28/08/2025
Fit for TV is a Netflix documentary exposing the reality behind the show ‘The Biggest Loser’.⚖️🤷♀️
It reveals how contestants were pushed to extremes for entertainment, while their health was sacrificed for ratings.
Contestants were put through unsafe challenges, despite warnings from the show’s own doctor.
One woman collapsed, came close to death, and had to be airlifted to hospital.
Some were eating as little as 800 calories a day, less than a toddler, while exercising for up to 8 hours at a time.
Trainers hurled personal insults.
Producers used stigmatising video and sound effects to mock participants.
There was even talk of weight loss pills being used.
One contestant later admitted she developed a severe eating disorder, and it’s hard to imagine she was the only one.🤨
The aftermath was devastating.
Contestants left the show with a damaged metabolism, slowed thyroid function, and constant hunger due to plummeting leptin levels.
A 2016 study published in Obesity followed contestants for six years.
All but one regained the weight they lost, and their hormones and metabolism never returned to normal.
In fact, the more weight a contestant lost, the worse their metabolic damage became.
To win, contestants turned to dangerous behaviours.
This wasn’t about health.
It was about weight stigma, shame, and ratings - packaged as entertainment.
The message was clear: Your worth depends on shrinking your body, and weight loss should happen at any cost.
This show promoted disordered eating habits, and long term metabolic harm. However, I strongly believe the documentary could have gone further in exposing its harms.
‘The Biggest Looser’ first aired back in 2004 for 18 seasons in the US. Sadly weight stigma and diet culture are still very much present in our society today.
✨ If you’ve ever felt like you were the problem for struggling with dieting, the results from this study based on the ‘show’ (and other research ) show what’s really going on: the system is set up to fail you, not the other way round.
There is another way 💜