Weight Watchers pivoted to wellness, supposedly rebranding itself away from the hard focus of numbers on a scale and toward more general encouragement of health and well-being. And, in the four years it was off the air, a lot changed. Read: Can television destroy diet culture?Įven after so much scrutiny, The Biggest Loser wasn’t officially canceled by NBC in 2016. (Producers, doctors, and trainers on the series denied all allegations.) Most damning of all was a wide-ranging National Institutes of Health study published the same year, which revealed not only that the majority of former contestants had regained the weight they’d lost, but that their extreme dieting had also permanently damaged their metabolism. In 2016, Biggest Loser alums told The New York Post that they were given diet pills on the show, sparking an internal NBC investigation. In 2014, after the Season 15 winner, Rachel Frederickson, weighed in at an emaciated 105 pounds, a visibly shocked Michaels quit for the third time, with People reporting that she was “deeply concerned” that attention wasn’t being paid to the contestants’ health. In 2007, the Season 3 contestant Kai Hibbard spoke out about the tactics she’d used to shed weight before the finale, which included eating only sugar-free Jell-O and asparagus (a diuretic) for days at a time, and sitting in a sauna for prolonged periods to sweat out more water. ![]() ![]() Though participants were reportedly forbidden from talking to reporters without the show’s permission (and were warned about potential fines of up to $1 million if they broke the rules), news began to eke out about what happened behind the scenes. The longer The Biggest Loser went on, though, the harder it was to maintain this position. It was about contestants fixing what was broken deep down inside-the emotional trauma and personal failings, in other words, that had led them to find comfort in food. The point of the show wasn’t winning a game, the trainers would emphasize. The series, like so many elements of America’s $72-billion-a-year weight-loss industry, positioned itself as a force for change, an empowering cultural product in a country where obesity rates are rising. One minute, they’d hurl F-bombs at stunned contestants in the gym and visibly relish their discomfort (“It’s fun watching other people suffer like that,” Michaels once said on air) the next, they’d coax vulnerable competitors into confessing their darkest secrets. Its most infamous trainers, Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels, would cycle between modes of sadism and empathy at whiplash-inducing speed. By the finale, Benson told The New York Times in 2009, he’d fasted and dehydrated his body to the point where he was urinating blood, a probable sign of kidney damage.įor 16 more seasons of television, The Biggest Loser spawned a colossally profitable weight-loss brand-with cookbooks and fitness DVDs, food-storage options and protein drinks-by insisting that it was helping people. ![]() Over the course of the show, he’d managed to lose 122 pounds, or 37 percent of his body weight. ![]() At the end of the show’s first season, Ryan Benson was crowned the “Biggest Loser” and awarded the $250,000 cash prize. Or maybe the cruelty was just part of the spectacle. Amid all this nebulous cultural toxicity of moguls and heiresses, a series in which contestants were isolated from their families, weighed shirtless on national television, forced to exercise for as many as eight hours each day, and taunted with challenges involving cinnamon buns and cupcakes might not have seemed so obviously offensive. Bush was about to be elected to a second term, The Apprentice was a brand-new hit, and Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie were fronting one of TV’s most popular reality shows. W hen The Biggest Loser debuted on NBC in 2004, George W.
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