Biggest Loser All Couples and Many Colors
Biggest Loser All Couples and Many Colors by Roxanne McDonald
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Forgoing the two- or three-team format, “The Biggest Loser” brings on the competition of couples as individual teams. |
Besides wondering how that is going to work for the superlative trainers, who in the
previous seasons were each assigned to a team, we get to meet a disparate line-up of contestants, dressed in a rainbow of hues:
BROWN TEAM: husband and wife Curtis and Mallory, weighing, respectively, 381 and 217 pounds (total weight: 598 pounds)
PINK TEAM mother and daughter Bette-Sue and Ali, weighing, respectively, 261 and 234 pounds (total weight: 495 pounds)
ORANGE TEAM mother and son Jackie and Dan, weighing, respectively, 246 and 310 pounds (total weight: 556 pounds)
YELLOW TEAM ex-husband and wife Paul and Kelly, weighing, respectively, 303 and 271 pounds (total weight: 574 pounds)
Biggest Loser Losses and Special Gains
Biggest Loser Losses and Special Gains by Roxanne McDonald
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Teasers including “The Biggest Loser” contestants’ original, first-week photos head up a blockbuster episode. |
Great inspiration two days before Thanksgiving comes by way of “The Biggest Loser,” which starts this week with before pictures and indual retrospectives—how they looked, felt, and felt about how they looked.
That’s always a powerful surprise.
Another surprise is how from week to week (real time weeks for us, months for them?) the players change so dramatically for the better. Just turning on the TV on Tuesday nights and tuning to TBL, I have to do a double take and make sure I am not watching an old episode from an old season I don’t recall…, that’s how dramatic the positive changes are:
Bill, whose brother is also a loser (having lost almost 100 pounds), has lost 100 pounds. Make that 106 pounds.
Brian, the only one left on the Red Team, has lost 70 pounds. Make that 76 pounds.
Hollie, who doesn’t get a sub-caption for a while into the show (maybe because last week she had a zero-pound weight loss?), has lost 43 pounds. Make that 51 pounds.
Isabeau, the villain of the day (for going along with the idea of voting off Amy), has lost 57 pounds. Make that 64 pounds.
Julie, who is the least televised for some reason, has lost 38 pounds. Make that 42 pounds.
Kae has lost over 30% of her body weight and 66 pounds and has won a $5,000 shopping bonanza from the plugging sponsor of the week, Prevention Magazine. Make that 69 pounds and her pace on the show.
Neil, ever the humble one, has lost 110 pounds. Make that 118 pounds total (the size of his girlfriend).
Nicole, who is “channels her inner Tyra” in front of the camera, has lost 57 pounds. Make that 61 pounds.
The Biggest Loser Trainers
The Biggest Loser Trainers by Roxanne McDonald
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For some, tough love works. For others, the kid glove approach is best. But what is so effective about drill sergeant humiliation? |
Laura Tucker at Reality Shack wrote up an awesome recap and introduction piece for week one of the new season
and I have decided to forego doing the same in favor of a quick look at the styles of the three trainers.
This came up for me, anyway, when I watched the ever-consistently tough Jillian and the ever-driven but sweeter Bob in comparison to the newer and nastier Kim.
Jillian Michaels
Experience:
17 years martial arts practice; 13 years personal trainer
Comments:
Contestants not used to working out, but now need to be aggressive
After working out in desert jogging with giant logs and kicking huge bags and doing lunges in the sand and all, they will find the air-conditioned gym will be a joke
Her people have gone from defeated to being empowered with “blood in their mouths.”
The opposing red and blue teams are going to be looking at the black team as a “pack of warriors.”
Yeah, Jillian is tough on her team, but she does her job with a more other-directed beneficence, really.
Biggest Losers Share the Wealth…of Reducing Habits, Info, and Tips
Biggest Losers Share the Wealth…of Reducing Habits, Info, and Tips by Roxanne McDonald
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Fitness centers are offering deals, new year resolutions start afresh, and TVGuide.com’s Rochell D. Thomas relays what the biggest losers say were their secrets to taking it off and keeping it off. |
If you watched the third season of The Biggest Loser, you likely saw the remarkable metamorphosis of successful weight reducers such as Mark Wylie and Amy Hildreth, who are featured in their after pics on TV Guide.com. You will then recall how they were at the start of the show and how they appeared (as in those pics) by the finale: Wylie–representing Florida—was 307 pounds when “The Biggest Loser” began, and lost 129 pounds (42% of his body weight), while Amy—representing Maryland–weighed 260 pounds to start, and lost 106 pounds (40.77% of her body weight).
