14 DAY TRIAL // The weight loss television show “Biggest Loser” is one of the biggest ratings earners it its segment. For those not in the know, it presents the journey of overweight people to a slimmer, healthier and in better spirits self. So far, it’s been seen as a brilliant show, for not only does it help a handful of people directly by helping them lead healthier lives, but also those at home, who may thus be motivated to change their life for the better.
At the same time, it also makes a killing in terms of sales, with the last season reportedly generating an estimated $100 million in revenue for the network. And it’s precisely here where the problem is, former contestant on season 3 Kai Hibbard says in a brand new interview cited by CBS News. Because of the pressure she was put on the show, she developed an eating disorder and is now in worse health than she was back when she was still overweight – and that’s not even the worst part about the show, she says.
Hibbard lost 118 pounds in 12 weeks on the show – or, at least, that’s what producers wanted audiences to think happened. As she puts it, in television, things are never what they seem and this also applies here, as odd as that may sound. She actually lost the weight in a lot more time, and this is why she’s now speaking out against the show, because it paints a picture for millions of overweight people that is simply not true. Hibbard insists she stands to gain nothing by speaking out now; on the contrary, actually.
“I have people that come up to me and talk to me and ask me why they can’t lose 12 pound in a week when I did. When I didn’t. It didn’t happen. It’s TV. So, if I’m going to be grateful and be an inspiration, at the same time I need to take blame and responsibility for the fact that I helped perpetuate a myth that’s dangerous. A week is not a week on TV... I’m saying that it would be most times longer than a week. And I believe once in my season it was less than a week. Not always a week,” the former contestant reveals.
And that’s not all: though the process of losing weight is presented as a healthy one, it’s not necessarily so. In Hibbard’s case, she actually developed an eating disorder and her friends and family had to stage an intervention after she was done with the show, to ensure that she returned to healthier eating patterns. As a result of that, she ended up gaining 70 of the pounds she’d lost in the reported period of 12 weeks. Pressure on the show also delivered a very serious blow to her self esteem, which, understandably, only made matters that much worse.
“I left with a very poor mental body image. I found myself loathing what I looked like the more weight I dropped because of the pressure on me. And I found myself doing things like considering coffee a meal. And because of the mentality that I was surrounded with, and the pressure that was given at that show, it was considered acceptable to behave that way. I take full responsibility for everything that I’ve done. But you can’t understand it unless you understand the pressure that was there,” she explains.