The Biggest Loser is motivational T.V. at its best. One of NBC’s most popular long-running reality shows, it’s easy to see why people enjoy watching The Biggest Loser. My husband affectionately refers to the show as the “Fat Farm” and we rarely miss an episode. Every week The Biggest Loser dishes out constructive diet and exercise tips to viewers that are appropriate for everyone, heavy or thin.
But, The Biggest Loser is so much more than that. It reaches out on a very humanistic emotional level. Our hearts are touched as we watch The Biggest Loser’s contestants struggle with obesity and weight loss, vicariously sharing their personal pain and triumphs as they transform their lives for themselves and their families.
The Biggest Loser contestants shed amazing amounts of weight, often a hundred pounds or more, in as little as ten weeks. The player with the overall highest percentage of weight loss becomes The Biggest Loser and is awarded a $250,000 prize with The Biggest Loser title at the season finale.
Each week, The Biggest Loser contestants are weighed on an oversized Biggest Loser scale. The Biggest Loser “weigh-ins” are accompanied by a lot of camera drama to heighten viewer suspense.
Prior to the weekly weigh-in, viewers witness highlights from the contestants’ grueling daily workouts and torturous hours spent in near non-stop training with Biggest Loser fitness trainers, Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels. Bob coaches the Blue Team and Jillian the Black Team. They train their teams until the players become as conditioned as professional athletes training at the same fitness level.
At The Biggest Loser weekly weigh-in, two contestants with the least percentage of weight loss fall below the highly feared “yellow line.” Being placed below the arbitrary yellow line means their fate now rests in the hands of fellow Biggest Loser contestants who ultimately decide which player will be voted off The Biggest Loser Ranch and sent home.
This can be a very emotional time for The Biggest Loser players. Decisions to send one player home over another are often based on personal alliances. Sympathetic feelings toward a particular fellow contestant, or feelings that one player deserves to stay on the Biggest Loser Ranch more than another, may affect the final vote.
Sometimes a Biggest Loser player is sent home because other contestants want to honor that particular player’s request to be sent home for personal reasons. Most of the time, the majority of Biggest Loser players vote off a player they perceive as the bigger threat.
The Biggest Loser player voted off each week is then highlighted returning home for an emotional family reunion. Viewers get to see how voted-off players look today, generally much thinner than when they first left the Biggest Loser campus. The Biggest Loser players sent home still have an opportunity to win $100,000 if they happen to be the returning player with the highest percentage of weight loss at the end of the season’s Biggest Loser finale.
Additionally, The Biggest Loser players are eligible to win prizes for weekly physical challenges. The prizes vary and are often as unusual as the wacky, but creative physical challenges themselves. Viewers may wonder, what will The Biggest Loser think up next?
A free one or two-pound pass, or immunity from elimination for the coming week are highly valued and preferred over prizes worth thousands. Any prize that allows one of The Biggest Loser contestants a chance to spend another week at The Biggest Loser Ranch is considered worth its weight in gold.
Weekly prizes on The Biggest Loser have included cash, groceries for a year, meals prepared by a gourmet chef, gym equipment, even new vehicles and vacation trips. Immunity or one-pound passes are almost always chosen over prizes worth $10,000 or more if The Biggest Loser contestant is given an option. Phone calls home and care packages from one’s family are prizes that contestants highly treasure, too.
The Biggest Loser’s personal trainers Bob and Jillian relentlessly push The Biggest Loser contestants, seemingly as driven as the players they are training. Every week brings contestants farther along on their path of self-discovery, closer to finding their own deep inner strength. The players’ path of self-discovery leads many of The Biggest Loser contestants to newfound confidence in their abilities and a drive to accomplish anything they set out to do.
The Biggest Loser contestants learn about nutrition and a healthy diet, but they also learn that nutritional knowledge is not enough to maintain weight loss. Contestants must grow to fully understand how and why food often becomes an emotional crutch. No one can fight a weight loss battle if they don’t know their own enemy within. This is critically important for permanent weight loss success, especially when high-calorie comfort foods are hard to resist, and often just a refrigerator ‘s door away.
The Biggest Loser’s success lies in its encouraging message of hope to anyone believing they lack power to change their own lives. The truth is many, if not most of us, live out our lives without ever fully accomplishing all we might have liked or dreamed of doing, held back by our own self-doubt. Too often many of us fail to realize the power to change has been inside us all along, untapped and ready to start working if we would just learn to believe in ourselves.
The first step to change is belief. Without a belief that something is possible, it remains elusively out of reach. Whenever we replace confidence and belief in our self with self-fulfilling self-doubt, our talents and abilities stagnate and we become comfortably uncomfortable in our own discontent.
The Biggest Loser contestants’ individual journeys of personal growth and discovery are what make this show so inspiring to viewers. We all can relate to The Biggest Loser’s message. It is so powerful and popular because it teaches all of us that regardless of our dress size, or the number we see on the scale, that anything is possible if we believe strongly enough in ourselves and our purpose. Each of us has the ability to reach deep inside ourselves and find the strength and determination to persevere and achieve goals we never dreamed possible.
Fans watch The Biggest Loser, thrilled to witness the metamorphosis that takes place in the lives of Biggest Loser contestants. Morbidly obese, encased in cocoons of excess body fat and guilt, the show’s contestants slowly shed layers of pain and guilt along with excess body weight. Many viewers personally relate to the contestants’ struggles; others can only empathize.
But, Biggest Loser fans everywhere revel in the amazing, almost miraculous, contestant transformations. And if you don’t believe me, tune in and watch NBC’s The Biggest Loser. It is the one television show credited with helping change lives all across America. The Biggest Loser airs Tuesday nights on NBC or you can catch full episodes and watch episode recaps by visiting NBC’s The Biggest Loser website at http://www.nbc.com/The_Biggest_Loser/
