“**[May Be Triggering For Folks With History of ED]**

I feel … that I have a responsibility to counteract some of the harm that [the Biggest Loser] 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.

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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.’

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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.

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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 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.

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