I write for fun, and I was going to do a little piece about Biggest Loser, but as I was writing it, the piece got longer and longer and now, as you can see below, it has become huge. But it made me think ? should we get angry about the Biggest Loser? I?m pretty cheesed off now, to be honest, after thinking about it a bit. Anyway ? have a read and tell me if you agree.
ITV?s UK version of the Biggest Loser franchise is a puzzling show. It commenced airing this January, presumably to coincide with many viewers? New Year resolutions to lose weight. Judging the programme?s objective solely from its scheduling, therefore, we could assume that its objective would be to stimulate would-be dieters, give them valuable tips and help viewers to sustain habitual change over the programme?s nine-week run at least.
I avidly tuned in to the first two shows. I have a love-hate relationship with Jillian Michaels, the psychotic celebrity trainer from the USA version whose DVD, The 30-Day Shred, kick-started a whole new dimension of self-torture. I hoped that watching the UK Biggest Loser would give me a similar boost in motivation and maybe some new types of training to try out. The show also boasts an in-house dietician for the contestants, so I even put a pen and paper close at hand whilst watching in order that no decisive fat-busting nutritional pointers could be forgotten.
The show started. The paired-up contestants were introduced and gave back-stories about how unhappy they were with their size. The ultimate winner (whoever loses the greatest percentage of their body weight) will receive a £25,000 prize, but one could tell that these contestants would have done this for nothing. The show?s spectacle is derived from the contestants losing absolutely staggering amounts of weight within the hot-house training/dieting set-up, so to maximise the drama they select XXL-sized contestants. The slimmest contestant was a girl a shade over 15 stone ? exactly where I was a year ago, as it happens ? but 18-22 stone was more the norm. One chap was 30 stone.
Seemingly immediately after the weigh-in they were led to a room filled with exercise bikes. The first challenge would be for each pair to cycle 26 miles between them. The last pair to finish would be up for eviction at the end of the week. On the contestants jumped and started furiously pedalling.
Er. Hang on. If they pedalled at 13mph (20.8km/h), then the challenge would take an hour! A solid hour of gut-busting exercise?! These are ginormous people who, although they were given a medical before commencing the programme, are all completely unfit. There was no visible warm-up session. There was no information about this particular type of exercise, or whether (as one would assume) cycling is a particularly good low-impact activity (when undertaken gently) for people just starting on a training programme. No ? the footage concentrated solely on the excitement of the race and various shots of overcome sweaty contestants collapsing off of the cycles into gasping heaps requiring oxygen masks.
It?s enough to make an overweight viewer who was tentatively considering a weight loss programme feel absolutely terrified. Is this what one needs to do to lose weight? And what if a viewer follows this example, leaps on to an exercise bike, with no warm-up, pedals as fast as possible and then subsequently strains something, leaving them unable to continue a fitness programme? It seemed a flabbergastingly irresponsible picture to hold up as a paradigm of weight loss training to a potentially uninformed viewing audience.
After the first week the contestants weighed in again. A few of them had lost unbelievable amounts ? over a stone. Everyone was leaping around and rejoicing. Nowhere was it highlighted that in a first week of a diet one is likely to lose a large amount of water weight. A pound of fat contains 3,500 calories, and to lose 14lbs (a stone) of actual fat in seven days, the body would have to have burned 49,000 calories stored as fat.
Assume that each contestant would have consumed 7 x 1,400 calories over the course of a week (+9,800). Take away the energy requirements to run the natural systems in such big bodies (allow 2,000 calories a day, so -14,000 over a week). This leaves the body in ?negative equity? of -4,200 calories used up from stored energy reserves within the body over the course of a week. Logically, the contestant would lose just over a pound of fat if they didn?t do anything other than eat 1,400 calories a day for a week.
But to create a negative equity of the -49,000 calories within a stone of fat, they would need to use up a further 44,800 calories of stored energy. This would mean that they would have had to have burned 44,800 calories on the exercise machines, or 6,400 calories A DAY to make up the remaining energy usage. It takes a fit 12 stone runner travelling at 10km/h very roughly 20 minutes to burn 300 calories. It would take that same runner over 7 hours continuous running to burn 6,400 calories. No way does the energy in/energy out equation add up here. Why were they deluding themselves that a stone weight loss in a week was actual fat loss?
What if people watching, who may only be a couple of stone over their healthy BMI, think to themselves that they, too, could lose that much that quickly? I would assume that the harsh reality would hugely disappoint and demotivate them. It takes me three months of hard graft to lose an actual stone of fat.
Fast forward to the second episode. Apart from slightly woolly references to the second week being ?tougher?, there was no explanation as to why the contestants? weight losses were now around the 5-7lb mark, when they had repeated exactly what they had done the week before. It?s still barely credible, for a week (17,500-24,500 stored calorie burn), and therefore likely to be still artificially inflated by water loss. You could see disappointment on the contestants? faces ? why hadn?t they lost stones again? ? so they, too, must be in the dark about how fat loss actually works.
So if the show paints a totally out-of-whack portrait of a safe training schedule, and creates dangerously artificial expectations of weight loss rates, then surely they would explain about healthy nutrition?
Well ? no. Biggest Loser has a weight-loss website product to which it costs money to subscribe. It is often shown in the course of the programme as a useful tool the contestants (and you!) can use to tot up their calorie intake from food and drink each day. The only guidance we, the viewers, hear about the diets of the contestants is that they aim to eat 1,400 calories a day. That?s it. What ? 700 Tic Tacs? 14 slices of bread? WHAT?! Easy ? if you want to learn more, you will have to pay money to access the franchise?s website.
If one takes Biggest Loser at face value and now judges the programme?s objective by its content, it would be a ludicrous stretch to assume that it is there for the enlightenment of its viewers. If a programme is not then created for informational purposes, then, we must assume that it is for entertainment purposes alone.
So fourteen morbidly obese contestants, who have their rolls of fat filmed with lingering distaste against heartbreaking anecdotal footage about how being fat is ruining their lives? is entertainment. If the viewer is not expected to learn from what they are watching, then the dynamic between the subject and the viewer is changed. The subject?s task is to entertain the viewer, and this places the viewer in a position of relative power ? they are on passive ?receive? and demand to be pleased. It keeps these contestants, their life stories and their struggle within the competition format at arm?s length from the audience. I don?t know about you, but I don?t particularly like watching suffering for fun.