses the point. 'It's not about how quickly you do it, but staying the course.' Fit For TV hits home the argument that while the show may have helped some contestants lose weight in the short term, its primary goal was always to entertain above all else.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Health
- Telegraph
How fat-shaming show Biggest Loser ruined lives
What I remember is the anguish. Contestants from The Biggest Loser, perhaps America's most repulsive reality TV show, were often very sick. The Biggest Loser, which ran from 2004 to 2016 on NBC and saw overweight contestants compete to lose the most weight for a $250,000 cash prize, made them sicker. Now some of these contestants have been interviewed for a new and gruesome three-part post mortem for Netflix called Fit For TV: The Reality of the Biggest Loser. Psychotherapists would call it re-traumatisation. It began, says Biggest Loser's co-creator David Broome, when he went to the gym one day. Broome has the expressionless face of a man who cannot be emotionally touched. Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the film Network (1976) which foretold reality TV ('Suicide of the Week, Execution of the Week, The Death Hour!') would know Broome as an authentic television villain. The sign at the gym, Broome says, read 'Help needed. Please help save my life. Obese person seeking trainer'. He then remembered that America is filled with the unhappy and obese, and that they rarely see themselves on TV. He invited them to apply to be The Biggest Loser. Broome did help: he helped himself. He co-invented a show that made hundreds of millions for NBC, made him rich, and arguably damaged the metabolism and mental health of those unlucky enough to appear on it. The contestants were chosen, isolated from their families at a 'ranch', and placed on a punishing regime: hours of gym each day; humiliating stunts involving food and 'fitness'; and suggested calorie intakes (1,500 for men; 1,200 for women. Most ate far less than that when they realised it would help them win. One man ate 800 calories a day and burnt 6,000 calories in the gym). Contestants have reported that their periods stopped; their hair fell out; they had problems with movement afterwards; they often couldn't sleep. (Others, though, still maintain that the show helped them.) Each week they were weighed in front of a live audience, who whooped and howled; the failures – those who had lost the least weight – were sent home. It couldn't happen today, now Ozempic is available and, watching it now, the show is a tableau of every piece of bullying I saw in the schoolyard, and worse. Fit for TV uses gruesome archive footage. Contestants are screamed at in gyms and placed on obstacle courses which appear to have been designed to make them look ridiculous. There are exculpatory interviews with Bob Harper, the show's co-trainer; Robert Huizenga, its doctor, who offers well-dressed contrition; and multiple contestants who, almost without exception, act like they have been in a war. Huizenga now says he didn't approve all the challenges the contestants faced. Harper says they knew it was diet that mattered for weight loss, 'but that becomes boring television. You know what's not boring television? To see us in a gym, yelling, screaming'. Even the contestants seem to understand that obesity is mostly a psychological problem that cannot be fixed by going on television. 'When you have something traumatic in your life,' says one, 'it doesn't go away.' Danny Cahill, the gentle, still-bewildered winner of season eight (he lost 239lb, or 17½st), says of his eating disorder, 'I lived it every day. I was missing life.' Like most of the contestants, he is larger than ever, because obesity is a psychological problem triggered by trauma and self-hatred, which The Biggest Loser compounded, not solved. As the series wound on, medical professionals questioned whether the 'regime' damaged the contestants' metabolic systems. The only things Cahill really lost were his privacy and his pride. The producers wanted exhibitionists of a particular type. It wasn't fat they needed – or not fat by itself – it was pain and ability to express it. Once successful – if we can call it that – they were not allowed to show the contracts they had to sign to a lawyer; or, rather, they were, but it was strongly hinted