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Lily Divine
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bolt.upright said:
It tastes fantastic. I prefer it with greek yogurt, or on it's own (without milk). Have been eating it for a couple years now.
bobistheowl
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Most guys prefer women with a few extra pounds, myself included. The super skinny look is what gay fashion designers prefer, because they tend to like guys with that body type.
What I object to is that all women tend to be described with two terms: Thin and BBW. The BBW term is used for all women who are not thin, whether or not they are legitimately beautiful.
Supposedly, it's mean to be "inclusive", so that obese and facially unattractive women are considered the same as everyone else. What it really does is exclude everyone who is not thin, by lumping all of them into one group, and giving it a condescending name.
It would be ridiculous to say that all obese men are handsome.
So why call all non thin women BBWs? To get their vote. That's always been why it's called "Political Correctness".
What I object to is that all women tend to be described with two terms: Thin and BBW. The BBW term is used for all women who are not thin, whether or not they are legitimately beautiful.
Supposedly, it's mean to be "inclusive", so that obese and facially unattractive women are considered the same as everyone else. What it really does is exclude everyone who is not thin, by lumping all of them into one group, and giving it a condescending name.
It would be ridiculous to say that all obese men are handsome.
So why call all non thin women BBWs? To get their vote. That's always been why it's called "Political Correctness".
bobistheowl
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Kool77 said:
If anyone is seriously overweight, they shouldn't be encouraged to be comfortable with that. They should be encouraged to get off the couch, do some exercise, and build self esteem by being more physically attractive today than they were yesterday, and less attractive today than they will be tomorrow. Nobody deserves a medal for giving up on themselves.
I'm probably one of the few here, if not the only one, who lost weight between Christmas and New Years. I was doing a lot of work, and I didn't really have meals on a couple of days, I just drank egg nog, because it was 50 cents a liter, starting Boxing Day. I lost a bit of weight around Hallowe'en this year, too, because I had almost no chocolate.
I bought a 'fat belt' in June. It's too long, and I have to make a new notch hole whenever my pants fall down, if I use the current notch hole. I'm about two inches to the good since then. With the next notch, I can throw away the pair of pants I'm wearing now, and wear the pair in the closet, that used to almost fit. I don't want to hang on to the pants that would be too big, because I don't want to grow back in to them.
Buying a piece of clothing or two that don't fit yet can be a good incentive towards self imnprovement. Feeling good about having a double chin because other people have double chins isn't self esteem. It's self delusion. Last Friday, I was walking briskly for three hours on a really cold day, and I soaked through two shirts, despite having my parka open, most of the time. I bought a big poutine, when I was nearly home, and I really enjoyed it, because I had earned the indulgence that day.
Guys who drink Gatorade while playing a sporting event are generally fit. Guys who drink Gatorade while watching sports at home on TV generally aren't. For me, winter weather is a good time for long walks, because extra calories are burned keeping one's body temperature much higher than the air temperature.
Food calories are just a unit of measurement for heat energy. Moving briskly or staying warm burns calories. Riding a sidewalk scooter to the grocery store doesn't. Some of those people are actually physically disabled, but most of them are just too far out of shape to comfortably walk to the store and back. They should not be encouraged to be comfortable in their own bodies, and they don't deserve sympathy for choosing to give up on themselves.
bolt.upright
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I had it with Activia strawberry yogourt, although I suspect it would be just as good with vanilla. I'll have to get some and give it a try. I haven't found a greek yogourt that I really like yet.Lily Divine said:
Lily Divine
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bolt.upright said:
PM me the types of flavours you like and I will send some suggestions.
bobistheowl
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Here's a video by Heart from about 1976, that YouTube won't let you see, but I will:
Most guys would consider lead singer Nancy Wilson to have a very attractive body type, perhaps even one they would prefer, over most. She gotten a lot bigger since, but back then, she was hot.
This is Honey Boo Boo's mom:
I think we can all agree that June Shannon is not hot.
And yet, under political correctness, the same descriptive term, BBW, would be used to describe both women, to be 'inclusive', so as to not harm June's self esteem.
A lot of us would be willing to book a session with an Escort who looked like 1976 Nancy Wilson. Probably none of us would want to bang June Shannon, even if she offered us money.
This is the problem with using the term BBW in the Escort Industry, when photographs may be inaccurate, or non existent, and different guys have different interpretations of what the term BBW means.
