Maintenance Phase - The Biggest Loser

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

This week we dissect the content and impact of one of America's most harmful TV experiments.   Support us: Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PayPal Get Maintenance Phase shirts, stickers and moreLinks! Aubrey’s article on The Biggest Loser That's not reality for me': Australian audiences respond to the Biggest Loser "Cheapening the struggle:" obese people's attitudes towards the Biggest Loser The Effects of Reality Television on Weight Bias: An Examination of The Biggest Loser'It's a miracle no one has died yet': The Biggest Loser returns, despite critics' warningsThe Retrograde Shame of The Biggest LoserAnalysis of all contestantsNeoliberalism And The Realities Of Reality TelevisionThe “Reality” of Health: Reality Television and the Public HealthLife after NBC's "The Biggest Loser": The Experiences and Perspectives of Former Reality TV Contestants Thanks to Ashley Smith for editing assistance and Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

Hi everybody, welcome to Maintenance Phase, where we are taking your 2000s TV obsessions and exploring them with an uncomfortable level of detail. Oooo! Is this one going to be about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Is that what you're saying? Look, we're going to talk to you about Angel today. I know. I'm one going to be about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Is that what you're saying? Look, we're going to talk to you about Angel today. I'm not going to like what you see. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I am Aubrey Gordon. I am an author and columnist for Self Magazine. You can also find us on Patreon.

We are at patreon.com slash maintenance phase. That is also linked through our website and in the show notes, the same goes for t-shirts, which you can get through T-Public. You are beautiful! I'm going to do that every time you mention the Patreon from now on. Please just do as many Christina Aguilera impressions as you want. And today we're talking about the biggest loser. I'm very excited about this one, Mike. I'm like equal parts excited and like a little bit of dread

because I've looked into enough of the biggest loser to know what an absolute horror show it is. But I also know that you are going to do deep dives that are going to reveal things to me that I maybe wish I didn't know. I was actually thinking this morning that we need to somehow come up with a content warning broad enough, like all hands on deck enough

for this fucking episode. Oh really? This has everything. This has eating disorders, terrible calorie shit, horrible fat phobia. There's a dead kid at one point. This episode is dark, dude. I like doing this show because on my other show,

it's like, you're wrong about, and we're like, busting people's preconceptions. And on this one, it's like, if you think the biggest loser is trash, like, it's trash. Like, we're not gonna blow any minds today. Like, it's maybe the most damaging television show ever. I just don't know, so listen,

I don't know enough about the history of TV to know this, but I do know that like, there are not many TV shows that have a hospitalization toll. Right. And I also will say, I come to the biggest loser not from having watched it regularly, but from having been someone who was a fat person

when it was on, and seeing the ways in which Jillian Michaels, who was the rising star trainer, who would just absolutely scream at people. And it wasn't just raising her voice, it was like, I don't want you getting off that treadmill until I say you get off or unless you're dead. Or like, you know what I mean? Like, just horrifying stuff like that.

She's like the meanest, yeah. I feel like what I saw at that time was a number of other people who were not fat, getting enlisted in that as work that they could do that would somehow benefit fat people. So like, that's my dog in this fight. One of the academic articles I read has a list of quotes from Jillian Michaels. Do you want me to read them to you?

Oh, I don't, but I do. What you get? These are so brutal. Okay, I don't care if people die on this floor. You better die looking good. I'm proud that I made him vomit. If you don't run, I will pull Alex on the floor and I will break every bone in his body. I don't care if one of your legs falls off or if one of your lungs explodes. The only way you're coming off the damn treadmill is if you die on it. It's fun watching people suffer. This is why we're doing the content warning. It's like this is like as bright and sunny

as it gets this episode. I was gonna say if the trigger warning didn't get you. I know. That little list of quotes like just podcasts switching off. We're basically saying is under no circumstances should you listen to the rest of this episode. Yeah, definitely don't listen to our podcast guys. No one is prepared for how terrible this is. So before we get into the actual content of Biggest Loser and the never-ending horror show that is the rest of this episode, we should first establish how big of a deal Biggest Loser was.

The Biggest Loser was four years, one of the most popular reality shows on television. So at its peak, it had, I believe it was 10 million viewers per episode. Jesus. It also spun off all this marketing and licensing. So there were like biggest loser fat camps. There were biggest loser TV dinners. There was of course all this other merch.

You could get like workout, nutrition, diet, cookbooks. So at its peak, the biggest loser franchise was making a hundred million dollars a year off of ancillary products. Yeah. People are desperate to lose weight. If you promise people that you can have the results of the people that you're seeing on TV

with only like whatever this steamed broccoli recipe, people will fall for it, and in the 2000s they did. The show was on for 17 seasons. Jesus Christ. That's like Simpsons numbers. And also as just sort of a glimpse of how mainstream this appeal was, Michelle Obama appeared on Biggest Loser Twice. What? Yeah, because she was doing all of her childhood obesity stuff. Twice, dude. I'll tell you what, every part of me loves and appreciates Michelle Obama,

except the fat part of me. I know, man. Where I'm like, oh no, I love you so much. Why you gotta? We're eventually gonna do an episode on her and it's just gonna be us going, ah, the whole time. Like, I like her.

I wanna like her. It's just this huge blind spot. Yeah. Just, um. Cool. So I have a complex structure for this episode. But before we get to that, can you walk me through like what does a typical episode look like? Like what happens in the biggest loser?

So the biggest loser is a season long reality show competition. It's not like chopped, right? Where there are different competitors every episode. They are all fat people. They do an initial challenge that gets them some kind of advantage in the final challenge. And then every week they compete to see who has lost the most weight.

Yes. And they get on a big scale. Quote on quote scale, I don't think it's actually really a scale, I think it on a big scale. Quote unquote scale. I don't think it's actually really a scale. I think it's a TV set. Oh yeah, it's fake. I mean, a various contestants have said that like they get weighed backstage beforehand.

