If Fat Bodies Are ‘Problems,’ Then We Need New Equations

In 2003, Hollywood producer David Broome was heading into the locker room after a workout. Outside the locker room door, he noticed a note on a bulletin board that read “Help needed. Please help save my life. Obese person seeking trainer.” Rather than seeing the note as a genuine request for aid, Broome imagined a different possibility. “That’s it,” he said to himself. “That’s the show.” As he recounts in the new Netflix documentary, Fit for TV: The Reality of the Biggest Loser, that fateful moment sparked the creation of NBC’s long-running competition show, The Biggest Loser.

Amid a boom of reality competition and makeover shows such as Extreme Makeover, Survivor, and American Idol, NBC acquired the show, and Broome was tapped as one of the executive producers. From the moment the first episode aired on October 19, 2004, Americans were hooked. For 10 weeks, audiences measuring in the millions watched 12 fat contestants humiliate themselves in their quest to be crowned the “biggest loser” and awarded a hefty prize of $250,000. And they watched it again and again, for 18 seasons.

“My family was one of those who—maybe not throughout all the seasons, but at one point—it was a weekly tradition for all of us to watch it together, which is horrifying in all the various ways,” says Hailey Nicole Otis, Ph.D., a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who specializes in rhetoric and fat studies. “It was interesting because my parents—especially my mom, but both my parents—were particularly into it, and they are both very into fitness. … So both of them really thought it was inspirational.”

The show’s depraved premise was a guaranteed recipe for disaster, but it was also a guaranteed ratings juggernaut: Fatness has long been treated as a spectacle that must be surveilled, corralled, and eventually browbeaten into thin submission, so a show based on literally making fat people thin was destined to be a cultural mainstay. 

“When The Biggest Loser was out, people seemed to take pleasure in watching fat people suffer,” says Breanne Fahs, Ph.D., a professor of women and gender studies and social and cultural analysis at Arizona State University. “That dynamic laid the groundwork for the sadistic relationship society has with fat bodies.”

NBC’s gamble worked, though it was risky at the time for broadcast networks to invest in reality TV shows centered around extreme body transformations. Just ask ABC, which abruptly cancelled Extreme Makeover after four seasons, or Fox, which cancelled the “hurtful and repellant” show, The Swan, after two seasons. But by combining transformation with competition, The Biggest Loser was able to achieve what its competitors failed to: pushing their vulnerable contestants to deadly extremes while also captivating audiences. Of utmost importance to NBC and the show’s executive producers, millions were watching and reinvesting in the long-held cultural idea that fatness is shameful, and humiliation in the pursuit of weight loss is a ritual fat people are expected to endure.

Now, more than two decades after the first episode of The Biggest Loser aired, the explosive allegations levied in Fit for TV serve as both a reckoning and a reminder. In the age of celebrities touting GLP-1s as a miracle cure for “obesity” at the same time weight loss is being culturally reframed as an act of personal wellness, revisiting the craze of The Biggest Loser—and the extremes contestants endured in their quest to lose weight—can serve as a glaring warning for the path we might be walking down … again. 

‘We Were Telling Inspirational Stories’

When The Biggest Loser began airing in 2004, the producers were focused on a singular goal: making good television. The show’s resident physician, Dr. Robert Huizenga, knew that it wasn’t possible to “have a show based on weight loss that’s safe.” When a friend called him to inquire about the possibility of creating a reality show focused on weight loss, he told them a routine diet would lead to between three and four pounds of weight loss per month. But, as he shares in Fit for TV, if the show added exercise into the equation, “that’s where the excitement was.”

The show’s producer took that mandate and ran with it, creating a series that capitalized on the systemic maligning of fat people and the cultural impulse to treat fat people as if we are projects in need of constant improvement. “We were not looking for people who were overweight and happy,” executive producer JD Roth says in the documentary. “There’s a lot of ‘em. That’s fine. We were looking for people who were overweight and unhappy.”

Though each season showed these contestants punishing their bodies, the pay off—losing weight and sometimes accruing fame and fortune—was framed as “inspirational.”