An Escort that has a 1976 Nancy Wilson body type, may accurately describe herself as a Big Beautiful Woman, but guys don't book an appointment with her, because they don't want June Shannon to open the door, when they knock.
In the Escort Industry, we don't need to be kind to the June Shannons. Somebody who looks like that does appeal to some men, but not many. If her picture and description are accurate, all is good and fair. Most guys, however, would rather spend their hobby money on someone else.
We do need to be kind to the Nancy Wilsons, who deserve our business, but don't get it, because the one term fits all approach discriminates against them, because they are not thin.
BBW is not a term that benefits the Nancy Wilson body type. It's one that sets the thin girls in a separate class, and lumps every other woman together into a separate class.
Saying that, in different words, got me permanently banned from the lobby area of the red board. It offended someone midway between Nancy and June on the attractiveness scale, who had a mod in her pocket.
Most guys would consider lead singer Nancy Wilson to have a very attractive body type, perhaps even one they would prefer, over most. She gotten a lot bigger since, but back then, she was hot.
This is Honey Boo Boo's mom:
I think we can all agree that June Shannon is not hot.
And yet, under political correctness, the same descriptive term, BBW, would be used to describe both women, to be 'inclusive', so as to not harm June's self esteem.
A lot of us would be willing to book a session with an Escort who looked like 1976 Nancy Wilson. Probably none of us would want to bang June Shannon, even if she offered us money.
This is the problem with using the term BBW in the Escort Industry, when photographs may be inaccurate, or non existent, and different guys have different interpretations of what the term BBW means.
An Escort that has a 1976 Nancy Wilson body type, may accurately describe herself as a Big Beautiful Woman, but guys don't book an appointment with her, because they don't want June Shannon to open the door, when they knock.
In the Escort Industry, we don't need to be kind to the June Shannons. Somebody who looks like that does appeal to some men, but not many. If her picture and description are accurate, all is good and fair. Most guys, however, would rather spend their hobby money on someone else.
We do need to be kind to the Nancy Wilsons, who deserve our business, but don't get it, because the one term fits all approach discriminates against them, because they are not thin.
BBW is not a term that benefits the Nancy Wilson body type. It's one that sets the thin girls in a separate class, and lumps every other woman together into a separate class.
Saying that, in different words, got me permanently banned from the lobby area of the red board. It offended someone midway between Nancy and June on the attractiveness scale, who had a mod in her pocket.
bobistheowl
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After the Heart video in post #383 is over, you'll see an array of video thumbnails that looks like this:
Full size:
The Heart video is on YouTube, (I made the video from VHS tape of a MuchMusic Spotlight, broadcast about 25 years ago). I can put this on YouTube, and YouTube will block it from the search results, but they won't remove it. They will, however, tell the uploader where it is, before they block it from the public.
If you see the thumbs array shown above, the video indicated with the red arrow is very funny, and also blocked by YouTube, but you can see it, by clicking on the thumb image. Some of the other videos displayed in the array may or not be accessed by the general public searching on YouTube, but you can see them here.
I can put any content I want on YouTube, especially videos that aren't there, (or are, from other people's blocked uploads), the videos you'd like to see, that are denied to you, because a corporation claims copyright. Videos by bands like Led Zeppelin or Rush won't be found by searching YouTube, nor will sketches and music performances aired on Saturday Night Live, but there are a lot of those videos that used to circulate of peer to peer file sharing apps, and I made hundreds of those myself. I can also extract clips from a complete episode of any show from which I have a digital copy. I might be able to fill your requests, for the clips you want to see, or missed the first time, and no additional opportunity was given to you.
I'm planning to make a thread of videos like that, and I'll keep putting them up for you until someone from The Pork Room decides to end that for all of you by posting anything in my video thread, just because I ask them not to. There's no other reason, they just like to have fun by ruining other people's fun.
papasmerf is the worst offender. Sarah/ escapefromstress always joins in. oldguyzer usually, but not always, participates. Transient does that, too, sometimes, but won't own up to it. Cardinal Fang never initiates this behavior, but he usually joins in, after the hijack has started. The other people from The Pork Room don't behave like that, nor do any of the other members here, unless a thread has already been hijacked by one of the people responsible for 100% of the thread hijackings here, all of whom are mentioned by name in this paragraph. You might want to socialize with people who behave that way, but I don't.