Hoping never to return to their former shapes and selves, Amy and Wylie have adopted some particular habits and
mindsets, as have the other biggest of losers, those who played through and those who worked off the weight at home–Jaron Tate (from Arkansas), Marty Wolff (from Missouri), Ken Coleman (from Washington), Poppi Kramer (from New Jersey), Jennifer Eisenbarth (from Minnesota), and Virginia “Ginnie” Bourque (from Vermont)—all of whom share with “Biggest Loser” fans and TVGuide.com readers some big losing tips and suggestions.Amy suggests eating often but in small amounts keeps the metabolism moving (and burning calories).
Wylie insists that we stop excusing ourselves, that we stop having excuses for not dieting healthy or not exercising.
Ken, who started “The Biggest Loser” at 358 pounds and lost 161 lbs pounds (44.97% of his total body weight), says the bottom line is to “burn calories.” That means, simply, working out.
Jaron, who started at 323 pounds and lost 160 pounds (49.54% of his total body weight), says the key is in counting calories.
Biggest Loser Viewers Got What We Wanted and More—or Less
Biggest Loser Viewers Got What We Wanted and More—or Less by Roxanne McDonald
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“The Biggest Loser” finale brought back the fifty states—minus over two tons of fat. |
Days before the final episode of “The Biggest Loser,” we fans of the show were predicting grand winners (or losers) and anticipating such special appearances as those made by each of the fifty state “representatives”.
We were greatly satisfied, then, when every single one of the original contestants not only showed up, but did so in leaner conditions and in collective success.
One of the goals put to the whole group at the start of “The Biggest Loser” series this season was for all of them to weigh in on one massive scale (the biggest in all of the history of television?) and then to return to do the same on the finale—having lost two tons. In the middle of the finale episode, all fifty players stepped on the mammoth contraption. At the start of the season their collective
weight was 14, 384 pounds; at the last weigh-in, their combined weight was 10, 103 pounds, making for a successful reduction of 4,281 pounds—281 over the two-ton goal. Yee hahs were heard throughout the theatre, signifying, as Caroline Rhea noted, a great moment for the United States of America!Also representing the ambitious goals and successful results were those who had made it to compete on the show. Even after being voted out and doing their own reduction and exercise regimes on their own, the players showed amazing changes:
Jennifer, Tiffany, Nelson (who was awesome!), Melinda, Amy, Ken, Pam, Brian, Bobby, Marty, Adrian, and Jaron all reduced dramatically, while Brian Starkey, Representing California, won the $100,000 “Winner of the Losers” prize by losing 156 pounds—50.65% of his total body weight to start.
Biggest Loser about to be Biggest Winner
Biggest Loser about to be Biggest Winner by Roxanne McDonald
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Will the weightiest and whiniest win again? |
Last season, on The Biggest Loser 2, the whiniest, most prolific with the snivels and the tears, Suzy, was one of the biggest losers, won big, and even got herself what she had been aiming for, a big boyfirned! [Well, not so big anymore….]
This season, there has been less whining, though there have been highly charged moments of conflict (of course), messy misunderstandings and malignings, and a couple of prize-worthy emotional outbursts. One of my favorite moments occurred when, for example, when the team’s trainer was nudging them about being “quitters”—you know, doing a typical reverse psychology thing….
Thirty-six year-old Heather Hansen, from West Bountiful, Utah, was crying and seething about how she was NOT a quitter. Well, Heather has kept true to her rage and is now in the finals—though ranked third of the three biggest losers at this stage in the game.
But of all the finalists, Heather; twenty-seven year-old Kai Hibbard from Eagle River, Alaska; and forty year-old Mark “Wylie” Wylie, from Miami Beach, Florida, my bets are on Kai. She has more grit, more no-nonsense determination, and, though ranked second behind Wylie at this point, could pull off the last pounds and percentages.
The Biggest Loser season finale airs on Wednesday, December 13th, and like Donna Emery of Reality TV Calendar, I also hope they bring back all fifty original contestants: they usually do have the past players in the audience, but it would be cool to have them pose in the shape of a flag or American symbol or even a Xmas tree, eh? Now that would be a big production.
SirLinksAlot The Biggest Loser Links
The Biggest Loser Stays Real and Stays on for a 4th Season
The Biggest Loser Stays Real and Stays on for a 4th Season by Roxanne McDonald
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The Biggest Loser will not only stay on with a fourth season, but will continue to use realistic goals and activities to prompt weight-loss success. |
According to Zap2it, NBC has picked up The Biggest Loser four a fourth season (airing in 2007). Despite the shaky Wednesday night television schedule, The Biggest Loser has held up well in the ratings, as have the contestants.
