Even though I love reality TV, I watched only a few episodes of “The Biggest Loser” during its 18 seasons, from 2004 to 2020. What I saw made me uncomfortable, because the show appeared to be a sad spectacle, and its producers seemed to be more interested in humiliating heavy people than in helping them. For the uninitiated, the premise of the show is that its participants, whose average weight was 329 pounds when they began the contest, competed to see who could lose the most weight in about seven months. Some of the winners lost over 200 pounds in that narrow time frame.
A new documentary on Netflix, “Fit for TV: The Reality of the Biggest Loser,” is a behind-the-scenes look at the popular show, and it confirmed my glancing assessment in some ways. The format seemed designed for maximal drama rather than peak health. The trainers had a drill sergeant style that involved a lot of screaming (“Nobody bullies my team except for me,” one trainer, Jillian Michaels, once said in the heat of competition). The diet and exercise regimens were draconian: Sometimes contestants were advised to eat under 1,000 calories a day in spite of exercising for hours.
A set of “temptation challenges” depicted in the documentary seemed particularly cruel. Contestants were faced with a junk food bonanza and an ugly choice: If you ate the most calories, you were awarded the chance to see your family, but you would obviously be set back on your journey to weight loss and the cash prize at the end.
While some of the participants felt the show changed their lives for the better, others felt that their decision to appear on it was much more complicated. Isabeau Miller, a former contestant who doesn’t appear in the documentary, said on TikTok that she felt the producers, trainers and doctors were in it to make money and become celebrities: “Nobody was like, ‘You know what I’m passionate about? Helping people who are obese to lose weight and feel better about themselves.’”
Though it started over 20 years ago, “The Biggest Loser” presaged the current manic state of wellness content, where nuance is dead and body functionality is secondary to appearance. The show depicted winning contestants in their moment of buff triumph and then shut the cameras off, much like many popular fitness influencers who show their ideal bodies while obscuring the disordered eating that got them there.
Kevin Hall, who was until recently a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health, followed 14 participants from “The Biggest Loser” for six years after they appeared on the show. In 2016, Hall and his co-authors found that 13 regained at least some of the weight they lost, four were heavier than when they started the show, and most of them had slower metabolisms than before their “Biggest Loser” experience.