That's why three of those people listed above are on the Ignore list posted in my signature line. Prim0 and Mariner are there for different reasons.
I can't stop them from doing what they do, but I can deny them the right to be recognized by me, as people. They're on my Ignore list because they chose to be, by repeatedly going out of their way to destroy the things I make for the rest of you.
I'm not willing to give papasmerf, Sarah/ escapefromstress, or oldguyzer any more chances. Prim0 may get a reprieve at Festivus, if he changes his attitude, but I'm not optimistic about that. Transient and I don't go out of our ways to post in the same threads, so I have no current beefs with him, and I'd like to keep it that way. Cardinal Fang amuses me mildly at times, and annoys me at other times, but not sufficiently in either way for me to consider him formidable. Heavyweight boxers don't get in the ring with Flyweights, but they do spar in the gym, sometimes. Mariner is a full time Troll that everyone should put on Ignore, until he gets a new handle with which to troll people.
If any of papasmerf, Sarah/ escapefromstress, or oldguyzer were to apologize now, I wouldn't accept it, because I wouldn't believe it. They've disappointed me enough times that I won't give them another opportunity to do it again. I don't want to fight with them anymore, but I don't want to play with them, either. That's their loss, not mine, and my decision is final.
Full size:
The Heart video is on YouTube, (I made the video from VHS tape of a MuchMusic Spotlight, broadcast about 25 years ago). I can put this on YouTube, and YouTube will block it from the search results, but they won't remove it. They will, however, tell the uploader where it is, before they block it from the public.
If you see the thumbs array shown above, the video indicated with the red arrow is very funny, and also blocked by YouTube, but you can see it, by clicking on the thumb image. Some of the other videos displayed in the array may or not be accessed by the general public searching on YouTube, but you can see them here.
I can put any content I want on YouTube, especially videos that aren't there, (or are, from other people's blocked uploads), the videos you'd like to see, that are denied to you, because a corporation claims copyright. Videos by bands like Led Zeppelin or Rush won't be found by searching YouTube, nor will sketches and music performances aired on Saturday Night Live, but there are a lot of those videos that used to circulate of peer to peer file sharing apps, and I made hundreds of those myself. I can also extract clips from a complete episode of any show from which I have a digital copy. I might be able to fill your requests, for the clips you want to see, or missed the first time, and no additional opportunity was given to you.
I'm planning to make a thread of videos like that, and I'll keep putting them up for you until someone from The Pork Room decides to end that for all of you by posting anything in my video thread, just because I ask them not to. There's no other reason, they just like to have fun by ruining other people's fun.
papasmerf is the worst offender. Sarah/ escapefromstress always joins in. oldguyzer usually, but not always, participates. Transient does that, too, sometimes, but won't own up to it. Cardinal Fang never initiates this behavior, but he usually joins in, after the hijack has started. The other people from The Pork Room don't behave like that, nor do any of the other members here, unless a thread has already been hijacked by one of the people responsible for 100% of the thread hijackings here, all of whom are mentioned by name in this paragraph. You might want to socialize with people who behave that way, but I don't.
That's why three of those people listed above are on the Ignore list posted in my signature line. Prim0 and Mariner are there for different reasons.
I can't stop them from doing what they do, but I can deny them the right to be recognized by me, as people. They're on my Ignore list because they chose to be, by repeatedly going out of their way to destroy the things I make for the rest of you.
I'm not willing to give papasmerf, Sarah/ escapefromstress, or oldguyzer any more chances. Prim0 may get a reprieve at Festivus, if he changes his attitude, but I'm not optimistic about that. Transient and I don't go out of our ways to post in the same threads, so I have no current beefs with him, and I'd like to keep it that way. Cardinal Fang amuses me mildly at times, and annoys me at other times, but not sufficiently in either way for me to consider him formidable. Heavyweight boxers don't get in the ring with Flyweights, but they do spar in the gym, sometimes. Mariner is a full time Troll that everyone should put on Ignore, until he gets a new handle with which to troll people.
If any of papasmerf, Sarah/ escapefromstress, or oldguyzer were to apologize now, I wouldn't accept it, because I wouldn't believe it. They've disappointed me enough times that I won't give them another opportunity to do it again. I don't want to fight with them anymore, but I don't want to play with them, either. That's their loss, not mine, and my decision is final.