And then they stand on like this pedestal, which is not a scale. And then the numbers appear on screen. Yes, totally. They are required is my understanding to take their shirts off for that way. The women are in spandex and sports bras. And the men take their shirts off for that way. The women are in spandex and sports bras and the men have their shirts off. So there's like quite a bit of like leering at fat bodies. Like there's part of it to me that feels very, very much like a freak show

that is dressing itself up as redemption. Yes. The appeal of the show is you get to see fat people pull themselves up out of their own wretchedness. Yeah, so at the end of the show you see they sort of step out of these scales wearing as little clothes as possible. You see their big numbers flash up on the scale and whoever loses the least amount of weight gets sent home. And their scores can be adjusted based on the advantages that they got in the earlier challenge. So like if you win a challenge you get an extra three pounds or something knocked off of your

number. So it's like mostly a weight loss thing, but also they do these little sort of challenges along the way that are like, well, it's not strictly weight loss. I don't know. I mean, I did find a content analysis where a bunch of researchers went through and watched two entire seasons, which is more than I could get through. And two thirds of the content was not sort of behavioral weight change, diet and exercise stuff. Most of it was reality TV bullshit. This person is trying to get immunity, but then this person is like the runner up

and like this person is gonna vote this other person off, like very standard reality show drama, right? And the weird selective editing, where they just take a bunch of B-roll of people sitting silently and then they put intense music behind it and they make it seem like a confrontation. That happens a lot.

Totally. Well, and also the thing that I remember the most from like the bulk of screen time on the biggest loser that I remember seeing is just watching fat people work out extremely strenuously in a way that looked dangerous to me. Just like dripping sweat, sometimes vomiting. Yeah, they like the vomiting.

All of this, you're just watching fat people go through like clearly excruciating physical pain. While thin people who appear to be physically fit are shouting at fat people who appear to be an extreme pain and not physically fit. Yeah, it's like hot people yelling at fat people. Hot mean people. Yeah, it's like home room.

Yeah. On that note, we are going to watch a clip together. Oh, Lord. This is a fucking nightmare. I couldn't watch a whole, I couldn't bring myself to watch a whole season, but I just sort of jumped around because I wanted to get a representative sample of this show and how it changed over the years.

So I would watch sort of, you know, Episode 6 from Season 2 and Episode 2 from Season 12. And so what I'm about to show you is the season premiere of Season 7. This is the show introducing us to the two trainers, Bob and Jillian. No, yay. Hey, you, you, you, you, you, you, you at home.

I am talking to you. America, we're the fattest country in the world. You realize that 300,000 people are dying for obesity every single year. The stakes are high. Don't you get it? What is it going to take for you to make that change?

Quit smoking. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Go for a walk. Drive past a drive-through. Make a change. Do something. You're worth it. What you're about to watch is our biggest season today.

Five years leading up to this moment. But none of it means anything. If you're gonna sit there and eat ice cream watching our show. Jesus Christ. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Like, do you seriously think that me as a 350-pound woman, taking the stairs instead of an elevator, is gonna make me thin? How long do you think that's gonna take? What? It's so, it's so, I love that they threw that in there.

Like, the most cliché advice, and also, the advice that doctors always use as the one not to tell people because it's so fucking fast-cil. Like a lot of people work on the first floor of their building or on like the 36th floor. Yeah. They put it out there like it's some sort of like forbidden truth and it's like do you realize we've all been told that at least 25 times in our lives? They also throw out my favorite garbage statistic. It's the same one that the Fenthenen Redux manufacturer's used. This is why I picked this clip, Aubrey.

You love that new thing. It's just like waving red in front of a bowl. To show me that 300,000 number. I was like, Aubrey's gonna fucking hate this. Oh, I'm gonna hate it so much, but also kind of love it. So that 300,000 deaths per year due to obesity is completely bogus. Completely bogus completely exaggerated. The source, the person who sort of like first elevated that number has been like, please

stop using it. That's not what this is. And people just love to keep using it, I think in part because it justifies the way that they treat fat people, right? That they're like, it's not that I don't care about you, it's that I care about you the most. So I'm going to be a true trash panda. Well, this to me encapsulates sort of why I picked this clip, because it's this perfect encapsulation in 60, 90 seconds of the show's completely contradictory tone toward fat people.

Because at one side, they're saying, you deserve better, you deserve this better life for yourself, right? Like it's being done out of care. But then on the other side, literally, like the next sentence, they're saying, don't sit there and eat ice cream and watch this. This is the last straw. You're going to die if you don't do this. So it's like, well, do you care about me or not? Yeah, this is also where the logic of anti-fatness and the logic of sort of like weight loss, right? Tips into the logic of like, spousal or family abuse. Right? Where they're like, I'm doing this for your own good. I wouldn't do this if you didn't make me. And it's really wild to me that culturally we have all gotten on board with like, yeah,

actually, for some groups of people, you have to publicly abuse and shame them for their own good, right? That we have all sort of collectively bought into this logic that we would absolutely not stand for in individual relationships. But suddenly when it's on a grand scale, we're like, yeah, no, that's good. Also, some of us just like ice cream, Bob. Listen, you know, some of us are eating halo top. Yeah. Yeah.

I also, this is so fucking petty, but my other beef with this clip, so we stopped before it got into the really bad stuff where they were like introducing us to all the contestants. This is season seven, where it's like the couples season and there's best friends and there's like a father and a granddaughter, and there's no fucking same sex couples.

Yeah. I'm like, you can't, there's some gay people in Bob. Yeah, you guys are gay, you let some gay people. Fat gay people exist, Bob. I'm right here, Bob. Come and get me. Okay, so the way that we're gonna do this is I have five reasons why the biggest loser is trash and I like we're going to walk through each of them in turn.

