Former Biggest Loser Contestant Speaks Out

Earlier this month, Biggest Loser finalist Kai Hibbard broke her silence about the way the reality show functions and treats contestants behind the scenes. In the interview (read the whole thing here), Kai talks about some of the smoke and mirror tricks one would expect from a reality tv show, like stretching a “week” on the show into two weeks, but far more disturbing are her accounts of how the contestants were treated while on the show.

Kai discusses how they had to work out 5-7 hours a day, often while injured, and while consuming only 1,000-1,200 calories a day. She also discusses how the advice of doctors and dieticians was often ignored by the trainers. For example, at one point some of the contestants were given pills to balance their electrolytes by the doctors, and the trainers immediately told them not to take the pills, because they would cause the contestants to retain water and make them seem heavier. Incidentally, electrolyte imbalance can be extremely dangerous. In the end, Kai left the show with an eating disorder and lower self-esteem than she started with.

After reading the entire interview (I highly suggest giving it a read!) I was absolutely appalled. As an occasional watcher of The Biggest Loser, I assumed some not-best-practice behavior was probably going on behind the scenes, but I didn’t realize that it went to this level of extremity. When, this past week, CBS picked up the story and interviewed Kai on the Early Show, I was happy to see the story get more exposure. “Now she’ll get support from the public,” I thought. But when I read the comments people were leaving on sites covering her story, I was even more disturbed. A fair number of the commenters (though by no means all) turned against Kai. The most frequent complaints, which I will address individually, being 1) she knew what she was getting into, she shouldn’t have expected it to be easy 2) She went on the show with an eating disorder (overeating) 3) Being overweight is unhealthy, she should be thankful for the opportunity to get healthy.

First of all, as Kai discusses in the interview, she didn’t know what she was getting into – she didn’t assume that anyone would want to treat them as badly as they were treated, let alone actually treat them that way. Second, being obese doesn’t imply you have an eating disorder – you can be addicted to food or be a binge eater, and those are eating disorders – but that’s not always the case. Obesity often stems from lack of education, lack of access to healthy food, or growing up with a bad diet. This distinction is important because an actual eating disorder affects your relationship with food to such an extent that it affects your way of life. So no, Kai wasn’t trading in one eating disorder for another, she now lives with the remnants of an eating disorder (her family staged an intervention when her hair started falling out) that could have killed her much faster than obesity ever would. Finally, the entire interview discussed the ways in which the show didn’t make them healthier. Society has this misconception that to be thin is to be healthy, but the practices implemented on the show were in no way healthy and often times dangerous. Furthermore, the idea that she should be thankful for an experience that dehumanized her and put her life at risk because she was fat is absolutely ridiculous.

All of these comments seemed to come from the type of “she’s fat, she needs this kind of treatment” attitude that permeates society. It really made me think that the bad practice and abuse expressed in the making of the show is actually just a physical manifestation of the intolerance of society at large. There’s so much more to obesity than over eating and lack of discipline. Also, being healthy does not equate being thin. I have friends who are thin who don’t work out and whose major food groups are Doritos and fries – but no one bugs them for being unhealthy.

Also, yes being obese can adversely affect one’s health, but that’s not really why people feel like fat people are worthy of bad treatment, is it? Overweight people have become the last group society can PC-ly make fun of. They are embodiment of the collective fears of individuals that maybe someday (god forbid) they will be overweight, and, more importantly, have to endure all the stigma that come with being overweight – being unlovable, lazy, lonely, a joke… oh yeah, and have health problems. But are those really side effects of being fat? No. Do we associate those things with overweight people? Yes, and whose fault is that, really?

One of the most telling things Kai mentioned in her interview was that she never hated her body, even when she weighed 280lb, until she went on the show. Body hate and shame is something that’s taught, something we wholeheartedly buy as a society. Even the thin among us are sold the idea that they have “trouble spots.”  When we enable society to tell us there’s something wrong with our not-perfectly-toned bodies, we’re also enabling the cruelty and intolerance that’s associated with not living up to the current ideal of beauty. Overweight and obese people don’t deserve to take the brunt of this collective intolerance and people of lower weight shouldn’t have to live in that kind of system either.