they would lose their place on the show if they did. Thus disarmed, they were fed into television. It is apt. It was not enough, as respectable doctors advise, to lose 2lb a week with moderate diet and exercise – not to win The Biggest Loser, which at its peak occupied the same studio as the talent show American Idol. The weighing scales, the producers admit, were the real protagonist of the show. Contestants might lose a stone or more in a week, and this was revealed to the screams of the crowd. This was achieved by over-exercise – 'I'm going to take your legs and beat you with them,' one trainer screamed – and, the contestants now say, by self-starvation and depriving themselves of water before the weighing in. One contestant – Ryan Benson, the winner of season one – said he lived on lemon juice for the last 10 days of the show and was so dehydrated he was urinating blood as he appeared on the valedictory talk shows. There is a long segment about Tracey Yukich, also of season eight, collapsing during her first trial, which was to run a mile along a beach. She was evacuated by helicopter. 'No one could have expected that anything like that was going to happen,' a producer says, in mitigation. Really? A disclaimer was aired on screen at the end of every show: 'Consult with your own doctor before embarking on any diet or exercise programme.' All contestants were required to sign a waiver. Yukich now says she thinks she died that day. JD Roth, an executive producer, says the show existed to help people. But this was spin – as the 'temptation challenge' laid bare. The contestants were taken to a room filled with the kind of food – or non-food – they would ordinarily binge on, and invited to eat it. If they ate enough of it, they might win a prize: getting to see their children, for instance. It was coercive bingeing for people who were already ill. When Roth tells us, 'I can't say that 100 per cent of the temptations we got right, but I can say that life is full of temptations,' I want to punch him. The contestants were vulnerable people, but were made to pass doughnuts from mouth to mouth – it's kissing with baked goods – or sing songs about obesity, or were screamed at for vomiting on the treadmill. A woman was weighed on TV. She was 476lb, or 34st. She wept, because she needed a support group, not primetime, which is the opposite. Suzanne Mendonca of season two, a police officer, said the show gave her an eating disorder, and made her a mockery among her colleagues. 'I stopped eating,' she said, of her time after the show, and regained the weight just the same. The nadir was in 2014, when season 15 winner Rachel Frederickson, a former competitive swimmer, walked out to her $250,000 prize money looking dangerously thin: she began at 260lb (18½st) and ended at 105lb (7½st). Even the trainers looked appalled at her appearance. The show went on, and the contestants got larger – how else do you entice the public to watch? It was a miracle that, as parodied in the drama series Unreal, backstage at a version of The Bachelor, no one died. Frederickson was the beginning of the end. In 2016, The New York Times reported that, 'A study of season eight's contestants has yielded surprising new discoveries about the physiology of obesity that help explain why so many people struggle unsuccessfully to keep off the weight they lose… As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants' metabolisms did not recover… It was as if their bodies were intensifying their effort to pull the contestants back to their original weight.' Now, only when it is too late, we have contrition. Harper looks awkward before the camera now; Huizenga looks ashamed. Jillian Michaels, the co-trainer who wasn't interviewed for Fit For TV, was rebuked for recommending her contestants take caffeine pills, which is the least of the show's evils. The concept itself was dangerous, but reality TV is ever in search of a villain. Its cynicism was boundless. The cynicism goes on. Netflix is still happily airing The Ultimatum: Queer Love (couples on the verge of marriage commit or split) and Love is Blind (get engaged to someone on TV before you actually meet them). The Biggest Loser ended in 2016. The producers of Fit For TV have done to the producers of The Biggest Loser what they did to the contestants, and this is satisfying, but nothing more.
