weird, i can read it outside of the US... I'll copypasta but it'll be long
A few months ago, I wrote yet another post on why The Biggest Loser is so bad for its contestants, the millions who watch the show, and the culture in general. I expected to see the usual comments from my usual readership.
What I didn’t expect to see was a comment from Season 3 Biggest Loser finalist, Kai Hibbard, saying how much she enjoyed my post and asking if we might speak.
Shortly thereafter, Kai and I spoke on the phone about her experiences on the Biggest Loser. From seeing her fellow contestants forced to workout with injuries against doctor’s orders, to the extreme dehydration prior to weigh-ins, to the resultant eating disorder that Kai still is working to heal, the story she told was nothing like the fantasy that the Biggest Loser seeks to promote.
I’ve held off on sharing this interview for the last few months, mainly because I have no journalism background and wasn’t quite sure how to present the material. But given that the Biggest Loser continues to be popular, even spawning a new show for its trainer Jillian Michaels, I felt that it was time to share our talk with all of you.
Because Kai’s story is so powerful in her own words, and because she has so much to share on the reality of this reality TV series, I’ve decided to break the interview into 3 parts, and give you the actual audio to listen to if you so desire.
So here goes with Part 1 of my interview with Kai Hibbard. By the way, part 2 is now available here. Part 3 is now available here.
Kai on the audition process:
“So I haven’t really talked about this because I’m not really supposed to. . . . So they put us in hotel rooms and they take your key away so you can’t leave. And you spend a week locked in a hotel room and if you want to go anywhere you have to call a production assistant to take you to get groceries or get dinner or whatever you might need. You also get loaded up in these vans with other possible contestants and you’re not allowed to speak when you’re in the van, with anybody, and then we had to go through these like doctor’s tests . . . . You get poked and prodded by complete strangers and nobody will tell you a single thing about what’s going on. And that point was where I really believe that the dehumanization process started, where they start teaching you that because you are overweight you are sub-human and you just start to believe it. Through the whole process, they just keep telling you, over and over, how lucky you are to be there. You’re being yelled at by people [whose] job is basically to keep the ‘fat people’ in line and you start to believe it.”
“They reminded you almost daily that you were supposedly lucky to be there and you got that for, gosh, I was on that ranch for 3 months so I heard for 3 months how lucky I was to be there and, let me tell you, my feet were bleeding, I was covered in bruises, I was beat up, but boy, I kept hearing about how lucky I was to be there.”
On the seclusion of the ranch:
“A lot of people don’t know that once we were actually on the ranch, it was 6 weeks before we were allowed to get mail from home and our mail was opened and censored. And it was 8 weeks before we were allowed to speak to anybody on the phone and it was for 5 minutes at a time with a chaperone.”
On the meaning of a “week” on the Biggest Loser:
“It varied. It went from 14 days and I believe that near the end we had one week that was 5 days.”
On then-host Caroline Rhea’s reaction to the blown up “before” pictures located throughout the ranch:
“She walked and she saw the photos of us that were shot deliberately to make us look as poorly as possible hanging up around the house and she lost it. She lost it on the crew and she demanded that they take them down and that it was humiliating. [She said that] we were people and should be treated as people.”
On being treated as “an expendable commodity”:
“We did one challenge in a stadium in California. It was about 100 degrees that day and the challenge involved running up stairs and then doing the wave all the way around the stadium and then running down the stairs and back across the football field. When we were done, we were obviously covered in sweat, we were all out of shape, and that was a really hard challenge in that heat. They brought us bottles of water that we had packed ourselves in the truck that had been sitting in the heat all day, and they broke out coolers for the trainers, the cameramen, the audio people, and for Caroline Rhea and they had cool water and we drank 90 degree water after we ran the challenge. . . . And actually one of the contestants, Eric, from New York (won my season) lost it at that point and screamed about how we weren’t animals and to please stop treating us like animals and they handled it the way they handled us always, [they] quieted him down, and reminded him how lucky we were to be there, that it was saving his life.“
On the way contestants (and viewers) are brainwashed into believing that fat people are subhuman:
“I believe that . . . most of the contestants, felt like it was okay to treat us like we were subhuman when we were there, that the ends justify the means. If they were going to make us thin, then it was totally worth it to humiliate us and treat us poorly all the way along. I just don’t feel that way.”
TRIGGER WARNING: Kai discusses the nitty gritty of her eating disorder in this part of the interview, and it may be disturbing for some of you.
