Comments

1
I read that article yesterday and it was really horrifying, almost "cigarettes don't cause cancer" noxious.
2
I shudder when I see reality shows about serious topics like alcohol rehab.

Even the benign shows are completely artificial. On the renovation shows the hosts and homeowners generally don't do any work other than a little play acting for the camera. Everything is done by the crew on a timeline that is completely different than how it is portrayed onscreen.
3
ZOMG!!1!

Since when has television ever been responsible about anything?
4
Regarding the fact that the women are forced to wear sports bras and the men are allowed to wear real clothes, it always bugged me that the men were allowed to take their shirts off when they weighed in. Why were they allowed that advantage over the women? A good-quality sports bra is actually pretty heavy, pretty comparable to the weight of a normal t-shirt.

I remember one season, they also had a male contestant who had perfectly rounded manboobs; I seriously felt they should have applied a censor blur whenever he took his shirt off.
6
Another aspect of rapid weight loss that the show (and this article, unfortunately) overlook is the fact that skin doesn't shrink right along with the weight loss, usually resulting in loose unsightly extra skin around the midsection, arms, neck, etc. You never see this addressed in most weight loss articles or shows, for obvious reasons- It's a lot harder to hate on a fat person if the hurdle to being 'attractive' isn't just exercise and diet, but also costly plastic surgery.

7
@4 I think the contest is for how much they *Lost* which makes any clothing irrelevant so long as they weighed in with the same clothing before and after.
8
I've never watched an episode because I don't really want to replace my television and I'm fairly certain that any and all nearby projectiles would find their way through my screen in very little time. That said everything that I have ever heard about that show is a TOTAL CROCK OF SHIT. It makes me angry.
9

The Biggest Loser Diet

You’ll eat small, frequent meals. Most of your food is lean protein, low-fat dairy or soy, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, and nuts.


http://www.webmd.com/diet/biggest-loser-…

Grain Brain

If you can limit carb intake to a range that is absolutely necessary (the details of which are in chapter 10) and make up the difference with delicious fats and protein, you can literally reprogram your genes back to the factory setting you had at birth.


https://kindle.amazon.com/work/grain-bra…
10
I get the scheduling and TV magic stuff, I get advertising, and I get massaging drama out of random footage; but using product tie-ins disguised as nutritional advice is despicable. [Same goes for Dr. Oz and his bullshit vitamin and supplement peddling.]

Next thing you know we'll wonder if having television producers recruit your neighbors to completely rebuild the homes they'll live in for the next 30 years in a matter of days—a job that would take a regular crew 3 months—isn't a bad idea.
11
@9 - that writing.. ugh. We literally have factory settings?
12
some of this is new info, but *anyone* who watches a season of this show with any thoughtfulness catches on pretty dang quick that the weigh-ins aren't weekly. I don't even think they've claimed that in the ones I saw. It may be heavily implied, but again, it's quite obvious that they vary in length.
13
@4: It's a percentage of weight loss, so if an individual is wearing the same clothing at every weigh-in it doesn't matter.
14
@3 - Since COSMOS.
15
Every reality show lies about basically everything. The shows about people making decisions about what house to buy? The house is already bought, and usually the options aren't even ones they considered. Biggest Loser refuses to show obese people falling for each other, because "who wants to see that?" as well as lying about timeframe and everything they do. Why are we surprised anymore? The only "reality" on these shows is that they're real people, not CGI composites... for now.
16
Every time I read these types of articles, my only reaction is that nobody forces anyone to go on a reality show.

Also, we don't need another story telling us how fake "reality" TV is.
17
@9, 11: There is such a thing as "epigenetics", where genes are activated/deactivated by chemical 'tagging' (methylation and sometimes ethylation, among others) of nucleotides near the promoter region of those genes (where transcription proteins attach). There's a certain amount of epigenetic regulation you inherit from your parents (some genes are "imprinted", meaning that you only get a functional copy from a certain parent and the copy from the other parent stays inactivated) and a pretty large amount that can change over the course of your life. Epigenetics seems to be responsible for, among other things, children having more efficient metabolisms if their mother was undernourished while pregnant.
But NO, it is NOT possible to, through diet alone, magically reset your epigenetic markers relating to metabolism to how they were at birth. JBITSMFOTP and Dr. Perlmutter is blowing smoke.
18
@13: (x2+c)/(x1+c) ≠ (x2)/(x1) ∀ c≠0
19
@18: Yes, but if c is a constant, they can just subtract c to get the person's weight without the clothes. Given that they lie about what the scale the use looks like, I'm betting they lie about the weights in that way too.
20
@9 Yes, I'm sure that's right. Grains, which humans have been eating for something like 10,000 years, are clearly the culprit responsible for negative health changes observed for the last 50 years or so.
21
@18: I knew there would be a pedant that would point out that there would be a minuscule difference, but the formula deserves extra credit. So thanks for that.
22
Let's remember this contestant was from season 3. They are now on season 25 or something. I'm sure much has changed due to public outcry since then. Also, many many many of the contestants from that show still, to this day, say it was the best and most important decisions of their life to go on the show.
23
@22- And thousands of abused children say their parents beat them because they were bad.

Crash weight loss is bad. It's a show about crash weight loss. The majority of contestants have probably gained the weight back within a year. Some are permanently damaged. A few might have managed to keep the weight down, not suffer kidney failure, etc.... I'm sure those few are very happy and vocal.
24
@17, I'm thinking severe caloric restriction diets probably reset some epigenetic markers in beneficial ways, but that's not so much the "what" but rather the "how much."

I read the first chapter and the table of contents. ('Cause there's no way I'm buying that thing). The book is a poorly-cited hodgepodge of competing theories about gluten and inflammation and how they makes your brain age faster, or something. He may very well be right about inflammation and the brain. But you know: "aspirin/exercise/sleep/caloric restriction" is just too simple conceptually to write a whole book about.
25
The av club did a longer piece:
http://www.avclub.com/article/whats-it-l…

Also did anyone see this week's Ink Master? I was impressed, they did tattoos on breast cancer survivors and Spike didn't censor the scars/breasts....SpikeTv has more common sense then the Seattle Parks and Rec department :(
26
Say it with me--reality TV is *entertainment* not journalism.
27
@24: Extremely low-calorie diets might influence epigenetic gene regulation...by tweaking metabolism to be more efficient and reduce losses. That would make it even HARDER to lose weight. That is why crash diets don't work. The best way to lose weight is to eat just enough to maintain your resting metabolism and work out a lot.
28
There is no doubt that people presenting facts in reality show programs are doubly sure that they have got their facts right. After all, many people take these shows seriously. http://goo.gl/Zefsq6
29
@17 That's interesting stuff, thanks.

Maybe I should let idioms off the hook, but I really only protested to the use of "literally" since humans aren't created in factories.

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