5 days ago
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.
