The new winner of The Biggest Loser is deemed “too thin”
If you’re familiar with the show The Biggest Loser, then you are also familiar with the goal of the game: the person who loses the largest percentage of body weight wins. Recently, an unlikely question has arisen from circumstances of the show’s results: what happens when the winner loses too much weight?
Rachel Frederickson, the newly crowned victor of Season 15 of The Biggest Loser, won the grand prize of $250,000 by losing 60 per cent of her body weight. Rachel began the competition at 260 pounds and lost 155 pounds in total, shrinking down to 105 pounds. Controversy was immediately sparked as viewers and the media deemed Rachel “too thin,” stating that the show went too far by allowing Rachel, a former competitive swimmer, to lose 155 pounds.
It seems as though there is no winning with the media when it comes to a woman’s weight, as she is almost always either too fat or too thin, the line in between being almost impossible to reach.
The Biggest Loser is a show which does not promote losing weight in a healthy and reasonable manner. It is a show which instead shames those who are overweight, promotes diet products and damages the mental and physical health of the contestants. The Season 3 Biggest Loser finalist, Kai Hibbard, developed an eating disorder after being a contestant on the show, and told her story of what really happens behind the scenes of the Biggest Loser. “Unfortunately, what they’re telling you the contestants are doing and what they actually have the contestants doing are two different things, at least as far as my season goes. We were working out anywhere between 2 and 5 hours a day, and we were working out severely injured. There’s absolutely no reason to work a 270 pound girl out so hard that she pukes the first time you bring [her into] a gym. That was entirely for good TV,” said Kai about her experience.
The Biggest Loser seeks to promote a fantasy in which their show changes people’s lives for the better; however, that is not the case. This show encourages its audience to critique and judge the bodies of others, pointing out their flaws and then going as far as to criticize a contestant for being too thin. Kai exposed the ulterior motives that the producers had: “There was a registered dietician that was supposed to be helping [the contestants at the ranch] as well… But every time she tried to give us advice . . . the crew or production would step in and tell us that we were not to listen to anybody except our trainers. And my trainer’s a nice person, but I have no idea what she had for a nutritional background at all.” The producers and trainers overrode the advice of doctors in order to gain higher ratings and get the most shocking weight losses possible.
Now that such a shocking weight loss story has been achieved, the winning contestant is being criticized, rather than the producers and trainers who made this result a possibility.
In order to change this unhealthy promotion of extreme dieting and weight loss, it’s important for viewers to be aware that such quick dieting is not a solution to changing an unhealthy lifestyle. Praising contestants for losing weight and condemning them if they lose too much not only sends mixed signals to the public about body image, but also places intense pressure on people to make sure their bodies fit a specific, unreachable mould. Instead, as viewers, we can encourage the acceptance of diverse body images by accepting them rather than demeaning them, and promoting healthy lifestyles rather than extreme dieting that produces such extreme results.