During each episode, these “overweight and unhappy” contestants endured grueling workouts while their trainers, Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels, verbally assaulted them until they pushed their bodies past their limits. (In the documentary, Michaels is shown telling a contestant, “So, unless you faint, puke, or die, keep working!”) On episode after episode, we see contestants experience severe dehydration, burst into tears, vomit, collapse from exhaustion, and still keep exercising in the elusive pursuit of losing enough weight to earn $250,000. 

And that was considered entertainment for the more than seven million viewers who tuned in each week. “When it comes to Biggest Loser, always remember we were trying to make an entertaining show that was on primetime network television,” Harper says in the documentary. “You know what’s not boring television? To see us in a gym, yelling, screaming. That’s inspirational. That’s ‘good TV.’”

But for the contestants themselves, good TV often caused irreparable damage to the very health the show purported to care so much about. Kai Hibbard, who appeared on the third season, began sounding the alarm about the dangerousness of the show in 2015. When she arrived at the ranch the show is shot on, she was given a medical exam and then immediately began working out anywhere from five to eight hours each day. She even collapsed. “There was no easing into it,” Hibbard told The New York Post. “That doesn’t make for good TV. My feet were bleeding through my shoes for the first three weeks.” 

While her exercise increased to a dangerous extreme, her caloric intake was also severely restricted, with Hibbard estimating that she was eating less than 1,000 calories each day. And, as other contestants have revealed, their calories would be even more restricted as they got closer to the designated weigh-in days. “The last 10 days [of the season], I didn’t put any food in my body,” Ryan Benson, who won the first season, says in the documentary. “I was just drinking lemon juice and maple syrup and cayenne pepper.” After the season ended, Benson was so dehydrated that there was blood in his urine sample.

Though each season showed these contestants punishing their bodies, the pay off—losing weight and sometimes accruing fame and fortune—was framed as “inspirational.” It was so inspirational, in fact, that tens of thousands of Americans sent in audition tapes and traveled to different cities for casting calls. Joelle Gwynn, a Black woman who appeared on Season 7, decided to audition after being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. “It wasn’t entertainment but inspiration,” she says in the documentary. “Watching the show, I saw people do miraculous things that I’ve never seen before. People being able to change, make radical change, I was like ‘I want that.’”

However, once the selected contestants—some of whom said in the documentary that they felt they had won the “lottery” by being cast—arrived at the ranch, the fantasy ended and the cruelty began. For contestants like Gwynn, who was one of the few Black people cast on the show, there was a racialized element that undergirded their casting and their treatment. Fit for TV chronicles how Harper specifically targeted Gwynn during her season, berating her when she was unable to run on the treadmill for 30 seconds after participating in a full workout. 

Though she’d watched the show for years before auditioning and being cast, Gwynn was unprepared for how Harper treated her. There’s no doubt: Given that fat people are perceived as lazy, and Black people are perceived as worthless, Gwynn was destined to be singled out. “I’ve never seen someone get abused like that,” Gwynn says during the documentary. “It was very, very, very, very embarrassing. … You cussing me out doesn’t help me.” These racialized dynamics have played out across reality television since MTV began airing The Real World in 1992—and The Biggest Loser is no exception.

As the contestants exercised excessively to burn upwards of 6,000 calories each day, they were also forced to partake in “temptation” challenges. In these challenges, the contestant who ate the most calories in five minutes would be awarded the “prize” of being reconnected with their families. In the documentary, Benson even recalls a particular challenge where the contestants had to build a tower of food with only their teeth. Ultimately, as Roth, one of the executive producers, notes, “The scale was our main character.”

There is nothing unique or particularly innovative about The Biggest Loser turning fat people into a punch line, but airing it to millions of people normalized the humiliation. “The idea [around these challenges] is that fat people cannot be trusted around food,” bestselling author Audrey Gordon says in the documentary. “It’s designed to make you draw conclusions about the contestants’ character based on what you see them eat on camera in a five-minute period. The goal here is to make a television show. And the more spectacle, the better.” 

Given their unhappiness within their bodies, these contestants, several of whom appear in the documentary, were willing to subject themselves to such abusive measures because they had a magic carrot dangled in their faces. If they followed the “medical” advice of the show’s trainers, they would be cured of their unhappiness while also possibly winning a life-changing sum of money. 

