Even though I love reality TV, I watched only a few episodes of “The Biggest Loser” during its 18 seasons, from 2004 to 2020. What I saw made me uncomfortable, because the show appeared to be a sad spectacle, and its producers seemed to be more interested in humiliating heavy people than in helping them. For the uninitiated, the premise of the show is that its participants, whose average weight was 329 pounds when they began the contest, competed to see who could lose the most weight in about seven months. Some of the winners lost over 200 pounds in that narrow time frame.
A new documentary on Netflix, “Fit for TV: The Reality of the Biggest Loser,” is a behind-the-scenes look at the popular show, and it confirmed my glancing assessment in some ways. The format seemed designed for maximal drama rather than peak health. The trainers had a drill sergeant style that involved a lot of screaming (“Nobody bullies my team except for me,” one trainer, Jillian Michaels, once said in the heat of competition). The diet and exercise regimens were draconian: Sometimes contestants were advised to eat under 1,000 calories a day in spite of exercising for hours.
A set of “temptation challenges” depicted in the documentary seemed particularly cruel. Contestants were faced with a junk food bonanza and an ugly choice: If you ate the most calories, you were awarded the chance to see your family, but you would obviously be set back on your journey to weight loss and the cash prize at the end.
While some of the participants felt the show changed their lives for the better, others felt that their decision to appear on it was much more complicated. Isabeau Miller, a former contestant who doesn’t appear in the documentary, said on TikTok that she felt the producers, trainers and doctors were in it to make money and become celebrities: “Nobody was like, ‘You know what I’m passionate about? Helping people who are obese to lose weight and feel better about themselves.’”
Though it started over 20 years ago, “The Biggest Loser” presaged the current manic state of wellness content, where nuance is dead and body functionality is secondary to appearance. The show depicted winning contestants in their moment of buff triumph and then shut the cameras off, much like many popular fitness influencers who show their ideal bodies while obscuring the disordered eating that got them there.
Kevin Hall, who was until recently a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health, followed 14 participants from “The Biggest Loser” for six years after they appeared on the show. In 2016, Hall and his co-authors found that 13 regained at least some of the weight they lost, four were heavier than when they started the show, and most of them had slower metabolisms than before their “Biggest Loser” experience.
The documentary has started a conversation about how the participants could have met their fitness and weight goals in a healthier way, and about how GLP-1 medications like Ozempic are now a big part of weight management that wasn’t available when the show was on TV. But I’m worried that message will get lost because health has become so polarized by the Trump administration, which shares a similar ethos to “The Biggest Loser”: an obsession with personal responsibility and sensational media.
In an episode of the “Conspirituality” podcast, which analyzes wellness, fitness and new age trends, the hosts, Derek Beres and Julian Marc Walker, make explicit parallels between the performative failure of “The Biggest Loser” and the antics of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again followers. Jillian Michaels, whose appearances on the show made her famous, is allied with many MAHA and MAGA figures, though she told The Times’s Molly Langmuir she doesn’t really think of herself as part of the movement (she did not participate in the documentary and is not a fan).
The “Conspirituality” hosts home in on Kennedy’s recent social media fitness stunt with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — they are the two members of the Trump cabinet most committed to that particular brand of performative strength and conservative masculinity — in which they and armed services members try to do 50 pull-ups and 100 push-ups in a specific period of time as part of what they called “Pete and Bobby Challenge.”
Numerous fitness experts pointed out that neither man displayed proper form while doing these exercises, and that those exercises and number of reps are arbitrary. Their challenge isn’t giving people more time in their day to exercise, or making cities more walkable, or improving access to whole foods instead of ultraprocessed ones.
In fact, Kevin Hall, the N.I.H. scientist who studied the “Biggest Loser” contestants and is one of the country’s foremost researchers on ultraprocessed foods, decided to retire from his government job this year. Hall said that he stepped down because federal officials censored his work and speech when it contradicted the Trump administration’s goals.
We can’t control the algorithm, but a new book by Casey Johnston, “A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting,” provides a middle path we can try to follow anyway. It does not cede fitness to extreme dieters, conservative politicians or supplement sellers, but it isn’t reactionary either. I find that sometimes in the effort to debunk what MAHA is selling or push back against extreme thinness, some people become a different kind of anti-science, rejecting the idea that diet and exercise matter at all.
Johnston, who writes a newsletter called “She’s a Beast” about health and wellness, writes about how getting into lifting made her realize she had been chronically under-fueling her body in pursuit of a low body weight. By focusing too much on cardio, she was also ignoring activity that might make her feel and function better. “I felt my muscles before I could see them,” Johnston writes about her early days of weight lifting. She was getting stronger and moving better just by working out a three times a week for 30 to 40 minutes. Before long, where she had previously struggled with lifting a 40-pound box of kitty litter, she could pick it up with ease and without hurting her lower back.
I also appreciated that Johnston talks about tracking her macronutrients in the book. Johnston is not an advocate of a one-size-fits-all approach to eating, but she writes that being allowed to eat whatever she wanted as long as it fit her macros was freeing for her, because it removed the “idea of there being good/bad, clean/unclean foods.”
I called Johnston to ask about how she managed to develop and promote a sane approach to diet and exercise, and she told me it’s something she’s grappled with a lot, because she doesn’t want to put a “different wrapping on the same toxic concepts” that are marketed by the predatory parts of the wellness and fitness industries. Johnston has come to realize that part of how humans create meaning is through our relationship to the physical world, which includes how we feel in our bodies, how we move them, and what we feed them.
We all deserve a chance to develop a strong connection to our bodies that feels good and will allow us to function well into our older age. It is an everyday process, there’s no quick fix and it’s not a journey that will fit into a one-minute video. I don’t think bread and circuses — or beef tallow and temptation challenges — will get us what we need.
End Notes
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Therapeutic TV: I have loved Jason Segel ever since “Freaks and Geeks,” but I just discovered his Apple+ TV show “Shrinking.” I know I just recommended “Couples Therapy,” but apparently I can’t get enough of shows about mental health professionals (my mom’s a shrink, I can’t help it). “Shrinking” is a dramedy, though, not a documentary. It’s about a grieving father, played by Segel, who is also a psychotherapist. His own trauma inspires him to shake up the way he relates to his patients. He works in a practice with therapists played by Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams, who are both excellent. It’s a gentle show that goes down easy.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
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