The Biggest Loser

It's really hard to not post comment on shows such as the Biggest Loser. Whilst on the one hand it's great for personal training and fitness in general - it helps to motivate the general public into action, I really disagree with the methods and the whole concept of the show.

Yes, I know... it's a show. It's meant to have MASSIVE results and MASSIVE impact, but do they really have to be so brutal to those poor people? and for the love of god, 1100 calories for the women and 1400 calories for the men? No wonder these people don't keep the weight off without some drastic measures later - they're not learning how to do it for life.

I would never advocate a healthy diet for a women to be less than 1500 - 1600 calories, and for a man 1900-2000 calories - depending upon their activity levels.
But for people that were eating around 4-6000 calories a day and upward, doing no exercise, to now drop to those levels and do around 4 hours of intense exercise a day...no wonder blood sugar levels and tempers, moods etc run rampant.

That little amount of calories would have sent the most hardened person straight to the temptation table in a flurry.

But... this is the only way they get such massive weight drops.

Which leads me to my next point of contention.
This is just not realistic people - 1/2kg to 1kg a week is the key to healthy, long term weightloss. Anything above that is generally not sustainable - yes, you may get more or less fluctuations on a week to week basis - but if you average it out over a 10-12 week period, it should average out to a kilo a week. By doing that you are learning more about what your body needs, how much it uses, what is optimum, how you feel, if you need to add more 'fuel' or could tweak a little more. At least when you start off around 1600 calories a day, you have somewhere else to go. If you start at 1100 calories and 4 hours of exercise...what else are you going to have to do when you plateau, which you inevitably will as your body shuts down its metabolism thinking its in starvation mode.

Crazy stuff. Yet compelling viewing...if only for the wrong reasons.