14 DAY TRIAL // Rachel Frederickson, the winner of season 15 of NBC’s The Biggest Loser, won the big prize of $250,000 (€184,311) by losing 59.6 percent of her body weight and becoming the contestant with the highest margin of lost weight ever recorded on the show. She is also the first to generate this much talk of an eating disorder.
Shortly after she was proclaimed winner, a huge scandal started because she’d lost too much weight over too short a period of time. In a way, by naming her winner, the show seemed to be trading one bad habit (the obese lifestyle) for another (starvation), and to indirectly encourage the latter as the better alternative.
As part of her post-show media campaign, Rachel stopped by The Today Show and, as BuzzFeed points out, the issue of the ongoing controversy around how much weight she lost wasn’t addressed once.
You can see the video from her appearance below. Rachel wasn’t in the studio because she couldn’t travel on account of the bad weather.
The interview started – and ended – with praises for Rachel and how “amazing” and “fabulous” she looked, and included questions like what will you do with the money and did your track record as an athlete help you train harder to lose weight.
The Today anchors don’t even ask her if she’d heard of the furor her appearance on the Biggest Loser finale generated, let alone ask her for a comment on the eating disorder rumors.