U
User-E
Guest
bobistheowl said:
Hey bob - would you mind inserting a every time you mention my name in your posts?
You're such a good little lap dog to shill for me so often. Good boy bob.
/-Thumbs-up::/
People.....if you are trying to lose weigh, go slowly.
[h=1]The brutal secrets behind ‘The Biggest Loser’[/h]By Maureen Callahan
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Comment(required)
January 18, 2015 | 7:00am
Kai Hibbard weighed 265 pounds before starting "The Biggest Loser" and dropped 121 pounds during the show to end up at 144. Photo: Getty Images (2)
[h=3]MORE ON:[/h][h=6]The Biggest Loser[/h]
[h=5]Government-backed DASH diet tops list as nation's best regimen[/h]
[h=5]‘Sons of Anarchy’ revs up for its final wild ride[/h]
[h=5]Meet the new coaches for season 16 of 'The Biggest Loser'[/h]
[h=5]Viewers fear for 'Loser's’ health [/h]
She had always struggled with her weight, but in January of 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.”
“So I made a videotape,” Hibbard says, “and the next thing I know, I’m on a reality TV show.”
Hibbard had never seen “The Biggest Loser.” She had no idea what she was in for.
‘The whole f- -king show,” she says today, “is a fat-shaming disaster that I’m embarrassed to have participated in.”
Since its premiere in 2004, “The Biggest Loser” — which pits obese contestants against one another in a race to lose the most weight — has been one of the most popular reality shows of all time.
The 16th season finale will air live on Jan. 29. Average weekly viewership is 7 million people, and about 200,000 people audition per season.
The show rakes in about $100 million annually in ad sales, with ancillary products such as cookbooks, DVDs, protein powder, clothing, video games and branded weight-loss camps bringing in tens more millions of dollars per year.
Kai HibbardPhoto: Getty Images
In a country where two-thirds of the population is overweight or obese, “The Biggest Loser” has multifaceted appeal: It’s aspirational and grotesque, punitive and redemptive — skinny or fat, it’s got something for you. It’s not uncommon to see contestants worked out to the point of vomiting or collapsing from exhaustion. Contestants, collegially and poignantly, refer to one another as “losers.”
“You just think you’re so lucky to be there,” Hibbard says, “that you don’t think to question or complain about anything.”
Contestants are made to sign contracts giving away rights to their own story lines and forbidding them to speak badly about the show.
Once selected, Hibbard was flown to LA. When she got to her hotel, she was greeted by a production assistant, who checked her in and took away her key card. When not filming, she was to stay in her room at all times.
“The hotel will report to them if you leave your room,” Hibbard says. “They assume you’re going to talk to other contestants.”
Another competitor, who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity, says that when she first checked in, a production assistant also took her cellphone and laptop for 24 hours. She suspects her computer was bugged.
Kai Hibbard during the Live Finale of “The Biggest Loser” Season 3.Photo: Getty Images
“The camera light on my MacBook would sometimes come on when I hadn’t checked in,” she says. “It was like Big Brother was always watching you.” The sequestration lasts five days.
After an initial winnowing process, 14 of 50 finalists are taken to “the ranch,” where they live, work out and suffer in seclusion. (The remaining 36 are sent home to lose weight on their own, and return later in the season.)
Those who remain, Hibbard says, are not allowed to call home. “You might give away show secrets,” she says. After six weeks, contestants get to make a five-minute call, monitored by production.
“I know that one of the contestants’ children became very ill and was in the ICU,” Hibbard says. “He was allowed to talk to his family — but he didn’t want to leave, because the show would have been done with him.”
Once at the ranch, contestants are given a medical exam, then start working out immediately, for dangerous lengths of time — from five to eight hours straight.
“There was no easing into it,” Hibbard says. “That doesn’t make for good TV. My feet were bleeding through my shoes for the first three weeks.”
“My first workout was four hours long,” says the other contestant. She came on to the show a few years ago at more than 300 pounds. On her first day, she was put through this regimen:
Her trainer yelled, “Get up!” then made a comment about a sick and overweight relative.
“I got up,” she says. “You’re just in shock. Your body’s in shock. All the contestants would say to each other, ‘What the f- -k just happened?’ ”
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.”
Hibbard had the same experience. “They would say things to contestants like, ‘You’re going 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. One production assistant told a contestant to take up smoking because it would cut her appetite in half.”