Tracey Yukich, a contestant on Season 8, decided to audition for the show because her marriage was in shambles due to infidelity. As she explains in Fit for TV, she thought losing a large amount of weight could persuade her husband to recommit to their union. “Maybe [the show] would fix me. Maybe [losing weight] would make me a better mom, a better friend,” she says in the documentary. “I felt like my weight and everything about it was just something that was constantly bringing me down. I wanted to change my life.”

Our size is perceived as a personal choice, so therefore, we should adopt an “any means necessary” attitude to lose weight, even if that means subjecting ourselves to restrictive eating and abusive exercise regimens.

Though the show’s casting team and producers seemingly knew the fragility of Yukich’s emotional, mental, and physical state, she was still allowed to join Season 8. Early on in the season, she was pushed to near death. Yukich collapsed during a challenge where the contestants were required to run a mile on a beach to secure their spot on the show. “I don't remember a lot,” she says in the documentary. “I remember hearing the helicopter. I just felt like I was floating. And then my grandpa was there. And then I saw darkness. But then I saw light. So I knew, I knew I died that day.”

After being airlifted to a hospital, Yukich was diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis, a serious medical condition in which damaged muscle tissue releases its proteins and electrolytes into the blood, which can cause irreversible damage to the body’s organs. Though Yukich’s liver and kidneys began shutting down and she nearly died, she was still determined to remain on the show. After all, she explains in the documentary, if she were not fat, she would have been able to complete that mile without collapsing and, therefore, losing weight was the ultimate remedy. 

“I thought it was my fault because I was fat,” Yukich says in the docuseries. “I felt like my weight and everything about it was something that constantly was bringing me down. I wanted to change my life, and I do feel like at that time that it was, like, my only hope.” 

Her health was secondary to the show’s principal aim: entertaining the masses at the expense of their fat contestants. Though Dr. Huizenga knew it was dangerous for Yukich to continue on the show, he still cleared Yukich to return to the ranch.  

Dr. Jennifer Kerns was a contestant on the show and then became one of the treating physicians. “I don’t think that anyone should be made to exercise until they vomit,” she says in the documentary. “I don’t think that this is the way that people should lose weight, but I think that achieving a dramatic weight-loss transformation was so valuable to people that they were willing to do anything that they had to to achieve it.” 

For some of those contestants, that included allegedly taking unapproved weight-loss supplements given to them by their trainers. (Both Harper and Michaels have denied that allegation). Regardless of the show drawing the line at illicit weight-loss drugs, the line itself moved when a show was created that predicated itself on, as Roth says in the documentary, “telling inspirational stories” about fat people that wasn’t about their humanity, but rather about shrinking themselves to be regarded as human. 

A Shrinking World

While The Biggest Loser trafficked in the idea that humiliating fat people can be both inspirational and lucrative, everyday fat people were experiencing the ripple effects of the show being a cultural phenomenon. Though Fahs, the Arizona State University professor, didn’t watch The Biggest Loser, one of her medical providers still brought the show into one of her appointments. “I had a terrible doctor who told me it would be ‘therapeutic’ for me to watch the show to inspire me to lose weight,” she says. “He essentially prescribed it to me, which was very bad advice for so many reasons. The show has haunted us all.”

Unfortunately, Fahs’ experience became more common as the show accrued popularity, with a 2012 study published in the journal Obesity finding that watching The Biggest Loser exacerbated anti-fat attitudes: 

After exposure to The Biggest Loser, participants reported significantly higher anti-fat attitudes; specifically, they reported greater belief that weight is controllable and greater dislike of obese individuals. Although contestants on The Biggest Loser shared their struggles with weight loss, this did not decrease participants’ endorsement of the belief that weight is controllable as well as dislike of obese individuals.

There’s nothing particularly striking about this conclusion for fat people, who are hypervisible in our cultural imagination and simultaneously marginalized. As someone who has publicly chronicled the medical neglect I experienced because of my size— neglect which eventually led to a diagnosis of heart failure and pulmonary hypertension—I am intimately familiar with how fat people are mistreated in our cultural institutions. Our size is perceived as a personal choice, so therefore, we should adopt an “any means necessary” attitude to lose weight, even if that means subjecting ourselves to restrictive eating and abusive exercise regimens. Though The Biggest Loser didn’t create this warped reality, it did legitimize it.