So here goes with Part 2 of My Interview With Kai Hibbard. Click here to read and listen to Part 1. Part 3 is now available too.
Kai on The Biggest Loser’s diet and exercise program:
“Unfortunately, what they’re telling you the contestants are doing and what they actually have the contestants doing are two different things, at least as far as my season goes. We were working out anywhere between 2 and 5 hours a day, and we were working out severely injured. There’s absolutely no reason to work a 270 pound girl out so hard that she pukes the first time you bring in a gym. That was entirely for good tv.
“There was a registered dietician that was supposed to be helping [the contestants at the ranch] as well . . . but every time she tried to give us advice . . . the crew or production would step in and tell us that we were not to listen to anybody except our trainers. And my trainer’s a nice person, but I have no idea what she had for a nutritional background at all.”
On how the trainers and producers overrode the show’s doctors:
“The doctor had taken our blood and tested us and sent us a solution, I don’t know exactly what it was but it was salty, so I’m assuming that our electrolytes were off. And when the trainers found out we were taking it, they told us under no certain terms were we to be taking that, because it would make us retain water and gain weight on the scale and we’d have to go home. The doctors had ordered us to take it and the trainers were like, ‘throw it out, right now.’ There was this interference between the people who were actually probably trying to get us healthy from the people who wanted a good television show.“
On the show’s low-calorie diet and her subsequent eating disorder:
“I think when I was on the actual ranch we were eating between 1,000 and 1,200 calories a day, I’m not certain. The thing is, it got worse when I got home. . . . I would get e-mails constantly from the producers: ‘what have you done today?’ ‘are you working out enough?’ It was just always, always, always. At that point, [I had] all the pressure on me, and [I was] trying to do right by what I had been told is the best thing to ever happen to me. And they would tell you all the time, ’200,000 other fat girls were in line right behind you. How dare you waste this experience? How dare you let anybody down?’
“So I got to a point where I was only eating about 1,000 calories a day and I was working out between 5 and 8 hours a day. . . . And my hair started to fall out. I was covered in bruises. I had dark circles under my eyes. Not to get too completely graphic, but my period stopped altogether and I was only sleeping 3 hours a night. I tried to tell the T.V. show about it and I was told, ‘save it for the camera.’
“At that point, my boyfriend at the time, who’s now my husband, and my best friend and my family stepped in and they said, ‘Hey, crazy, you’re going to die if you keep this up.’ At that point was doing really fun things like not eating at all. . . my major food groups were water, black coffee and splenda. I got to the point that when I was nervous or upset I was literally vomiting my food up. And at one point the scale stalled, I was stuck at 163, and my trainer and the producers all ordered me to take a free day. . . . They said, ‘oh, you’re body needs to be shaken up.’ And I was so afraid of food at that point I went in [to the store], I bought a bag of snicker doodle cookies, and a quart of milk, and a box of ex lax and I ate them all together. And I knew that I was in trouble. And it was at this point that I was like, ‘Hey, where are those doctors and that psychologist that are supposed to be following up and keeping an eye on me that I kept hearing about?’”
On how she started to recover:
“Thank God my family intervened. They got me semi-back-on-track all the way to the finale. My very first meal where I actually ate again, my husband sat with me and it was a bowl of oatmeal and an egg-white omelet with salsa, and it took me an hour and a half and I cried through the whole thing.”
On how the show affected her body image:
“It gave me a really fun eating disorder that I battle every day, and it also messed up my mental body image because the lighter I got during that T.V. show, the more I hated my body. And I tell you what, at 144 and at 262 and at 280, I had never hated my body before that show.
“I do still struggle [with an eating disorder]. I do. My husband says I’m still afraid of food. . . . I’m still pretty messed up from the show. It doesn’t help that when I go in public . . . the first thing they usually ask me is ‘what do you weigh now?’”
On why she’s speaking out:
“I feel . . . that I have a responsibility to counteract some of the harm that that show does. Because I took a piece of being that problem, I now own a piece of being the solution. . . . When I have people come to me crying, telling me how hard they work and how they log their food and how they’ve done everything they could and [they ask] ‘Why can’t I lose 12 pounds in a week like you?’ I feel a responsibility to get out there and go, ‘You know what? Sue me if you want to, NBC, but I’m telling these people, I didn’t lose 12 pounds in a week. It didn’t happen. It wasn’t a week. And even when it looks like I lost 12 pounds in a week . . . I was so severely dehydrated that I was completely unhealthy.”