So reason number one that the biggest loser is trash is that it's wildly unrealistic. Some of this stuff is like really obvious the fact that it's a reality show, right? Like all reality shows are fundamentally unrealistic, but I think one of the most important aspects of its unrealistic trashness that doesn't actually show up in the academic literature all that much is the kinds of participants that they choose. So the contestants on it are not a representative sample

of fat people. They have deliberately chosen fat people who have like emotional eating issues, who have compulsive eating issues, who basically get no exercise and who are extremely unhappy with their weight. I don't know what percentage of fat people that is, but that is not all fat people.

There's a lot of fat people who are fit and do exercise. There are a lot of fat people that is, but that is not all fat people. There's a lot of fat people who are fit and do exercise. There are a lot of fat people that don't have issues with compulsive overeating. There are lots of fat people who are just like, I am this big and I am perfectly happy with it. But we never see any of those people. Right. And there are also fat people who have polycystic ovarian syndrome, lipidema, who can't actually lose weight in the ways that we like to think

that fat people can just pay attention for a little while and drop a hundred pounds, right? Like ultimately, like I think the thing that is easy for people to forget about the biggest loser which blows my mind, but it's true, is that fundamentally their task is to make a TV show. Yes. That has a bunch of drama to it.

Their task is not to encourage medically healthy weight loss at a sustainable rate. That's not a TV show. Oh yeah, so we need to go through this, but it is like the also super duper obvious point about the unrealisticness of the biggest loser, just the fact that they're literally trapped in a ranch house for six months

and exercising eight hours a day. Like if you're gonna watch a weight loss TV show, this is the worst model to try to replicate because you can't go off to a ranch for six months and have somebody shout at you for your entire working day. So I found a really interesting analysis online where they looked just like collected all the numbers on the first 17 seasons.

So it was 277 contestants. And this is bananas. The average contestant loses 16 pounds in the first week. What? Yeah. So we have to temper this with the fact that we also know from former contestants that quote unquote, week is a little bit of a misnomer like oftentimes the show will call it, you know, because it airs every week. So the show will say like week two, week three, even though the contestants are actually there for two or three weeks oftentimes, but they're still depicting to the public that this is a week, right? They're still essentially saying that it is possible for human bodies to do this in a week.

Jesus Christ. One guy lost 41 pounds the first week. No. So like this A is not good for you to be losing this much weight this fast. Secondly, it's not remotely realistic without like a severe eating disorder to be losing this much weight this fast. Secondly, it's not remotely realistic without a severe eating disorder to be losing this much weight in a week. That's like a toddler. Yeah, he lost a toddler.

So there's been various analyses of this over the years, and one of them finds that the contestants are burning 8 to 9,000 calories every day in exercise. Jesus. They're usually taking in somewhere between 500 and 1500 calories a day. Which I also just want to say, listen, if you've ever been on one of those treadmills or ellipticals, where they count how many calories you've burned, where you get on for like an hour, and they're like, you burned two Oreos. I know. I know. Where you're like, what? So the amount of an extraneousness of that exercise has to be through the root.

Yeah, and they're being yelled at by hot people the whole time, which makes it worse. Mean hot people. Which makes them unhot to me. It makes them hotter to me, unfortunately. Oh, no, my own. That's my own personal stuff. We're gonna have a therapy episode. My issues with mean hot people. So there's also like unrealistic trapped in a ranch eating exercise and there's all that unrealisticness. But I also think underneath the more obvious unrealisticness, the show depicts a really unrealistic view of what dieting can do for you. So we're going to watch another clip.

This is really rough. Sorry, not like the first one. This one's really bad. The first one was like I'll walk in the park. So they asked participants when they come in like the first day, they're at their heaviest, to talk to their skinny yourselves. And so at the end of the show, this is the second to last episode when they're, there's only I think five or six contestants left, and they watch their heavier selves talking to them now. And so we're gonna watch this.

Oh God. It's bad. You know, it's been a journey and you had a deal with a lot of pain to bring this process. There's no way I ever amuraising laughably like this. It's what I remind you.

This is not what you are anymore. This is who you were. You've already put in a lot of work. You've already gotten this far. You can keep going. There's no need to stop. Stopping is what you do at home. And you don't need to do that anymore.

Just remember the journey. Remember what you did. Remember the struggle that you. Just remember the journey, remember what you did, remember the struggle that you did, remember how you felt today, when you just felt not like yourself. Please don't forget all you've gone through because this is the true you. You're so much stronger now. You're not this weak person anymore.

You're my hero. You're gonna be so happy and that's what you deserve. You deserve to be happy. The mules hooked up, but just loaded away. So I would like to crawl out of my skin. I know. Ugh!

I know. This whole idea of the real you is thin is such a quietly horrific and toxic concept that like any fatter version of you than the way that you would like to see yourself as a thin person is like a betrayal of yourself or a failure to be your true self is like the most wild bullshit. Yeah, you know me.

It's a rare thing that I'm at a loss for words. Yes. I'm kind of at a loss for words about this one. All of these people do deserve happiness. Like, they all seem really nice. Yeah. But they've just been like duped onto the show that is selling them this fantasy

about this future life that they're gonna have. And they've had it drummed into them even before they came on the show. That sort of the 350 pound version of yourself is not yourself and that you only deserve happiness if you're smaller? Yeah, I mean, listen, I understand this. I am a 350 pound version of myself

and I know it's not the real me. I'm so sorry I've been deceiving you all this time, right? Oh my God. There was a tiny moment when I thought you were serious. I was like, oh God, this podcast is taking a turn. You were like, oh no, we hit bedrock. I was gonna start playing the background music. Oh God.

What I find so irresponsible about this is that this is the inner monologue that most people do have when they're dieting. I'm gonna be at the smaller weight. I'm gonna date somebody. I'm gonna get a better job. Like people extend the trend line and they envision this future for themselves.

