Unique Original Articles » Why the Biggest Loser is a Bad Weight Loss Program

Everyone knows what The Biggest Loser is all about. A group of extremely obese men and women are catapaulted into extreme food deprivation, and physical workouts so harsh that, in the words of Ed Martin on MediaVillage.com “Half of these people looked like they were going to have heart attacks, the other half like they were on the verge of strokes”.

But with rates of obesity rising constantly, and rates of death caused by being fat and insufficiently active scaring the hell out of health professionals, could we at least view The Biggest Loser as an effort to help?

The issue is that while the program claims it’s giving messages relating to healthy weight loss, what it actually demonstrates is the most dangerous strategy with the highest failure rate, damaging not only the men and women on the show, but anyone observing who is led to believe that this is what permanent weight loss is about.

The quicker someone loses weight, the quicker it returns

In a world where human fatties have health departments and health scientists apoplectic with worry, and rightfully so, it’s unsurprising that there’s been a massive amount of clinical studies on the effectiveness of the most common approaches to losing weight and keeping it off.

In every part of the civilised world where clinical research has been carried out, it has been thoroughly shown that weight loss programs based on diet or exercise not only fail miserably, but they make people fatter!

A massive 95% of people who use a diet to lose weight experience weight regain (and more) within 3 years, and a massive 95% of people who reduce fat through an exercise regime put the weight back on (and more) within 1 year!

For instance Matt Hoover, winner of The Biggest Loser in 2005, kept putting on weight since the show ended. By 2006 he had put on a heap of weight, and in 2007 the folds were showing.

The truth is that people can’t lose weight that quickly and not jeopardise the body’s rate of metabolism and general wellbeing. And in fact to Matt’s enormous credit, and we have to admire his courage in saying such a thing, he now says that The Biggest Loser is an unhealthy way to lose weight, and that he would never tell anyone to reduce weight as shown on The Biggest Loser. Of course not, it fails, and it’s a dangerous weight loss program!

If you lose weight quickly, you are not losing any significant fat

Scientists report that it’s just not possible to gain or lose much more than 1 kilo of fat in 7 days. And yet people on The Biggest Loser often huge weekly losses (25 lbs) and Matt even experienced a weekly gain of 12 lbs!

So what’s really happening?

The people on The Biggest Loser absolutely didn’t lose or gain much fat when they racked up those big gains and losses. What they took off or put on was most likely fluid, and when fluid is lost that quickly, the rate of metabolism also decreases, and that’s just one of several serious health effects that go hand in hand with too-rapid weight loss.

If the person happens to be on a low-carb eating plan the effects are even more dire. Those important carbs help retain water, so of course when you cut out your carbs you lose fluid, further reducing your metabolism.

Foods containing carbs are also absolutely essential for retention of muscle mass, and if you decrease muscle mass (which is what happens if you’ve suddenly cutyour calories your metabolic rate will fall even lower.

No wonder people get that return of weight so quickly, and end up weighing more than ever, and often ill and exhausted from tiredness created by the diet program itself.

The Biggest Loser punishes people for doing healthy things

A serious mistake which turns people right off exercise is to force them to have such an awful, stomach-turning, painful example of it that each time they think of being active, they actually feel sick at the thought.

One more way to make people hate exercise is to berate or belittle them as they try to keep up, and even make them feel guilty or worthless for not performing up to scratch. The Biggest Loser ensures that whenever their graduates think about being physical in the future, they’ll have strong negative feelings that eventually will sabotage any efforts to be more physical.

As well as turning people off exercise, The Biggest Loser uses methods that actually get people compulsively desiring unhealthy, fatty, sugary food. Depriving yourself of your favourite foods is known to create food cravings.

The Biggest Loser moves past mere deprivation, taunting contestants with their very favourite foods and creating the most enormous food cravings!