On the mass of contracts and waivers that she signed to be on The Biggest Loser:
“I think at the time when you sign it . . . and it says things like, ‘you give yourself over to whatever doctor we have treat you and we don’t attest to the credentials of the doctor’, you think, ‘no one is going to treat another human being this poorly, why should I even worry about that?’ You don’t realize that there are people out there who would treat you that poorly. You also get reminded . . . over and over again that . . . this is a chance of a lifetime and there are 200,000 other fat people behind you and if you don’t sign it they will. . . . I believe I signed away my life story and gave them the right to fictionalize it if they wanted to. I had an attorney look at it afterward and he was like, ‘you signed away things that really can’t be signed away here, and the problem is they’ve got, like, 100 attorneys and you can’t even afford me.’ I’m terrified sometimes at the idea that I’m putting my family at risk to talk about it, but . . . my family’s taught me that you can’t go wrong with the truth. I’m just going to do what I’ve got to do.“
So here goes with Part 3 of My Interview With Kai Hibbard. Click here to read or listen to Part 1. Click here to read or listen to Part 2.
On how the contestants dehydrated themselves before weigh-ins:
“I didn’t learn how to dehydrate until I got on the ranch. It was every week. Every single week, this is what a weigh-in would look like: the real weigh-ins were at 10 o’clock in the morning and they were on a cattle scale at the ranch and they weren’t filmed. . . . Now, mind you, it was shot in Simi Valley, so it’s a desert, so it’s hot. And on the morning of the weigh-in you would get up and you’d put on your underwear, your spandex shorts, and you’d put on sweatpants and then you’d put on a sports bra, a tank top, a long sleeve shirt, and your sweatshirt, a ball cap, and then you’d zip up your sweatshirt, you’d put your hood on and you’d go down to the gym. [The gym] wasn’t a real gym, it was a temporary structure just for shooting and it didn’t have any air conditioning and you’d shut all the doors and all the windows in the gym. Then you would work out for two, two and half hours (as long as you could stand it) without any water. (The boys would take water, rinse their mouth out, and spit it. I couldn’t even do that — if I was going to put water in my mouth, I was going to drink it.) Most, if not everybody, had cut their water about 24 hours beforehand, if not 24 hours then at least by 5 o’clock the afternoon before. And then, you would drink coffee if you had anything the night before, because (a) it would clean your system out and (b) it would dehydrate you.
“So after you did the 2 hours of working out in full sweat, sweating off as much as you can, you would go back to the house, shower, blow dry your hair, and strip down to the lightest clothing you could find, which was usually spandex shorts and a sports bra. Then you’d go downstairs and you’d weigh yourself in and the second you got off that scale you would chug water because you were so dehydrated. ”
On her most painful weigh-in:
“The worst one I can remember is the very last one, before the final weigh-in, and it was down to five contestants left. I remember being on the elliptical and being so exhausted and so ready to go home and so dehydrated that I burst into tears and I’m crying . . . and I’m still working out and it set off a chain reaction and every single person in the gym, all of the five contestants that were left, were crying. And we were so brainwashed at that point that I remember saying out loud, ‘Well, at least we’re losing more water-weight by crying.’”
On how the contestants learned to dehydrate themselves:
“The trainers tell you. And it was [trainer] Kim [Lyons]‘s first season, and I remember Kim having a conversation with [trainer] Bob [Harper] where she said, and she said it to her team, ‘You know, look, let’s do this the right way this season — no dehydrating, let’s just do it the healthy way.’ And Bob completely agreed to it. Then, right before our very first weigh in, Kim came over to us and she said, ‘Guys, I’m really, really, really sorry. I know that Bob and I agreed not to dehydrate our teams, but I’m watching Bob, and if you look right now, he’s dehydrating his team. And if you guys don’t dehydrate, you don’t stand a chance. You’re going to get picked off one by one and have to leave. And that’s when it started.”