And then once you inevitably start gaining the weight back, which happens in 95% of attempts to lose weight, then you feel like even more of a failure. Because you're losing this life that you envisioned for yourself, where you were a better father and a better partner and all this insta improvement in the kind of person that you are, and then you feel that slipping away.

And because everyone around you, usually people who have not tried to lose a hundred pounds or more are telling you how simple it is. Yes, so you also get the bonus feeling of, I'm not just a failure because I lost this sort of glimmering mirage of a life as a thin person, but I'm also a failure because this thing that everyone is telling me is really simple to do is something that I am not doing. Yeah, I just think it's really unethical to reinforce these

views that basically the entire population already has. There's no examples of someone on the show being like, hey, wait a minute, I'm actually fine. Yeah, totally. My life is fine. I'm not a broken ass person. And if those people are on the show, they're not showing those clips. Oh, definitely not. Oh yeah. So are you ready for reasons it's trash number two?

Always. I thought you were gonna say, are you ready for another clip? And I was gonna be like, honestly, maybe not. Yeah. Let's tell them those fun bikes. They're really dark. I will totally take another reason it's trash. Let's tell them those fun bikes. They're really dark. I will totally take another reason to trash.

Let's go. So reason number two is it's fake and unethical. So one of the things I really have been thankful for in the research for this is that because the show has been on for so long, we now have a couple contestants coming forward and being like, no, this was trash. Like behind the scenes, it's even more trash than it looks on TV. So, are you familiar with Kai Hibberd?

I am, Twitter pal, Kai Hibber. Yes. A real dream scenario of a fat person who lost a bunch of weight and then figured out how to still be in solidarity with people who are still fat. Right. A dream. So she was the runner up in season three.

And she says that at the end of the season she had lost so much weight that she wasn't getting her period and her hair was falling out in clumps. She had to like wear a beanie when she came home to see her boyfriend because she was so embarrassed about like bald patches on her head. Like this was profoundly bad for her being on the show. She says it's one of the biggest regrets of her life. Yeah, I mean, those are all things that happen when you're caring for your health.

Yes, exactly. Classic sign of health. One thing I also thought those are all things that happen when you're caring for your health. Yes, exactly. Classic sign of health. One thing I also thought was really interesting is as a journalist, like one of the main things that you learn in journalism school is journalistic ethics. It's not clear to me that there's any ethical code of conduct for reality TV. It's not quite journalism,

but it's like, it's not entertainment either because these are real people. But there's no like reality TV show contestants bill of rights. No, there's no reality TV show contestant's bill of rights. No, there's no, there doesn't appear to be any sort of ethical anything except for what gets the most viewers in the most desirable demographic and makes the most money for the lowest cost. I mean, that's the other thing about reality TV, right?

Is if you make reality TV, you don't have to pay writers or as many writers, you don't have to pay all of these sort of like unionized positions, you don't have to pay people to make television. The real biggest loser is the unionized workforce of America. So this is a quote from another dissident contestant. Suzanne Mandanca, a contestant in season two, said that contestants would go to extremes to lose weight. She said they would utilize amphetamines, water pills, diuretics, and throw up in the bathroom, and claimed that Bob Harper told

people to vomit to lose weight, I vomited every single day, she said. Good God. A lot of the contestants that have come forward, like the few dissident contestants that we know about, a lot of them said that they just had really crushing student debt, and they wanted the $250,000 reward for winning the show.

Right, this is like where the show gets revealed to quietly be like the Hunger Games or like the Running Man or something, some dystopian future where you're like, you just drown people in debt and then you make them lose weight on television to lose the movie. Right, like it's just so icky.

There's also another thing that Kai Hibbert said, there's no mental health counseling. Like the show sort of hints that there is, but it appears that the only actual mental health interventions that they have is that all of the contestants take personality tests, like long detailed personality tests, basically so the producers can know, are they going to blow up at each other? Like who's going to be a good reality TV show contestant essentially?

But after that, there's no mental health counseling on the show. And so in season 17, in episode two, which was one of the random episodes that I watched, this woman was talking about how she was homeless, and she was sleeping on a friend's couch, and her like five-year-old son wandered outside and fucking drowned. What?

Yes, and she's talking about like, I couldn't protect him, I'm a terrible mother, and Bob like tries to comfort her. He says something that's actually pretty good. He says terrible things happen to people who deserve happiness, which is like one of the only semi-human behaviors I've seen him display on that show.

But then, she's like, she's this woman is obviously extremely distraught. And then he grabs her hand and he's like, you're gonna make something of yourself now that you're here. Oh! And it's like, oh, she doesn't need to lose 20 pounds, dude. She needs fucking real trauma counseling

and maybe some social safety net stuff, so she's not homeless. Any normal person with normal professional ethics would have been like, let's shut this down and get this woman the help that she needs. Also, what's so interesting to me about the structure of the show too, is it's not just that all these people

are living in a house together and they're all gonna support each other in weight loss, et cetera, it's a contest, it's a reality show. So eventually this woman who used to be homeless and whose son died, she didn't lose enough weight, so she got kicked off. So it's like, even as a sort of like weight loss deal with our issues around food exercise, that's not the exercise, because it's a fucking contest.

This is not how alcohol rehab works. Like, whoever can abstain for the longest days gets to stay and everybody else gets kicked off. Like, even if you believe that losing weight is imperative, being in a fucking contest is not the way to do it. Jesus Christ. So the last thing that Kai Hibbert said

that sent me down a rabbit hole about the fake and unethicalness of the show is that she mentioned very sort of casually that in this ranch house where they're all supposed to be barely eating and they're trapped there and they have to lose all this weight, most of the food that's in the house is from products that are sponsoring the show.