Meanwhile, their calories were severely restricted. The recommended daily intake for a person of average height and weight is 1,200 to 1,600 calories per day. The contestants were ingesting far less than 1,000 per day.
Hibbard says the bulk of food on her season was provided by sponsors and had little to no nutritional value.
Kai Hibbard during the Live Finale of “The Biggest Loser” Season 3.Photo: Getty Images
“Your grocery list is approved by your trainer,” she says. “My season had a lot of Franken-foods: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray, Kraft fat-free cheese, Rockstar Energy Drinks, Jell-O.”
At one point, Hibbard says, production did bloodwork on all the contestants, and the show’s doctor prescribed electrolyte drinks. “And the trainer said, ‘Don’t drink that — it’ll put weight on you. You’ll lose your last chance to save your life.’ ”
Such extreme, daily workouts and calorie restriction result in steep weight losses — up to 30 pounds lost in one week.
“Safe weight loss is one to two pounds per week, and most people find that hard,” says Lynn Darby, a professor of exercise science at Bowling Green State University. “If you reduce your calories to less than 800-1,000 a day, your metabolism will shut down. Add five to eight hours of exercise a day — that’s like running a marathon, in poor shape, five days a week. I’m surprised that no one’s really been injured on the show.”
In fact, contestants have been seriously injured, but it’s not often shown. The first-ever “Biggest Loser,” Ryan Benson, went from 330 pounds to 208 — but after the show, he said he was so malnourished he was urinating blood. “That’s a sign of kidney damage, if not failure,” Darby says. Benson later gained back all the weight and was disowned by the show.
In 2009, two contestants were hospitalized — one via airlift. And 2014’s Biggest Loser, Rachel Frederickson, became the first winner to generate concern that she had lost too much weight, dropping 155 pounds in months. She appeared on the cover of People with the headline “Too Thin, Too Fast?” Frederickson (5-foot-4, 105 pounds) admitted to working out four times a day, and within one month of the finale had gained back 20 pounds.
Rachel Frederickson dropped 155 pounds — making her 105 pounds at the end of “The Biggest Loser.”Photo: Getty Images
“Just calorie restriction in and of itself has to be supervised,” Darby says. “I mean, people die. Then add that exercise load on top of it. The joints of someone who has never exercised absorbing the force of 300 pounds of jumping or bouncing? It’s just not safe.”
Frederickson at “The Biggest Loser” Finale.Photo: AP
Hibbard says she and other contestants sustained major physical damage.
“One contestant had a torn calf muscle and bursitis in her knees,” Hibbard says. “The doctor told her, ‘You need to rest.’ She said, ‘Production told me I can’t rest.’ At one point after that, production ordered her to run, and she said, ‘I can’t.’ She was seriously injured. But they edited her to make her look lazy and bitchy and combative.”
Hibbard’s own health declined dramatically. “My hair was falling out,” she says. “My period stopped. I was only sleeping three hours a night.” Hibbard says that to this day, her period is irregular, her hair still falls out, and her knees “sound like Saran Wrap” every time she goes up and down stairs. “My thyroid, which I never had problems with, is now crap,” she says.
“One of the other ‘losers’ and I started taking showers together, because we couldn’t lift our arms over our heads,” says the other contestant. “We’d duck down so we could shampoo each other.”
The trainers, she says, were unmoved. “They’d say stuff like, ‘Pain is just weakness leaving the body.’ ”
This contestant says she and most of her castmates came away with bad knees. “There was one guy whose back was so bad he could only exercise in the swimming pool. By the end of the show, I was running on 400 calories and eight- to nine-hour workouts per day. Someone asked me where I was born, and I couldn’t remember. My short-term memory still sucks.”
So why do so many contestants stick with the show?
“You’re brainwashed to believe that you’re super-lucky to be there,” Hibbard says. One doctor told a contestant she was exhibiting signs of Stockholm syndrome, and Hibbard herself fell prey to it.
“I was thinking, ‘Dear God, don’t let anybody down. You will appear ungrateful if you don’t lose more weight before the season finale.’ ”
The other contestant had a similar response. Despite “the harassment and the bullying, I wanted to please them,” she says. She lost seven pounds in one week and apologized. “I’d lost 12 pounds the week before,” she says.
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.”
