Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 19, 2025
I never watched NBC’s The Biggest Loser beyond the promo clips that seemed to air during nearly every NBC telecast from 2004 until its cancellation in 2016. But I did watch Fit for TV, the Biggest Loser docuseries on Netflix, for the same reason everyone else is watching: we’re a nation obsessed with both weight loss and scandal. Fit for TV is almost too hard to resist.
I’m not sure how insightful it is, but the three-episode series is fascinating. It features several former contestants reflecting on their journeys — both positive and negative — as well as the show’s executive producers David Broome and J.D. Roth, longtime host Alison Sweeney, and trainer Bob Harper. The other trainer, Jillian Michaels, says as much about her role through her absence as she might have had she appeared. (Given what I know about her from recent headlines, she wasn’t missed.)
For all the contestants interviewed, the show clearly changed their lives — sometimes for the better, often for the worse. I was particularly partial to Danny Cahill, who lost nearly 250 pounds on the show (the most ever for a contestant, at least through season 8). Cahill has since regained the weight, which has been its own humiliation. While he’s interested in losing weight again, he has no desire to do it for television, and he seems largely content with where he is, weight challenges notwithstanding. His story is remarkable not for the weight loss but for Cahill’s ability to be comfortable with himself, no matter his weight.
Joelle Gwynn, who has lost significant weight since The Biggest Loser, does not credit the show. Her experience was awful — she was berated, humiliated, and turned into a reality-TV villain by Harper, who mostly comes across as a smug ass, his 2018 heart attack (despite being fit) notwithstanding. Harper expresses no real regrets about his methods, though the filmmakers gave him plenty of chances. There’s an almost comically amusing moment on the series after he declines to apologize again, where he pulls his dog up on his lap like a supervillain.
Aubrey Gordon, the always fantastic host of the Maintenance Phase podcast (which debunks the pseudoscience and myths of popular weight-loss and self-help books), also appears, doing what she does best: shaming the shamers. She reminds us that even for the few heartwarming stories The Biggest Loser produced, they’re outweighed by its cultural harm and obsession with how people should look.
I do have mixed feelings about some of the horror stories. Obviously, the show prioritized drama over contestants’ health. I had no idea, for instance, that there were food challenges — opportunities for people trying to lose weight to gorge themselves, which just seems cruel. Still, I think contestants bear some responsibility for signing up. By later seasons, they knew what to expect: cruel food challenges, punishing regimens, and trainers who berated them. Knowing what to expect, however, doesn’t really excuse some of the more abhorrent behaviors of Jillian Michaels and Bob Harper.
In the end, there isn’t much of a scandal beyond the fact that Harper and Michaels hated each other. Jillian gave contestants caffeine pills one season (and admitted as much on the show), and at one point, a tiny, 14-person study with no control group showed most contestants regained the weight. But that’s true of most people, whether their weight loss is extreme or not. The only real wrongdoing was the way the show fed into weight-loss culture and exploited its participants, which is also a problem for capitalism.
The show was canceled in 2016, less because of scandal than because the body positivity movement had made it irrelevant. That movement, however, seems to be waning, so I suspect it’s only a matter of time before The Biggest Loser is rebooted and made even more extreme.