It's like jello and like craft mac and cheese by far the funniest scenes on the show are when they try to give diet advice to the participants, which are actually few and far between this content analysis found that almost all of the weight loss that was prescribed was exercise, like they're just exercising constantly, and they don't talk about diet that much. But when they do talk about diet,

there will be scenes that sort of pretend to be, like, oh, I just pop in by the ranch house, like, seeing what's up with Janine or whatever. And then Bob will come and be like, oh, I just pop in by the ranch house, like seeing what's up with Janine or whatever. And then Bob will come and be like, Janine, did you know that this Quaker Oat cereal that only has 235 calories? And like she's very clearly acting and she's like, no Bob, I hadn't heard of it. It's like infomercial acting. So like, that sounds great, Bob.

This will help me with my needs. What are the different flavors? And he's like, maple syrup and brown sugar. Oh wow, Bob. And it's like, really? Pop chips are a sustainable alternative to greasy potato chips. And you're like, is anybody falling for this?

Like these aren't food tips. Like none of the foods that they're prescribing are particularly fucking healthy. They're all like packaged, microwaved, whatever little foods. So like, this is the double genius of the show. Is it not only are they making money from advertisers, but the show itself is an advertisement.

Right, this was also the era when there was all this talk in TV sort of production about, quote, unquote, vertical integration. Yes. It's such a weird peak behind the curtain of like, it's all a profit grab. Goodbye. Right. Like, according to a New York Times article, peak behind the curtain of like, it's all a profit grab. Goodbye. Right?

According to a New York Times article, the biggest loser had the most product placements of any TV show on the air in 2011. They had 533 placements. Well, it's also one of those things where it's like, listen, the diet industry is extremely profitable. Yes. Even now that it has sort of changed its name

to the wellness industry, there are just like a bajillion things where you're like, it's oatmeal. It's just oatmeal. We're familiar with its work. Yeah. Okay, so reason number three that the biggest loser is trash is it's abusive and horrible. Yeah, you knew it was coming. Yeah, we're not going to watch a clip, but I am going to send you a really horrifying picture. Okay, here we go. No, I know. Yeah, we're not going to watch a clip, but I am going to send you a really horrifying picture. Oh, okay. Here we go. No. I know. So what we're seeing, I can't remember this contestant's name. Rachel Fredrickson. Rachel Fredrickson. Uh-huh. So you're seeing a before and after photo of, I would say, a mid-fat lady, and she's wearing sort of like biggest loser like workout shoes and bike shorts and branded t-shirts. Sassy little hands on hips pose. They also make them look like shit in all the before photos.

That's like another thing. They always have them in like oversized t-shirts. I was gonna say it's almost as if they're trying to cultivate an image. Yeah, exactly. Right. Right. And then the, so that's the photo on the left

is the before photo, the one that like every fat person everywhere has come to know to dread. And then the photo on the right is the before photo, the one that like every fat person everywhere has come to know to dread. And then the photo on the right is her with her hair blown out and done and highlighted. She's wearing a full face of makeup. She's wearing like silvery, champagne, glittery, like mini dress, cocktail dress maybe. She looks like she is ready for like an event. And she is extremely thin. Yes.

She is thin enough that like when you see tabloid photos where they just go like scary, skinny, and then have photos of, you know, Celine Dion or Nicole Richie or whoever it is at the moment that they're sort of like zooming in salaciously on like nobby knees or bony elbows or what have you. Like that is the look that she is giving. She's a size 0 slash 2 here.

Jesus. So when she started the show, she was 260 pounds and she ends the show at 105. Yeah. And it's 60% of her body weight. A totally sustainable amount of weight to lose in a period of a few months. Sort of what made this such a big deal is that they do, you know, the six months of the ranch,

and then all of the contestants go home, like the final three, four contestants go home, and they come back a couple months later. And, you know, you see, have they gained weight in the interim period, have they lost more weight in the interim period, like, can they maintain the biggest loser lifestyle? Dutut unique and remarkable for losing a lot more weight during this interregnum period,

which is when everybody else usually ends up gaining weight or maintaining. What's fucked up about this is that she obviously, like she looks worryingly thin in this photo. But this also triggers a round of people talking about her body. Like she ends up on the cover of People magazine with the headline, Toothin, Too Fast.

Right, and it's People magazine who I would not necessarily trust implicitly with a sensitive conversation about eating disorders. Yeah, no kidding. You know? Yeah. Like, to me, it's like, what do you fucking expect? Like, she's in a fucking weight loss contest.

Yeah. Of course, she's losing a ton of weight. Like, of course, this is making her like an unhealthy competitor. you fucking expect. Like she's in a fucking weight loss contest. Of course she's losing a ton of weight. Like of course, this is making her like an unhealthy competitor. Like that's what you want her to do. It's like she's unhealthy and like we're worried about her because she's too thin, but all of the behaviors that got her there, we weren't worried about her.

Like she admits in the interview in People Magazine that she's working out four times a day. Uh, that's bad. Like regardless of whether she's 105 pounds or 140. This is also upheld in the way that eating disorders are diagnosed even. You and I can talk about this and know

that disordered behaviors are disordered behaviors, but in order to be diagnosed with anorexia, you currently need to have a BMI of under 17. This is one of those cases where, again, when she was a fat person doing it, we were like, get it, go, you got this, right? We're applauding while it's on television, and then when she sort of hits a thin weight,

we're like, uh-oh. Right, and also, as long as we're moving toward the goal of weight loss, which of course is imperative, whatever the means we use to get there are fine. Yep, this is an excerpt from an interview with Kai Hibberd. She says, they would say things to contestants like, you're going to die before your children grow up. You're going to die just like your mother.

We've picked out your fat person coffin. One production assistant told a contestant to take up smoking because it would cut her appetite in half. Jesus Christ. There's this very pervasive message about the show that fat people cannot trust their bodies. When a fat person says like, my knees hurt, it's like, shut up.

