Reports are coming in saying that The Biggest Loser is cancelled. That’s excellent news and I could not be happier. Let’s recap this crap:
The Biggest Loser was a horror of a television show in which fat people were physically and mentally abused as they tried to lose as much weight as possible, as fast as possible, regardless of the danger, for a chance to win a tiny fraction of the amount of money that the show made off their abuse.
I am thoroughly convinced that if this show was shot with dogs rather than fat people it would have been pulled off the air after the first episode, because people wouldn’t have stood for this kind of mistreatment of dogs. The fact that fat people would subject themselves to this show is not a justification for the many abuses the show perpetrated.
Now the show finds itself under a cloud of suspicion as former “competitors” talk about the abuses that they suffered at the hands of their “trainers” and the show’s doctor, Robert Huizenga.
Click here to read the full piece, including how the show hurt not only their contestants, but also their viewers.
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Dances With Fat 
Well, that took quite ever long enough.
Incidentally, in the 18-49 demo that is the main driver of advertising revenue for primetime network TV (and hence strongly correlated with renewal/cancellation decisions), the last four seasons averaged ratings as follows:
Season 14, 2013: 2.32
Season 15, 2014 (the Rachel Frederickson season):
1.93, down 17%
Season 16, 2014-5: 1.24, down 36%
Season 17, 2016: 1.07, down 13%
More than half the desired audience jumped ship in three seasons. And the majority of the damage was done after the Frederickson ending.
The show should have been cancelled after the Frederickson season for sure, but at least NBC took a beating from not doing so.
That so called Doctor should lose his medical license.
They would occasionally fim segments close to my house at UC Riverside. My daughter was working at the Riverside Outback steakhouse when they came in ordered for the crew but not the contestants. Go figure right?
I watched a few episodes, and I never could figure out how the contestants could lose so much weight if they were actually following the exercise/eating plan that they show claimed they were following.
No I know that is a big fat lie.
I also couldn’t figure out how this rapid weight loss was ‘to save a person’s life’ since it was my understanding the rapid weight loss is usually considered a BAD THING.
After I started following Kai Hibbard, I was completely horrified at what was being done to these people.
I can only hope that the contestants who have been on that show get whatever help they need to cope with the experience.
I can’t be the only one who spat my drink halfway across the room when I read TBL’s press release, which states…
…wait for it…
“The safety and well-being of our contestants is, and has always been, paramount,”
Yeah, right! The show contains explicit examples of purigng behavior (encouraged with lines like “puke is love”) and textbook psychological abuse, so even if you believe TBL’s press release line that the other accusations are false… and let me be frank, I trust TBL about as far as I could throw Primus in mascon gravity… they *filmed and aired* enough material to condemn their practices as unsafe.
Please tell me their food is going away, too. I don’t want to eat yummy, tasty, healthy vegetables, while giving THEM any money. And I don’t want to have to return or throw away a bag of carrots, just because it has “The Biggest Loser” on the label.
I had to convince my mother not to buy their produce, and she thought it was so strange that I would care about produce labels, since I never had before. I just would buy the produce that I wanted, and that fit into my budget. Now, I’d pay more for literally any other brand of carrot. “I don’t CARE if it’s on sale. I won’t eat it! Please don’t buy it! I’ll have to go out and buy more carrots somewhere else, and they’ll clog up our veggie drawer in the fridge.”
Mom, bless her, had never heard of The Biggest Loser TV show. Somehow, she managed to not watch that channel at the right time to see commercials for that show, I guess. Lucky her.
Also, don’t you just “love” how they would keep saying they were doing this to the contestants “to save their lives” because the poor people were going to die of fat?
But killing them on the way to thinness, that’s healthy!
And if these contestants die young, it will be blamed on the fat, not the torture.
“And if these contestants die young, it will be blamed on the fat, not the torture.”
Oh, this so much. Obesity has been blamed for so much negligence and incompetence in both the medical and fitness arenas, it’s become the professional equivalent of the imaginary friend who broke your mom’s favorite vase while she was at the store and you *totally weren’t* playing baseball in the house.