“The persistence of fatphobia was probably the biggest thing on my mind after watching the docuseries,” says Otis, the University of Maryland professor. “I immediately texted people I knew, asking if they watched it, asking what they thought, because my thought was this [docuseries] didn’t really do much in terms of taking accountability for the actual harm of the show. It also didn’t do much to interrogate the underlying fatphobia that made a show like that possible. And then I realized, well, of course it’s not going to interrogate that because we haven’t moved past it.”

Instead of doing the interrogating that Otis mentions, the final episode of the docuseries follows some of the contestants, many of whom have regained the weight they lost because the show caused the permanent slowing of their metabolism. The final episode also relitigates why the show was cancelled, why it should have never had a competitive element, and why the show’s legacy shouldn’t be tainted by its outcomes—none of which considers how we can envision a world in which fat people are allowed to exist without being subjected to constant pressure to lose weight. 

But if Fit for TV were to do that, then it would directly contradict the premise that The Biggest Loser wasn’t as effective as it could’ve been, but it was helpful and it did help to usher in a new miracle: GLP-1s. “We live in a different era, so if you had a show today, it might be people injecting themselves once a week,” Dr. Dhruv Khallar, a physician and professor of health and policy and economics at Weill Cornell Medical College, says in the documentary. 

New Prescriptions for Harm and Hope

More than 20 years after the first episode of The Biggest Loser aired on NBC, the cultural scripts that turned the show into a ratings bonanza are still omnipresent and damaging for fat people. There are now natural inheritors of The Biggest Loser’s legacy, including TLC’s wildly popular show, My 600-lb. Life, and its series of shows focused on sisters, friends, and roommates who weigh more than 1,000 pounds and want to undergo medical procedures to lose weight.

“The fat body is always framed as a problem—personally and culturally,” says Fahs. “Media stories panic about fat people bankrupting Medicare or overwhelming the system. It’s the same narrative: Fatness is inherently negative, a liability, and a threat.”

But there is also a more insidious element now, which is concerning for the fat liberation activists and scholars who have been pushing for new cultural scripts. The group of medications known as GLP-1s have long been prescribed to diabetics to help alleviate the symptoms of the disease. But now, thanks to Big Pharma and the billion-dollar dieting industry, GLP-1s are being repurposed as weight-loss drugs that are supposed to help those using them lose a percentage of their body weight. A number of celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey and Serena Williams, have publicly endorsed GLP-1s while the American Academy of Pediatrics abandoned their “watchful waiting” approach for children who are diagnosed as obese. They are now recommending weight-loss surgery and medication for teenagers over the age of 13. 

There is a continuity that exists from the popularity of The Biggest Loser to the current ascension of GLP-1s, one that relies on oppressing fat people while proclaiming to help them.

“We still have not decoupled body size from health culturally, even though we have way more evidence to suggest that [it should be],” says Otis, who is currently working on a book about the body positive movement. “One of the things I’m finding is that the Health at Every Size, anti-diet culture movement that started in the late ’80s, early ’90s already found that research. The weight stigma research was there, showing that treating fat people poorly is more detrimental to health, and also that diets don't work. We had that evidence then, and we have more now, but companies figured out a way to co-opt it.”

Instead of creating more fat-inclusive institutions, GLP-1s are now touted as the ultimate solution. One of the saddest parts of Fit for TV is that some of these same contestants have begun using weight-loss drugs because, as Gwynn, the Season 7 contestant notes, “It cuts out the food noise.” The logic seems to be: If we are unable to treat fat people well, then why don’t we erase the need for fat people altogether?

“Today, coverage of GLP-1s still moralizes fatness,” Fahs says, while also noting that GLP-1s don’t actually make the majority of fat people thin. “[GLP-1s] typically lead to losing a percentage of body weight—maybe 40 pounds—but that doesn’t shift someone into a new social category. Celebrities distort this reality.” As Fahs chronicles in a recent paper published in the Fat Studies journal, there are four major patterns within the media coverage of GLP-1s in the United States, including fat people being made invisible by not being interviewed by the news media and fatness being treated as a monolith. Meanwhile, research shows that GLP-1s must always be taken to maintain any weight loss and that the side effects are so severe that Ozempic, one of the GLP-1s on the market, is facing $2 billion in lawsuits. Yet, GLP-1s are still being spotlighted as a cure for “obesity.” 