On how the show is edited to make contestants look bad for refusing to work out with injuries:
“You really get brainwashed into thinking everything’s your fault, [that] you’re just not strong enough, you’re just not good enough. . . . For example, Heather, on my season, was told by the medical trainer, not one of the personal trainers, . . . ‘Here’s the deal, both your knees are messed up, and I believe you ripped your calf muscle.’ So he told the trainer that too but when you watch the show, Heather’s arguing with our trainer and saying, ‘Look, I can’t do it.’ And they made it look like it’s because she’s lazy and refuses to work out, when actually she’s been told by the doctors, ‘Do not run, do not do this, you cannot do this.’ And production and her personal trainer wanted her to do it anyway, just for the cameras. And when she refused to do it for the cameras because it would have damaged her body even more (she ended up needing steroid shots in both knees while we were still there by the way) it was edited to make her look like she was lazy and disobedient, basically. So then you’ve got the 22 million Americans that watch it thinking that you’re this horrible, lazy, ungrateful person. And she literally got death threats on the NBC web site. I just have people that tell me stuff like, I’m ugly when I cry, or I’m lazy. She got death threats.”
On people’s reaction to Kai telling her story:
“I get hostility now, now that I tell the truth about what happened on the show. I get told I’m ungrateful or I must be lying because everyone else says it was so positive. . . . I actually had one person friend me just to send me a hate letter. . . . The worst ones are the rabid fans of the show who desperately want a magic cure-all, and when you tell them that it’s not they get upset. I tend not to get my feelings hurt so much by those. . . . But the ones that kind of get me the most are the contestants that also have been on the show and either have something financially invested or emotionally invested in keeping the myth going that will say something to me about it. But at the same time, I get really bolstered by the [contestants] that were like, ‘Thank you for saying something. We can’t speak out because we’re still under contract and we’re afraid what it’ll do to our family.’ Those make it all worth it. . . . It’s just too bad that I get all of those e-mails in private because they’re afraid and I get all the hate comments from the other contestants out in public.
“I have to say that there are some people that probably had a very positive experience there. I don’t know, I’ve only lived my experience. If you’ve been overweight you’re whole life and conditioned to believe that you’re not worthwhile until you’re thin, and they bring you someplace that, no matter how bad they beat you, it makes you thin, and that’s all you ever wanted, then I guess that’s a positive experience. . . . Being thin is not the end-all-be-all for me.”
On the fantasy of being thin:
“They said that they were very surprised by me as a contestant because, if you watch from the beginning of the season to the end, my personality doesn’t change at all. And my comment was, ‘Why would it?’ But I guess that 95% of the contestants start off one person and end up a different one at the end. And it’s because they believe that being thin will make all my dreams come true. [But] your mortgage is the same if you weigh 144 or if you weigh 268. You’re either happy with your life or you’re not.”
On a member of the Biggest Loser staff who intervened on behalf of the contestants:
“There was one person, that I think really tried to stand up for us. His name was John (sic) and I believe he’s the sports trainer for University of South Carolina now. I’m not certain. But they brought him in on our season, because, I guess, the previous two seasons, if the contestant turned their ankle or had blisters, they were wrapping their own feet and they were taping their own wounds up and they brought “Doc” John on to help with our injuries and treat us. And he was very compassionate. And when we went down to his pool house to get treatment once in a while, when we could (eventually, the crew tried to stop us from even going there), it was kind of a safe place. You could go in and talk about what was going on and a camera wouldn’t be in your face. But by the end of filming, it stopped being a safe place too, because they thought too much drama and too much good, juicy stuff winds up being said in his little treatment place. And they didn’t bring him back again after [the third season].
“He desperately tried to intervene a couple/few times and the crew would shut him down a lot, or our trainers would. For example, when he tried, on the doctor’s orders, to give us the electrolyte solution, or when he tried to tell our trainer that Heather’s calf muscle was probably ripped and she couldn’t work out and the crew intervened and Heather looks like she’s a whiner.
On her message about the Biggest Loser going forward:
“Kill your scale. It’s ridiculous to measure your worth based on a number in a little box that you get on in the morning. It’s absolutely ridiculous. It has nothing to do with your worthiness. Nobody needs a reality TV show to be a healthy human being. And love yourself no matter what you weigh. If somebody comes up to you and tells you you’re fat or if somebody comes up to you and tells you your beautiful — that has absolutely nothing to do with who you are and everything to do with who you are. And remember that.”
To keep up with what Kai’s up to, check out her blog and friend her on Facebook.
Krizstyling , 12-28-2010 02:55 PM
stellarosa27 , 12-28-2010 03:18 PM
Iconised Ghost , 12-28-2010 03:40 PM
fcuser10395743 , 12-28-2010 03:59 PM
