14 DAY TRIAL // Rachel Frederickson set a lot of tongues wagging on last season’s finale of The Biggest Loser, when she stepped out for the final weigh-in and she was a mere shadow of her former self, going down from 260 pounds (117.9 kg) to 155 pounds (70.3 kg), which many viewers deemed too much.
On the show, she had lost almost 60 percent of her starting weight, but it wasn’t this that bothered viewers, but rather the fact that she had a BMI under the healthy one and was looking considerably frail and unhealthy.
That was in early February. Two months on and Rachel has gained about 20 pounds (9 kg): she’s fuller in the face and body and, she tells Us Weekly, she’s convinced she’s now at her “perfect weight.” The focus for her now is on maintaining the weight loss and, of course, first and foremost, staying healthy.
“It started a discussion about body image. That's huge,” she says of her big reveal on the final show of The Biggest loser. “I've gone up about 20 pounds [9 kg]. I think I'm at my perfect weight!”
Not that she ever said she’d lost sight of the reason she went on the show in the first place: after the dust settled a bit on the public uproar, she spoke out on the controversy for the first time, insisting that she’d done nothing to put her health in danger. If anything, she was doing it before the competition, when she was grossly overweight.
Contrary to what many viewers believed, she hadn’t traded one unhealthy lifestyle for another, she had not developed an eating disorder or been starving herself to win the big prize. She did admit to working out as much as 6 hours a day and to counting calories strictly.
These days, she’s back to her normal life. “I work out an hour, six days a week. I love classes like SoulCycle. I also loosely count calories, but sometimes I might eat an Oreo. It's not the end of the world,” she says.
Frederickson expected to gain some weight back after she returned to her pre-show life, just like she said on her first appearance on The Today after The Biggest Loser: it’s not realistic to expect not to, once you stop working out for as many hours as she did, just like it’s not realistic to imagine you can keep up a 6-hour daily workout routine, once you go back to your job.