You Give Me a Bad Name

Dear Bob and Jillian, I understand you are changing people's lives and inspiring them to reach goals they never thought possible, but let's be realistic. The average overweight person watching "The Biggest Loser" is not really able to accomplish the ridiculous amounts of weight loss the contestants on this show attain.

Any trainer knows that healthy and safe weight loss is 1 - 3 lbs per week. The contestants on this show are dropping much, much more than that on a weekly basis. How can you be sure this is done safely and how can you be sure that once this show is over that weight isn't going to come flying right back? Where are past contestants, do you still care about them? Have they kept the weight off?

I must now admit that I do watch the show and enjoy seeing the success stories and how losing the weight changes people's lives. It is inspiring, motivational, and heart-warming, but it's really giving us "real world" trainers a hard time when we have clients that struggle daily with weight loss. I can't tell you how many times I've heard, "How come Jane Doe lost ten lbs in one week on The Biggest Loser and I can't lose one or two pounds?"

Well, Jane Doe has 24/7 nutritional monitoring limiting their caloric intake and four to six hours per day in a state of the art fitness facility. One more thing Jane Doe has is "Hollywood" trainers! I am not saying that you (Bob and Jillian) don't have more health and fitness knowledge in your pinky than I have in my entire body, because you very well may, but I feel you are there to get FAST, spell-binding results for us the TV viewer to keep coming back to watch. "Hollywood" trainers are there when Jessica Simpson needs to get ripped in six weeks for her role as Daisy Duke or when Hugh Jackman needs to be ready for his role as a kick-ass sci-fi character in some awful comic book film. You push normal everyday people far beyond their limitations thus exposing them to injury, stress, and unnecessary hyper-over-exertion!

Bottom line is this, people struggling with weight loss need to keep their expectations real and not get discouraged when they cannot accomplish the same thing as their Biggest Loser counterparts. There is a healthy, sane way to lose weight and keep it off and that is not what is being portrayed on this show.