As Zap2it reports NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly saying, “The producing team has come up with unique ways to keep the series fresh, and we anticipate the next cycle will continue to produce life-changing results for the contestants and jaw-dropping reveals for the viewers.”
The ways the contestants have to compete to win challenges and immunity are indeed fresh: tonight’s November 29, 2006th episode, for instance,
extends to the participants the reality of how much weigh they have lost and use that reality to challenge the remaining six: Jaron, Heather, Kai, Wylie, Adrian and Erik have to run a horse track (complete with an announcer yelling out their every moves)…with iron/metal weights the equivalent of what they have lost in fat thus far. This not only makes for good TV and a good, grueling challenge, but also keeps the remaining contestants vitally aware of how much weight they were carrying when they were overweight.
Further, I once read about and practiced the activity myself: at home with no gym equipment, I stuffed a backpack with sacks of flower and sugar and huge cans of veggies and fruits. This was when I had hit a wall in my weight loss regime, and the added junk forced my body to work harder and therefore to burn more calories as I did my usual power-walking workout—which I had been doing for almost a year.
Oprah Winfrey did a similar experiment. She towed lard/suet in a toy wagon out onto the stage. The pile of fat in the wagon represented how much she lost (then on Slim Fast, I think). The reminder is as real as one can get without actually putting the weight back on by overeating. Yay, then, for the reality of The Biggest Loser!
SirLinksAlot The Biggest Loser Links
The Biggest Loser: A More Holistic Experiment?
The Biggest Loser: A More Holistic Experiment? by Roxanne McDonald
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The latest rage is to define some of the reality TV game shows as social experiments. But some, like The Biggest Loser, are more than that. |
Survivor: Cook Islands, America’s Next Top Model…calling their shows this season social experiments because they are multicultural… because they pit black against white or challenge the interpersonal relationships of clans or types…because they feature contestants who are there to win but also to “represent”
But The Biggest Loser (this season featuring weight loss candidates from the fifty states—Alaska, California, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New York, and Utah still in contention) is
tapping into more than the social or sociological elements. The interpersonal relationships the losers develop for the duration of the show are often superficial, but this season (2006), the bonds seem to go deeper than usual. When, for instance, the red team lost a player to the blue team’s choice of who to get rid of, the remaining players were quite saddened. They expressed a preference of grieving over working out the anger (which was trainer Kim Lyons’ immediate response and solution for her men and women.
This brings up another psychological element to the show: the inevitability of loss on a number of levels: the physical loss and necessity of saying goodbye to weight put on over the years, weight that has been an insulator, a comforter, a safety barrier of sorts; the temporary loss of loved ones, while the participants are away learning a new way of eating and exercising life; and the loss of fellows who have become friends but who are those the surviving players have to get rid of.
The Biggest Loser Players on a Cruise Ship? Now That’s Just Cruel
The Biggest Loser Players on a Cruise Ship? Now That’s Just Cruel by Roxanne McDonald
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If you have ever been on a cruise ship, you know the major part of the deal is the food–the massive amounts, great varieties, and most delicious and most frequently served fares. So why would the challenge be to work temporrarily on a ship and walk past the fine fares…over and over again? |
Is it a most insidious challenge, or what? Or, is it more analagous to having a thin family, a mother who forces you be the only one (who, as the only fatty) to diet, and siblings who airplane forkloads of goodies past your nose as they taunt, “Mmmmm” and “Neener neener neeeener…”?
To add insult to injurious teasing, The Biggest Loser players have to serve cruise ship guests…who happen to be their spouses or family members. And they have to do the task in competitive, against-the-clock fashion.
Before I get too excited about the unfairness of it all, let me make a couple of concessions, here.
Granted, the challenges are designed to force the players to exercise. Therefore, the choices the producers and writers make for The biggest Loser are appealing. That is, as opposed to the roteness, mundaneness, and banality of doing endless sit-ups, pull-ups, push-up, or God knows what-ups, the kind of challenge whereby the teams have to work together, figure out the logistics of a puzzle or task, and have to get their hearts and heads involved and focused keeps the players sufficiently preoccupied so that they are not obsessing about or eating food.
Next, while it is so bloody tiresome to hear about, see, or read about some skinny minnie who is weight- (or control-fixated to the point of anorexia nervosa or bulimia, it is of course a good thing when 400-pounders get the opportunity to lose weight in this environment of support and guidance by professionals.
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