When Hibbard got home, her best friend and boyfriend took her straight to the doctor. “She said I had such severe shin splints that she didn’t know how I was still walking,” Hibbard says.
Jillian MichaelsPhoto: AP
The show’s most famous trainer, Jillian Michaels, quit “The Biggest Loser” for the third time in June 2014, with People magazine reporting she was “deeply concerned” about the show’s “poor care of the contestants.”
In a statement to The Post, NBC said only: “Our contestants are closely monitored and medically supervised. The consistent ‘Biggest Loser’ health transformations of over 300 contestants through 16 seasons of the program speak for themselves.”
Expert Darby doesn’t buy it. “With most weight-loss programs, people gain at least half of the weight back,” she says. “And the people who are most successful in our studies are the ones who make small changes over the long term — so I can’t imagine that anyone on ‘The Biggest Loser’ has weight loss that’s sustainable.”
Hibbard, who lost 121 pounds to end up at 144, put weight back on, but won’t say how much. Yet she feels a responsibility as someone once held up as false inspiration.
“If I’m going to walk around collecting accolades, I also have a responsibility [to tell the truth],” she says. “There’s a moral and ethical question here when you take people who are morbidly obese and work them out to the point where they vomit, all because it makes for good TV.”
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Filed under NBC , Obesity , The Biggest Loser , Weight loss
[h=1]The brutal secrets behind ‘The Biggest Loser’[/h]By Maureen Callahan
Name(required)
Email(required)
Comment(required)
January 18, 2015 | 7:00am
Kai Hibbard weighed 265 pounds before starting "The Biggest Loser" and dropped 121 pounds during the show to end up at 144. Photo: Getty Images (2)
[h=3]MORE ON:[/h][h=6]The Biggest Loser[/h]
[h=5]Government-backed DASH diet tops list as nation's best regimen[/h]
[h=5]‘Sons of Anarchy’ revs up for its final wild ride[/h]
[h=5]Meet the new coaches for season 16 of 'The Biggest Loser'[/h]
[h=5]Viewers fear for 'Loser's’ health [/h]
She had always struggled with her weight, but in January of 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.”
“So I made a videotape,” Hibbard says, “and the next thing I know, I’m on a reality TV show.”
Hibbard had never seen “The Biggest Loser.” She had no idea what she was in for.
‘The whole f- -king show,” she says today, “is a fat-shaming disaster that I’m embarrassed to have participated in.”
Since its premiere in 2004, “The Biggest Loser” — which pits obese contestants against one another in a race to lose the most weight — has been one of the most popular reality shows of all time.
The 16th season finale will air live on Jan. 29. Average weekly viewership is 7 million people, and about 200,000 people audition per season.
The show rakes in about $100 million annually in ad sales, with ancillary products such as cookbooks, DVDs, protein powder, clothing, video games and branded weight-loss camps bringing in tens more millions of dollars per year.
Kai HibbardPhoto: Getty Images
In a country where two-thirds of the population is overweight or obese, “The Biggest Loser” has multifaceted appeal: It’s aspirational and grotesque, punitive and redemptive — skinny or fat, it’s got something for you. It’s not uncommon to see contestants worked out to the point of vomiting or collapsing from exhaustion. Contestants, collegially and poignantly, refer to one another as “losers.”
“You just think you’re so lucky to be there,” Hibbard says, “that you don’t think to question or complain about anything.”
Contestants are made to sign contracts giving away rights to their own story lines and forbidding them to speak badly about the show.
Once selected, Hibbard was flown to LA. When she got to her hotel, she was greeted by a production assistant, who checked her in and took away her key card. When not filming, she was to stay in her room at all times.
“The hotel will report to them if you leave your room,” Hibbard says. “They assume you’re going to talk to other contestants.”
Another competitor, who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity, says that when she first checked in, a production assistant also took her cellphone and laptop for 24 hours. She suspects her computer was bugged.
Kai Hibbard during the Live Finale of “The Biggest Loser” Season 3.Photo: Getty Images
“The camera light on my MacBook would sometimes come on when I hadn’t checked in,” she says. “It was like Big Brother was always watching you.” The sequestration lasts five days.
After an initial winnowing process, 14 of 50 finalists are taken to “the ranch,” where they live, work out and suffer in seclusion. (The remaining 36 are sent home to lose weight on their own, and return later in the season.)
