Biggest Loser

I love the Biggest Loser. I love watching everyone lose weight and see how much they change. One of my favorite parts is where the contestants show up and God only knows how many medications they are on and after working out for a few weeks and losing a few pounds they all go off their medications. Many of the medications people take today, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, are all due to being overweight. I wish doctors would talk more to patients about losing weight rather than giving them drugs. During the episode on October 13th , Danny told us that he was off all of his medications. He had lost 58 pounds but he was still over 350 pounds. He was off all of his medications because he was working out.

I do have one big issue with show and that is the amount of weight that they lose in one week. In the normal world you cannot lose 10 to 20 pounds in one week. On the show what you do not see is that the contestants work out for 8 plus hours a day. They wake up and go for a walk or hit the treadmills first thing, then they work with their trainers all day long and then after dinner they will go and do more cardio. If you were working out as much as the contestants we would lose that much weight as well. Also, if you look at a lot of the contestants a few years after the show, many (not all) do gain some of the weight back, it is hard to maintain a weight loss of that extreme in the normal world.

In the normal world or real world we have to work full time, we have raise our children, we have to clean house or whatever. It is very hard to find time to work out. A normal, realistic weight loss goal is ½ or 2 pounds per week. If you lose weight slowly it will stay off, but if you lose weight quickly it will come back on quickly. That is why I am setting a weight loss goal of 2 pounds this month. I currently weight 133 pounds, sometimes that number goes down to 132 and sometimes it goes up to 134. I would ideally like to lose another 5 to 8 pounds but I will be happy with 2 for now.