The Biggest Loser is not real life

Millions of viewers watch The Biggest Loser regularly, and you only have to take a look at one of the dozens of web forums that have sprung up like noxious weeds to see the horrible tragedy of large numbers of people really believing that this is a reasonable strategy for dropping those pounds.

They are unaware that the “Losers” are under 24/7 observation, by a whole team of people. That the participants don’t have any kind of normal human life, aren’t at a job, aren’t looking after a family and in fact aren’t involved in normal social time with friends or community.

The participants aren’t learning any lifestyle practices at all that are practical in the real, outside world.

Viewers rarely have the knowledge that some of the “Losers” are regularly purging and vomiting as they try to win the prize, or at least not “let down” their team.

Nevertheless it’s so tragic to read the negative and insulting comment that is flung at contestants who are seen as pathetic merely for the sin of eating a Mars Bar.

It’s spot-on but cruel replay of that infamous scientific trial of “blue eyes/brown eyes” where people were taught to punish others who were seen as inferior.

The Biggest Loser fails to meet basic guidelines for healthy dietary habits

Despite the fact that the show claims to encourage healthy weight reduction, even the show’s own medical consultants have admitted the program puts people at risk, dropping Jules Condon and Sam Birrell because of potential danger to their health (heart problems and deep vein thrombosis).

Sadly, Jules and Sam were so taken up with the hype that they actually wanted to keep on risking their lives!

Nutritionist Kathleen Zelman points out that what the Blue Team eats has deficient levels of complex carbohydrates, and that its low-carb regime will cause muscle reduction, even more so when paired with a heavy activity level.

Zelman also says the Red Team consumes too few calories to cope with the workouts and is definitely out of line with National Academy of Science Guidelines on proteins, carbs and fats.

Dr Michael Dansinger, a medical consultant on series 2, himself points out that the totally unnecessarily-low energy intake can’t be done safely by the general public.

Scientific trials suggest that weight gain directly caused by the habit of dieting is around 6 billion pounds each year

That’s an awful lot of weight gain! But it’s true. The average dieter actually increases their weight by around 5 pounds of fat a year, and it’s estimated there are 1.5 billion dieters in the world each year.

The Biggest Loser can certainly be blamed for an increasing amount of this increase in overweight and obesity.

Diets are creating ill health and damaging lives

Research trials consistently demonstrate that dieting has serious health and other impacts on our lives:

• Diets cause people to gain weight because of reduced metabolism
• Diets almost always provide insufficient nutrition because they always try to avoid certain foods
• Dietingimpacts on mood because of the way even “bad” food is necessary for hormone manufacture, very often causing anxiety or depression
• Dieting also decreases or destroys your libido
• Dieting weakens your body’s immune system so that you experience more illness
• Your decreased metabolic rate makes it harder to exercise and in fact you may find yourself with fatigue syndromes
• Trying to go without familiar foods causes food cravings, so that every single diet you force yourself to follow only makes the problem worse
• Dieting is proven to be linked to eating disorders in children and young people, and this is fatal for well over 64% of those who develop anorexia or bulimia

Your single most important rule to lose weight

Absolutely throw out that diet and agree that you’ll never, ever, diet again. If you just make this one change, although you might at first put on some weight, your metabolic rate will get back to normal, and you will lose 5 pounds or more and not have to worry about putting it back. In time you’ll feel a lot better, with a a higher level of energy, you’ll feel better about yourself and you may even feel like taking time to learn about a healthier lifestyle, even learning about the 17 lifestyle mistakes that reduce metabolic rate, or taking part in a sport that you can play for the sheer pleasureof it.

In other words you’ll actually have a life worth living.

So if you want a weight loss strategy that works, and keeps weight off permanently, definitely switch off The Biggest Loser!

Christine Sutherland is a Perth clinical researcher with over 30 years’ experience, and specialises in overweight and obesity issues. She is striving to get diets banned as part of any weight loss program, and her popular free book “How to Be an Effortlessly Slim, Toned Person” is easily downloaded from her web site.
Article Source: JS2 Article Marketing