As we culturally shine a new light on The Biggest Loser and catchy Ozempic commercials air daily, there are a lot of possibilities for sustaining a movement focused on liberating fat people rather than erasing them. In a 2019 paper published in Women’s Reproductive Health, Fahs argues, in part, that we must “imagine more ways to draw in angry, emotional, and activist responses to fat stigma, particularly as a more radical wing of fat activism springs up.”

Sometimes that takes the form of purposely rebuking the push for GLP-1s, a trend that Otis is noticing. “I’m seeing a lot more fat people who are choosing not to take GLP-1s, who are choosing not to engage in intentional weight loss even as it’s become more available,” she says. “There’s almost a renewed vigor to be visible about that.” Fatness is neither personal choice nor personal failure; it is systemic, so rejecting GLP-1s is not merely a rebuke of a “cure” but a refusal to accept that their bodies should be taken through the ringer to achieve thinness.

The world has been oppressive to fat people, and we deserve the sacred joy that all people are entitled to.

Other times, those possibilities come through the push for fat-inclusive legislation, which the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance and FLARE are pursuing through the Campaign for Size Freedom. Since 2019, the Campaign for Size Freedom has been working in several states, including New York, Minnesota, and Delaware, to lobby legislators to pass bills that outlaw weight and height discrimination. 

While legislative fights are essential, they can also be slow moving, so it is important to fight for systemic change in our small, everyday practices. For Otis, that has taken the form of advocating for better seating in the classrooms where she teaches, so both she and her fat students can be more comfortable. For some doctors, that has included becoming trained to recognize their unconscious bias against fatness and begin treating fat patients with more respect, care, and diligence. And, for many of us, it includes naming that the world has been oppressive to fat people, and we deserve the sacred joy that all people are entitled to.

“We can’t just sit around and wait for the powers that be,” Otis emphasizes. “We have to make smaller pockets of joy and radical acceptance in the meantime.” That’s one of myriad reasons fat people are also intentionally gathering in digital and physical spaces to fortify their commitment to community- and world-building. Being visibly and comfortably fat in a moment where we’re encouraged not to be can be a form of resistance, as is the case with both Philly FatCon and Seattle FatCon, two fat-focused conventions where everyone from influencers to medical doctors gather to discuss the state of fatphobia and consider ways to make the world more inclusive for fat people.

“Creating spaces for fat community, whether online or in person, is crucial,” Otis says. “These spaces feed us while we push for bigger change. Social movements have often been framed as seeking recognition from dominant power, but they also engage in world-making at the community level. Fat folks are particularly good at this. We’re fighting for larger change, but also creating spaces where people can be in their bodies and celebrate each other.”

Intentional fat communities serve as a sharp rebuke of The Biggest Loser, which prided itself on gathering families around the television to poke fun at fat people and watch their bodies be forced into a thin ideal. Instead of buying into the idea that thinness is a form of self-love while fatness is a form of neglect, fat communities understand liberation is a political practice. If we are to get free, then we must embrace new ways of seeing and being in order to build a world where The Biggest Loser or My 600-lb. Life isn’t the dominant script about what it means to live in a large body. It is not just on fat people to create the world; it is going to require all of us.

“Building fat community is important, but in the face of rising fascism and authoritarianism, I think about the ways we can all work together to make the world better for those the world is violent toward,” Otis concludes. “That’s what I envision.”

The Biggest Loser might have been a bellwether for the fatphobic world we now inhabit, but there are still possibilities worth hoping and fighting for; if not for ourselves, then for the fat children who are still being subjected to BMI tests and mile runs in gym class. Those possibilities crystallize when we stop thinking about fatness as a failure and instead accept that bodies have always come in all sizes and all shapes—and always will. 

“We need to stop moralizing bodies as successes or failures,” Fahs concludes. “This rhetoric harms fat people, but also people of color, queer people, disabled people, older people. It eventually touches everyone. We should cultivate more anger and collective outrage at these harms—less shame, more rage—as a catalyst for change.”

This piece was edited by s.e. smith and copyedited by Andrea Grimes.

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