Those who remain, Hibbard says, are not allowed to call home. “You might give away show secrets,” she says. After six weeks, contestants get to make a five-minute call, monitored by production.
“I know that one of the contestants’ children became very ill and was in the ICU,” Hibbard says. “He was allowed to talk to his family — but he didn’t want to leave, because the show would have been done with him.”
Once at the ranch, contestants are given a medical exam, then start working out immediately, for dangerous lengths of time — from five to eight hours straight.
“There was no easing into it,” Hibbard says. “That doesn’t make for good TV. My feet were bleeding through my shoes for the first three weeks.”
“My first workout was four hours long,” says the other contestant. She came on to the show a few years ago at more than 300 pounds. On her first day, she was put through this regimen:
- Rowing
- Body-weight work
- Kettle bells
- Cool-down on treadmill
- Interval training
- Stairmaster
- Outside work with tires
Her trainer yelled, “Get up!” then made a comment about a sick and overweight relative.
“I got up,” she says. “You’re just in shock. Your body’s in shock. All the contestants would say to each other, ‘What the f- -k just happened?’ ”
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.”
Hibbard had the same experience. “They would say things to contestants like, ‘You’re going 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. One production assistant told a contestant to take up smoking because it would cut her appetite in half.”
Meanwhile, their calories were severely restricted. The recommended daily intake for a person of average height and weight is 1,200 to 1,600 calories per day. The contestants were ingesting far less than 1,000 per day.
Hibbard says the bulk of food on her season was provided by sponsors and had little to no nutritional value.
Kai Hibbard during the Live Finale of “The Biggest Loser” Season 3.Photo: Getty Images
“Your grocery list is approved by your trainer,” she says. “My season had a lot of Franken-foods: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray, Kraft fat-free cheese, Rockstar Energy Drinks, Jell-O.”
At one point, Hibbard says, production did bloodwork on all the contestants, and the show’s doctor prescribed electrolyte drinks. “And the trainer said, ‘Don’t drink that — it’ll put weight on you. You’ll lose your last chance to save your life.’ ”
Such extreme, daily workouts and calorie restriction result in steep weight losses — up to 30 pounds lost in one week.
“Safe weight loss is one to two pounds per week, and most people find that hard,” says Lynn Darby, a professor of exercise science at Bowling Green State University. “If you reduce your calories to less than 800-1,000 a day, your metabolism will shut down. Add five to eight hours of exercise a day — that’s like running a marathon, in poor shape, five days a week. I’m surprised that no one’s really been injured on the show.”
In fact, contestants have been seriously injured, but it’s not often shown. The first-ever “Biggest Loser,” Ryan Benson, went from 330 pounds to 208 — but after the show, he said he was so malnourished he was urinating blood. “That’s a sign of kidney damage, if not failure,” Darby says. Benson later gained back all the weight and was disowned by the show.
In 2009, two contestants were hospitalized — one via airlift. And 2014’s Biggest Loser, Rachel Frederickson, became the first winner to generate concern that she had lost too much weight, dropping 155 pounds in months. She appeared on the cover of People with the headline “Too Thin, Too Fast?” Frederickson (5-foot-4, 105 pounds) admitted to working out four times a day, and within one month of the finale had gained back 20 pounds.
Rachel Frederickson dropped 155 pounds — making her 105 pounds at the end of “The Biggest Loser.”Photo: Getty Images
“Just calorie restriction in and of itself has to be supervised,” Darby says. “I mean, people die. Then add that exercise load on top of it. The joints of someone who has never exercised absorbing the force of 300 pounds of jumping or bouncing? It’s just not safe.”
Frederickson at “The Biggest Loser” Finale.Photo: AP
Hibbard says she and other contestants sustained major physical damage.
“One contestant had a torn calf muscle and bursitis in her knees,” Hibbard says. “The doctor told her, ‘You need to rest.’ She said, ‘Production told me I can’t rest.’ At one point after that, production ordered her to run, and she said, ‘I can’t.’ She was seriously injured. But they edited her to make her look lazy and bitchy and combative.”
Hibbard’s own health declined dramatically. “My hair was falling out,” she says. “My period stopped. I was only sleeping three hours a night.” Hibbard says that to this day, her period is irregular, her hair still falls out, and her knees “sound like Saran Wrap” every time she goes up and down stairs. “My thyroid, which I never had problems with, is now crap,” she says.