Keep running. When fat people say like, this is too much or I'm not comfortable with this, we shouldn't believe them because that's the weakness that got them to this place in the first place. Right. Fat people are not allowed to have boundaries. Exactly. Injuries and things like joint pain or being short of breath, the 63-year-old guy passes out within five minutes of getting on a treadmill in the first episode.

There's like, well, yeah, it's weakness leaving the body, get back up there. Right, and even like a good faith, like if you assume good intentions from the show? No, yes, hard to do. There's in the most recent season, like the wellness reboot season, there's a woman who fucks up her knee doing box jumps.

And she's then like two minutes later seen on a rowing machine with an ice pack on her knee. Yeah. Uh, this is not good. Also, a rowing machine is not using your knee. Oh yeah, good point. I had the thought about that. So it's no surprise that all of this abuse

has produced a lot of injuries over the years. In 2009, two contestants on the same season were hospitalized from basically forcing them to run and one of them passed out. There was one contestant who got stress fractures in her feet from being forced to do these jumps. Right, we're just concerned about your health, which is why we're pushing you to the point

of kidney failure, hospitalization, and wasn't somebody like, flown in a helicopter to us, like life-flated, basically? They call that heat exhaustion, but according to Kai Hibberd, that was basically from being forced to run. Good lord. So reason four, by biggest loser is trash.

People gain all the way back. Yeah, there was like a big, big, big New York Times story about this. Yes. My recollection is that what they found is that it permanently damages their metabolism. Yes. It makes it almost impossible to lose weight in the future. So, at the average weight that contestants were at six years after the show, they should be burning around 2600 calories a day, just

like existing, but they're only burning 2000, which means if they eat more than 2000 calories a day, they will gain weight. And this is six years after. Yeah. So it's amazing is they actually did the same study 30 weeks after, so almost a year after they left the biggest loser and then they did it again six years afterwards. And their metabolism's actually got slower over that time, even as they gained a lot of the weight back.

This is sort of like, we sent these adults to Fat Camp. We filmed it so you can watch, and then we returned them to the lives that they were leading. And now we're dismayed that they haven't been able to keep it up, and we've decided to sort of attribute that to their character or their emotional eating or some kind of invisible pathology, right, that there's some kind of character weakness that must be leading them to weight gain, not that, hey, science actually doesn't know fully what makes some people fat and some people thin. And it is so much more comforting

to approach that from a sort of lens of pathologizing fat people and standing and comfortable judgment of them. Right. Then it is to go, actually this is really complex and some stuff we know and some stuff we don't. Yeah. And sometimes people are fat and that might be okay, because again, then you don't have a show. Whoops. I mean, one thing it did stick out to me was the fact that on average, the participants, six years later, were still in the obese category.

So the average weight of participants when they got onto the show was 305 pounds. And by the end of the six years, all of the, you know, diet lifestyle, whatever, gaining, losing weight, stuff, the average is five foot eight and 192 pounds. Yeah. What's really interesting to me about that is that anyone putting up those

numbers would go to the doctor and get weighed and the doctor would start that conversation with, you need to lose weight, right? Because according to the numbers, they do need to lose weight. But the thing that fat people have been saying forever is just fucking ask people before you have the conversation of like, did you know you need to lose weight? Ask people like, uh, were you need to lose weight? Ask people like, were you recently on a game show

where you lost 50% of your body weight and then gained 25% of it back? That's really helpful context for like the kind of advice that your doctor should be giving you. Right. And ask fat people what they've been eating. And when they tell you, believe them.

Yes. Part of the reason that many doctors don't ask fat people of questions about why we're fat or what we've done to sort of interact with our own fatness or try and get thin or whatever is that they fundamentally just don't believe our answers. Yes.

So it feels like sort of a useless exercise, right? Right. Okay, last reason. Are you ready? Ready. Ready is a lever B. You knew it was coming. The fifth reason

why the biggest loser is trash is the effect that it has on the rest of society, not just the people that are on the show, but everybody watching it. Gross. The biggest loser has been controversial for quite a while, and there's quite a few articles where people defend the show, like Gillian Michaels and interviews, various TV executives, producers, and the defense is always what we've heard a million times on the show, that it's raising awareness of the obesity epidemic and it's inspiring people to lose weight.

Who is unaware of the obesity epidemic? Can you show me the people who are like, oh, I didn't know, people think it's healthier to be thin than to be fat? So this is from a New York Times article, JD Roth, an executive producer of the series who created its current format, says that while the show was extreme, it needs to be extreme in my opinion.

For some of these people, this is their last chance, he said. And in a country right now that's wrestling with healthcare issues and the billions of dollars that are spent on obesity issues per year, in a way, what a public service to have a show that inspires people to be healthier. Getting 100% to keep the weight off has never been the goal. The goal is, can we inspire people in America to make a change in their life? And in that, we're batting a thousand. Are you?

There are more fat people now than there ever have been before. Are you making a positive change? Are you doing what you think you're doing? This is what I wrote in my notes. I wrote, are you though? This is not something that I've seen documented. I mean, you know, there's been various academic dissections of the effect of the biggest loser

and all these other weight loss reality shows. There's a Kaiser Family Foundation sort of analysis, like literature review of all the different studies have been done. And they all do the same thing that we saw in the President's Physical Fitness Test, where they weigh the pros and cons of this show and of this kind of TV,

and all of the pros are potential things and all of the cons are actual things. Look at all the stuff we could do, but haven't done for the 50 years that we've been doing this garbage test that everybody hates. Like, no. This is an excerpt from the Kaiser Family Foundation report. Reality TV has the potential to provide inspiration for lifestyle changes such as weight loss or smoking cessation.

