Woman's Awful Time As A Contestant On 'The Biggest Loser' Makes Me Like The Show A Lot More
NY Post – She had always struggled with her weight, but in January 2006, Kai Hibbard was in real trouble: At just 26 years old, her 5-foot-6 frame carried 265 pounds.
Her best friend staged a mini-intervention. “She said, ‘Hey, I love you, but you’re super-fat right now,’?” Hibbard recalls. The pal encouraged Hibbard to try out for the smash NBC reality show “The Biggest Loser.”
The trainers, she says, took satisfaction in bringing their charges to physical and mental collapse. “They’d get a sick pleasure out of it,” she says. “They’d say, ‘It’s because you’re fat. Look at all the fat you have on you.’ And that was our fault, so this was our punishment.”
“[The trainers] would say things to contestants like, ‘You’re going to die before your children grow up.’ ‘You’re going to die, just like your mother.’ ‘We’ve picked out your fat-person coffin’ — that was in a text message.” She adds that one production assistant told a contestant to take up smoking “because it would cut her appetite in half.” A second anonymous former contestant added: “[The trainers would] get a sick pleasure out of it. They’d say, ‘It’s because you’re fat. Look at all the fat you have on you.’ And that was our fault, so this was our punishment.”
For Hibbard, the low point came when she and her fellow “losers” were brought to a racetrack, where they were housed in individual horse stalls. When a bell went off, they had to run neck-and-neck like animals, picking up sacks filled with their lost weight on the way.
“I walked,” she says. It was her minor form of protest. “They edited it to look like I was lazy,” she says, “but I wasn’t participating because it was humiliating.”
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The Post has some big behind the scenes takedown on NBC’s Biggest Loser and it’s all pretty interesting. The point seems to be that the show is awful and borderline abusive to its contestants but to me it just seems like they have the best ideas ever. When you’re a big time fatso who needs to lose hundreds of pounds like some of the people on this show, you NEED this kind of wakeup call. So yeah maybe it’s a little dehumanizing to be literally shoved into a horse stall like an animal and sure it’s not ideal to get shouted at about your loved ones being fat and dead just like you’re going to be but it’s MOTIVATION. If the threat of diabetes and a heart attack won’t scare you thin then maybe some good ol’ fashioned bullying might. Whenever I’m mowing through a burrito and a side of nachos I fucking wish someone would yell at me and tell me about my impending death or make piggy noises in my face. If you don’t have your own willpower you should be thankful that they’re there to help you out. We’re in the results business here.
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Also “We’ve picked out your fat person coffin” has to be one of the funniest thing some hardcore fitness bro has ever said. You can’t penalize them for that, total 1 in a million shot. Also do fat person coffins cost more? If so then this is pretty thoughtful too.
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