“One of the other ‘losers’ and I started taking showers together, because we couldn’t lift our arms over our heads,” says the other contestant. “We’d duck down so we could shampoo each other.”
The trainers, she says, were unmoved. “They’d say stuff like, ‘Pain is just weakness leaving the body.’ ”
This contestant says she and most of her castmates came away with bad knees. “There was one guy whose back was so bad he could only exercise in the swimming pool. By the end of the show, I was running on 400 calories and eight- to nine-hour workouts per day. Someone asked me where I was born, and I couldn’t remember. My short-term memory still sucks.”
So why do so many contestants stick with the show?
“You’re brainwashed to believe that you’re super-lucky to be there,” Hibbard says. One doctor told a contestant she was exhibiting signs of Stockholm syndrome, and Hibbard herself fell prey to it.
“I was thinking, ‘Dear God, don’t let anybody down. You will appear ungrateful if you don’t lose more weight before the season finale.’ ”
The other contestant had a similar response. Despite “the harassment and the bullying, I wanted to please them,” she says. She lost seven pounds in one week and apologized. “I’d lost 12 pounds the week before,” she says.
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.”
When Hibbard got home, her best friend and boyfriend took her straight to the doctor. “She said I had such severe shin splints that she didn’t know how I was still walking,” Hibbard says.
Jillian MichaelsPhoto: AP
The show’s most famous trainer, Jillian Michaels, quit “The Biggest Loser” for the third time in June 2014, with People magazine reporting she was “deeply concerned” about the show’s “poor care of the contestants.”
In a statement to The Post, NBC said only: “Our contestants are closely monitored and medically supervised. The consistent ‘Biggest Loser’ health transformations of over 300 contestants through 16 seasons of the program speak for themselves.”
Expert Darby doesn’t buy it. “With most weight-loss programs, people gain at least half of the weight back,” she says. “And the people who are most successful in our studies are the ones who make small changes over the long term — so I can’t imagine that anyone on ‘The Biggest Loser’ has weight loss that’s sustainable.”
Hibbard, who lost 121 pounds to end up at 144, put weight back on, but won’t say how much. Yet she feels a responsibility as someone once held up as false inspiration.
“If I’m going to walk around collecting accolades, I also have a responsibility [to tell the truth],” she says. “There’s a moral and ethical question here when you take people who are morbidly obese and work them out to the point where they vomit, all because it makes for good TV.”
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Filed under NBC , Obesity , The Biggest Loser , Weight loss
blackram
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bobistheowl said:
Actually, it was Anne Wilson that was the singer, and Nancy Wilson was the guitarist (https://is.gd/rqZx1t).
Anyway, it's a little bit disingenuous to refer to Anne Wilson back in the 70's as being a BBW. She was not that far off of her sister's (Nancy) body style at that time. It was only by the time of Heart's comeback in the late 80's that Nancy had ballooned up.
Still with the teased-up hair and makeup of the 80's, she looked pretty good, but you could tell that the video directors were spending less time on her full body and concentrating only on her face at that time.
oldguyzer
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blackram said:
I was (and still am) a big Heart fan...saw them many times live (including last year on tour in Montreal). Nancy was incredibly hot back in the 80s, and still looks fantastic and plays guitar really well. Anne has had weight problems, but she has one hell of a voice.
Cardinal Fang
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oldguyzer said:
I saw them in concert at Massy Hall the last time they were in Toronto and Anne still has an amazing voice.
U
User-E
Guest
oldguyzer said:
They were role models for me when they first became popular. Back then it was still unusual to have women being the big names in a group.
Cardinal Fang
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Not sure about the sound quality.
Maurice Boscorelli
Senior Member
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Anne did the vocals for the fictitious group Stillwater in one of my favourite movies of all time ''Almost Famous''.
BTW if you haven't seen this flick and you grew up in the 70's it's a must see and a great date movie to boot.
BTW if you haven't seen this flick and you grew up in the 70's it's a must see and a great date movie to boot.
bolt.upright
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Sorry Lily, I didn't look at this thread again until today. My wife keeps buying Greek yogourt (she likes it) so I've tried it a few times but I don't like it as much as my Activia regular yogourt. I prefer strawberrry and vanilla (I tend to buy vanilla because my cats like it too). I like the new Greek yogourt muffin at Timmies though!Lily Divine said:
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