Reality TV also gives a voice to normal everyday people rather than stars, provides exposure to a broad range of human experiences not available in other programs, and may also provide viewers with a sense of personal validation, an awareness that there are people out there like me with the same kinds of problems that I have. No, it doesn't. Fuck off. What are the other health issues for which we weigh potential benefits against actual harms? The potential for the biggest loser to inspire people to lose weight. It's like, okay, well, there's studies on this. Does this inspire people to lose? No. Yeah. Yeah. So why would that even be relevant? This potential when we know

it does not inspire people to lose weight? There have been some studies on looking at the effects of the sort of quote unquote obesity epidemic messaging on how folks think about fat people in particular. Right. And what they found is that all of that messaging increases bias toward fat people. Surprise, surprise. If you call fat people a disease that is somehow threatening your health, it's not going to go great for your perception of those people.

I'm curious about if anyone has done any looking into the effects of watching shows like the biggest loser. Did you find anything related to that? There's actually two studies where they measure people's attitudes regarding fatness and fat people. And then they show them an episode of the biggest loser, and then they test them again. One of them finds that it doesn't give everybody fat phobic attitudes, but if you have existing fat phobic attitudes, it will make them worse.

Yeah, that makes sense. It also seems like the thinner you are, the more likely you are to hold those views, so it seems to have the sort of radicalizing effect on thin people that watch the biggest loser. There's another one that finds it doesn't necessarily affect fat phobia, but it does affect how controllable you think weight is. So at the root of anti-fat bias is this idea that people can control their body weight like Christian Bale gains and loses pounds for movie roles all the time. So why can't fat people do that? And so when you watch an episode of the biggest loser, it reinforces the message that like,

oh, weight is easily manipulable. And all they have to do is like eat better and exercise more and then they'll be small. And so I don't really have to engage with whatever shitty beliefs I have about that. Well, also all of those actors gaining and losing significant amounts of weight, sort of stories when you read the interviews with the Christian Bales and whoever else's of the world, what they're talking about is like, for dinner, I melted a pint of Ben and

Jerry's and drank it. Right. And then surprise, surprise when they stopped doing that. It was weight, right? Like, that's not a one-to to one for my experience as a fat person who has been fat since grade school middle school. Like come on guys. I also think that even on its own terms, they guess those are just not motivate people to exercise and change their diets because first of all there's really no information on the show

about healthy diets. Like it's not actually teaching people how to cook or like anything that people would actually need to know. Like here's how to saute some carrots for dinner. And then when it comes to exercise, there's some actually really good studies of the way that it depicts exercise on the show. Because a really important aspect of this is that exercise is always cast as torture.

Exercise is your punishment for being fat. Like that is the overwhelming message that you get about exercise from the show. And most of the exercise that people are doing on the show is fucking miserable. It's like box jumps and like lifting weights above your arms 50 times. And like I say this is somebody who goes to the gym

pretty frequently, not everyone likes going to the gym. And there's never anything on the biggest loser for like, hey, maybe you really like biking, like maybe for you, go for a long bike ride and listen to a podcast, or maybe for you, it's team sports, maybe play field hockey with some friends on Wednesdays every week.

Like there's no exploration of how a lot of people really like forms of exercise, but they don't know which forms of exercise they like. The only way you ever see exercise on the show is at a gym where you have to fucking pay for it, and with someone yelling in your face as you're throwing this fake rubber ball on a wall back and forth. Yeah, the biggest loser is essentially just recreating fat kids' experience of PE. The president's physical fitness test. And the president's physical fitness test.

Right, like all of it, right, which is just like, you are being publicly humiliated, exercises your penance for daring to have this body. Yes. And you have to punish yourself in public so that people know how apologetic you are. Yeah, I will say for my own self, the thing that helped me figure out what kinds of movement I liked was being able to do those away from other people. Because it turns out the thing that made it fucking miserable for me were always the sort of social response to a body like mine in motion.

Yeah, ugh. In all of the other research about this, because there's also research like this qualitative research on sort of watching the biggest loser with fat people and doing like a content analysis on just like their reactions, is watching the biggest loser has the same effect on fat people as fat shaming in that it increases their motivation to lose weight, but it doesn't increase their ability. So watching the biggest loser and having like Jillian Michaels look at the camera and shout at them all the shit we saw in the clip, that makes people think like, oh my god, I have to lose weight.

I'm gonna die if I don't lose weight. It's so imperative for me to lose weight. But it doesn't give them enough money to buy fresh fruit at the grocery store. It doesn't give them a gym membership. It doesn't actually give them any counseling for whatever other issues they had. Like it doesn't actually do anything totally and there are different sort of shades of motivation. Yeah, when I have watched the biggest loser, the motivation is I don't want that lady to yell at me ever. Yeah, right. The motivation isn't to lose weight for that lady to yell at me ever. Yeah. Right, the motivation isn't to lose weight for my own good or my own health. It is to avoid abuse, which is not a great sustainable kind of motivation. No, you just have to hire Jillian Michaels to be in your house at all times.

I don't want that. She's on her way. Aubrey, she'll be there in 15 minutes. Is that an offer to send her to your house? So last little section, we're going gonna do like a little epilogue because I thought this was kind of funny. Biggest loser just sort of ended up pedering out. Every, basically every season just had fewer and fewer viewers.

It was like 10 million, then 8 million, then 6 million. And by the end, it only had about 5 million viewers per episode, which was half of what it was when it started. And so reality shows don't really have like series finales in the way that, you know, like supernatural or buffy do. But then it basically died in 2017, and then they brought it back on a different network. It's now on USA as like a wellness show, like the new super touchy-feely version of it. So we're going to watch a clip watch a clip, you know the clip.

So Jillian Michaels is also, she has become this massive brand in her own right, based on the popularity of the show. Mean white Oprah. Yeah, exactly. And so this is an interview that she gave last year. Wait, is this the Lizzo interview? It's the Lizzo interview.

