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Jan 30

The Retrograde Shame of The Biggest Loser – The Atlantic

Diets that Work Comments Off on The Retrograde Shame of The Biggest Loser – The Atlantic

The longer The Biggest Loser went on, though, the harder it was to maintain this position. Though participants were reportedly forbidden from talking to reporters without the shows 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. In 2007, the Season 3 contestant Kai Hibbard spoke out about the tactics shed 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. 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 wasnt being paid to the contestants health. In 2016, Biggest Loser alums told The New York Post that they were given diet pills on the show, sparking an internal NBC investigation. (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 theyd lost, but that their extreme dieting had also permanently damaged their metabolism.

Read: Can television destroy diet culture?

Even after so much scrutiny, The Biggest Loser wasnt officially canceled by NBC in 2016. It just never came back. And, in the four years it was off the air, a lot changed. 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. Consumers became more skeptical of diet culture, and more cognizant of the societal factors that lead to obesity. TV also adjusted to the times. Dietland and Shrill premiered, deftly dissecting fatphobia and the self-hatred that products like The Biggest Loser subliminally encourage. As if to illustrate how anachronistic the NBC show seems now, Michaelswhose unfiltered, unflinching style was historically a big part of her appealwas broadly denounced for fat-shaming this month after making comments about Lizzos weight on a BuzzFeed show.

And yet, despite everything, The Biggest Loser has shuffled, zombielike, back to prime time, with a new season debuting this week. USA Network, the sister network to NBC where the show has found a new home, announced last year that in its new incarnation the series was going to offer a holistic, 360-degree look at wellness. In a panel at the Television Critics Association conference in January, Harper (now serving as the shows host) and two new trainers insisted that this time around, things would be differentthat the focus would be on health rather than weight. Which is both a funny comment about a series whose final 20 minutes still revolve around mass weigh-ins optimized for peak drama in a TV studio, and, it turns out, completely untrue.

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The Retrograde Shame of The Biggest Loser - The Atlantic

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