CNBC
31-07-2025
- Health
- CNBC
Eli Lilly's Mounjaro shows heart health benefits in head-to-head trial with older diabetes drug Trulicity
Eli Lilly on Thursday said its blockbuster diabetes drug Mounjaro showed heart health benefits in a late-stage trial directly comparing it to the company's older diabetes treatment, Trulicity. Mounjaro met the study's main goal of showing that it wasn't any worse than Trulicity at treating people with Type 2 diabetes and established cardiovascular disease. Eli Lilly said it believes the new data bolsters the case for Mounjaro to be prescribers' first choice for patients with Type 2 diabetes, who are twice as likely to have heart disease or stroke as those without the disease. The results come as Trulicity – also a top-selling drug for Eli Lilly – faces a patent expiration in 2027, which could further boost Mounjaro's position in the diabetes market. Mounjaro met the main goal of the nearly five-year study, reducing the risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack or stroke by 8% when compared to Trulicity in adults with Type 2 diabetes and established cardiovascular disease. It was the longest and largest trial to date on tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Mounjaro, enrolling more than 13,000 people. The company said Mounjaro showed additional, "more comprehensive" benefits over Trulicity in the trial, including a 16% lower rate of death from any cause and greater kidney protection. While Mounjaro's data is promising overall, it did not meet some analysts' benchmarks for being considered "superior" to Trulicity. Some clinicians said the results, particularly the lowered risk of cardiovascular events, aren't surprising, as they assumed Mounjaro would be able to offer cardiovascular benefits. But the difference in the rate of death from any cause between Mounjaro and Trulicity is "really quite profound" and "definitely something clinically meaningful to us as clinicians," said Dr. David Broome, clinical assistant professor at the division of metabolism, endocrinology and diabetes at the University of Michigan's department of internal medicine. He said the data helped quantify the difference between Mounjaro and Trulicity, which will further help providers and patients determine the best treatment to move forward with in their shared decision-making. Broome said those prescribing decisions between patients and providers will ultimately depend on several factors, such as their insurance coverage, the side effects of a given drug and how well the patient tolerates them. Dr. Howard Weintraub, clinical director of the Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease at NYU Langone Heart, called Mounjaro a "winner" in the trial, with the only downside coming from it having slightly more side effects than Trulicity. But he said the results may not motivate more people to start Mounjaro, and that the drug's higher list price may deter insurers from covering it if it isn't substantially better than Trulicity. Weintraub said he expects there to be a lot of "digging" into the data when the full results are presented at a European medical meeting and published in a peer-reviewed journal in the fall. Eli Lilly saw the trial results as an indicator that clinicians should choose Mounjaro for the patient group. "It strengthens the overall story. In my mind, it raises the question of, 'Why wouldn't you choose Mounjaro?'" Ken Custer, president of Lilly Cardiometabolic Health, said in an interview. The results "take away any doubt of why this is the right medicine for a patient with Type 2 diabetes and Type 2 diabetes with cardiovascular risk," he said, adding that it "makes it even harder to say no to covering this medicine for patients." The results also come as Eli Lilly solidifies its lead over Novo Nordisk in the booming market for weight loss and diabetes drugs. Studies from both companies have shown the added health benefits of their drugs for conditions such as obstructive sleep apnea and chronic kidney disease. Eli Lilly plans to submit the heart health data to global regulators by the end of the year, and the company said that could lead to approvals — and by extension insurance coverage — of Mounjaro for this purpose in 2026. Any approvals would not apply to Eli Lilly's weight loss drug Zepbound, which shares the same active ingredient as Mounjaro but is specifically cleared for patients with obesity and not diabetes. The company is currently studying Zepbound's cardiovascular benefits in patients with obesity and established cardiovascular disease. The phase three trial is expected to wrap up in 2027, according to Eli Lilly's website. Even if regulators approve Mounjaro for treating heart disease in patients with Type 2 diabetes, it may not significantly expand use of the drug. That's because Mounjaro's current approval for Type 2 diabetes already covers many of those patients: Around 30% of people with Type 2 diabetes also have cardiovascular disease, according to the Heart Foundation. In a June research note ahead of the data, TD Cowen analyst Steve Scala said he believes uptake of tirzeptide "would be largely unaffected" if it shows similar heart health benefits as Trulicity. Tirzepatide is already "gaining significant adoption" in the market due to its "strong profile," Leerink Partners analyst David Risinger said in a separate note in June. He said experts agreed that regardless of whether tirzepatide's cardiovascular benefits were superior or matched those of Trulicity in the study, the results "would not significantly alter" the decisions of doctors. Mounjaro showed greater improvements than Trulicity did when it came to some cardiovascular measures and lowering body weight and A1C, which is a measure of blood sugar levels. The safety data of both Mounjaro and Trulicity were generally consistent with what has been observed in the past. The most commonly reported adverse events for both drugs were gastrointestinal-related and generally mild to moderate in severity.