Oh, God. I know. We're not gonna watch the wholezo interview? It's the Lizzo interview. Oh, God. I know. We're not going to watch the whole thing, but it's like, uh. Yeah, totally. It's so bad. Okay, here we go. Well, you've said before that you think political correctness has gone too far in the health and fitness world.

What did you think about that? Yeah, political correctness has just like come so I can't even, I think it's insane. And it's like the pendulum just as far as it swings in one direction, it swings back in the other, right? And you've got these crazy extremes, whereas she's too fat to be a pop star. Well, you say things like that. You know, then there's going to be, you should never be able to say things like that, right? But for years, people were, they could fat shame and they could exclude people and they

could make people feel less than. We should always be inclusive, but you cannot glorify obesity. It's dangerous. It kills people. It's the number one cause of bankruptcy in our country. So there's a middle ground here. Now it's like, that woman is 250 pounds

good for her. And it's like 250 pounds, 999 times out of 1,000, is going to mean heart disease cancer, diabetes, autoimmune issues, and early death, like, mmm, mmm, mmm, I have to say, I've personally found, and I love celebrities like Lizzo, or Ashley Graham, who are really preaching self-acceptance.

I love her music, yes. Well, percent, I don't know anything about her. I'm sure she's a cool, awesome chick. Yeah, and I love that they're putting images out there that we normally don't get to see of bodies that we don't get to see being celebrated. And why are we celebrating her body? Why does it matter?

That's what I'm saying. Like why aren't we celebrating her music? Because it isn't gonna be awesome if she gets diabetes. Wow. She is Satan, dude. I really like that, Jillian Michaels, the patron saint of horrific fat shaming is like,

right? We definitely shouldn't fat shame and it's a real shame that people used to do that, but now they've stopped and it's gone too far. I know. Ask any fat person if they feel like there's too much acceptance of fat people right now. Where did the fat shaming come from, Jillian? Was there a particular TV show that you could point to?

Like a particular person on a particular TV show? Can you be specific? I also will have to say just on the extremely petty level, I love how much of this interview she spends sort of sputtering and searching for words. This is what you get whenever somebody says, I think political correctness is what you get whenever somebody says, I think political correctness is out of control and you say, what do you mean? You never get a clear answer. Tell me more, Adam Karola.

Just speak up, man. It's also, it's kind of funny because you can tell the host fucking hates her. And the host is like, the host does very well at like, trapping her. It's nice to see somebody else who just has like, deep contempt for her and is like, what can I make her say on TV? This gonna make her look like shit. Look, if you can get Jillian Michaels to shit on Lizzo,

the person that like, everyone loves right now. I know. Like, can you also get her to talk shit about like, Beyonce? Does she have thoughts on Mr. Rogers? Does she like to share? What else can we get her to talk shit about like Beyonce? Does she have thoughts on Mr. Rogers? Did she like to share? What else can we get her to talk about? Also, there is this sort of attitude

that she in particular has really fed into, which is just like fat people will necessarily become diabetic, hypertensive, whatever else. That's a fully made up number, bam. I mean, I think that Jillian Michael's thing is the perfect encapsulation of this sort of wellness reboot of the biggest loser, because I mean, she's not on the new show,

but I think the entire project feels to me like a version of I'm not fat shaming, but. Yeah, and then you just say something fat shaming. The new season of the biggest loser is still a weight loss competition. You get kicked off if you do not lose enough pounds. The new season of the biggest loser is still a weight loss competition. You get kicked off if you do not lose enough pounds. There is no way to reboot that to make it not about weight loss.

It's literally a weight loss contest. But Mike, they have a group conversation with Bob Harper, who pretends to be a therapist. Here's what I kind of feel like about the biggest loser. It feels kind of like America's id. What do you mean? It is what all of us wish we didn't believe about fat people and what we wish we didn't find

entertaining as we're sort of shifting out of diets for everyone to quote unquote wellness for everyone, which is like the same thing. Yes, that there is this sort of a little bit of like rapprochement about like, rough-roach-mong, about like, uh, hey, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't have all been this into this thing, but also I don't wanna talk about how into it I was.

Right. And the reason that it held appeal is that fundamentally I think a lot of us do believe fat people should be yelled at until we get thin. It's also interesting the way that the fact that it's a reality TV show with the giant air quotes that that comes with, gives people a shield for what's actually being

to pick that on the show. Because if it was a fictional TV show about a bunch of fat people who couldn't stop eating and their weight defines their life and they're so depressed and if they only lost weight, they'd be happy. You'd be like, fuck you man. Like nobody's that simplistic, right? But the fact that it's a reality TV show,

and these are real contestants and quote unquote real dramas every week, it gives you this cover for watching a show that is basically depicting fat people as all of the negative stereotypes that skinny people have about fat people. Right, they are gluttonous, they are lazy, they are clumsy, they can't do the exercise,

they won't do what they're told, but it's packaging them up as, we'll look at reality. So it's okay to be depicting this. And all of this is designed to make thin people feel calmer and better about their lives. Yeah. None of this is designed to be viewed by fat people. We are immaterial.

Yes. And me and my boyfriend, when we were watching it, we were trying to count the scenes where people weren't crying. Only emotions that anybody on this show has are crying and like panting, right? It's like they're doing exercise or they're revealing something extremely personal and deep and dark about themselves.

Everything is just like misery and crossfit. So that is our biggest loser episode. I feel both gross and like a metaphorical weight has been lifted, not lost, but lifted, which is just like, I don't know. It makes me feel better to go back through this stuff and talk about why it's constructed, the way that it's constructed,

because it's sort of like the man behind the curtain. It's like seeing the great and powerful Oz where you're like, it's just a mean lady who wants to yell at Lizzo on TV. That's all it is. The idea that we're ascribing some kind of altruism to a like network TV reality show that is just taping people yelling at other people until they throw up. This is not an ideological venture, guys. I mean, when you put it like that, Aubrey. I think that sounds bad. Thank you.