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Bob Harper, who for more than 10 years and 17 TV seasons—17 seasons, who knew?—coached, cajoled, encouraged, tough-loved, and occasionally screamed at heavy people to make them lighter on the controversial TV megahit The Biggest Loser, is sitting at a plain wooden table in a greenroom in Santa Fe, eating baby carrots from a paper plate his assistant has set before him.

He is weeping.

Beside him are his two Havaneses, Vivienne and Karl, whose fluffy heads he periodically scratches. Outside this room are the gym facilities and sun-scorched open fields that will serve as the setting for season 18 of The Biggest Loser, a kind of comeback for the show—a reboot—which will premiere on January 28.

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USA Network is my host: They paid for all transportation and lodging for me and several other reporters to be here, to herald the impending launch of the reboot. We will interview this season’s contestants, see the sets—and meet Harper, the avatar of strength and discipline to so many of the dozens of contestants he trained during 17 seasons, who is crying actual tears while he eats his baby carrots.

I’m only on my first question. Which was: So, you had a heart attack at 51?

Harper said he only had a few flash memories of the day in 2017 when he went into cardiac arrest: There was a margarita with friends in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. He walked one of his dogs (Karl).

Two days later, Harper woke up from a coma. He was told that, in the middle of a workout at his gym, “I had laid down on my side and rolled over,” he said. He started turning blue, and a trainer yelled for someone to call 911. A stranger performed CPR until the paramedics arrived, which saved Harper’s life.

“I thank God for this man every single day, because if it wasn’t for his persistence, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” he said.

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Harper’s heart attack is just one of the seismic events that shook the Biggest Loser universe since it went off the air in 2016. There was the scientific study that suggested that the show might cause irreversible health problems for the contestants. (In reporting this story, Prevention.com has found gross misinterpretation of that study by news outlets including the New York Times—more on that in a moment.) There was also the rise of the plus-size model, the modern advent of body positivity, and society’s migration away from things like fat-shaming and TV shows about weight-loss.

While in cardiac rehab, Harper—former CrossFit enthusiast, picture of fitness, a man who looks like he could free solo the Empire State Building—wasn’t able to walk a city block without getting winded. For the first time, he said, he could understand, truly understand, all those contestants with morbid obesity that he trained on television for so many years.

“The emotional struggles that I went through have been so relatable to a Biggest Loser contestant,” he said. “I’ve had to change the way I work out. I’ve had to change the way I eat. I realize that in talking to the contestants here, the choices you make when it comes to food aren’t about you anymore. It’s about the people that were there for me. This is where I get so emotional about it, but for the people who were there for me every step of the way, I owe it to them. You’ve got me crying, but it’s true.”

The reboot of The Biggest Loser purports to incorporate this kind of thinking, altering its approach to include wellness and mental health. Are those changes a façade covering up a show that’s really still about the schadenfreude of watching fat people sweat? A knee-jerk reaction to the zeitgeist? Or are they real?

And either way, in 2020, will we still watch this show?

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In 2014, more people were tuning in to watch trainers Jillian Michaels and Harper coach contestants on The Biggest Loser than there were watching the State of the Union Address. The goal: lose as much weight as possible as quickly as possible. Of the many unscripted TV shows depicting dramatic weight loss in the 2010s—TLC’s My 600 Lb. Life, MTV’s I Used to Be Fat, ABC’s Extreme Weight Loss—The Biggest Loser, which aired on NBC, was by far the most popular. Michaels and Harper became stars.

The show was controversial in its ruthless methods to slide the scale. A typical day for contestants involved five to six hours of intense exercise. High-gloss red and blue vomit buckets decorated the set, and they did not go unused. There is a famous YouTube clip called “Bob’s Freakout Extended,” in which Harper hurls 10 f-bombs at a Season 7 contestant in less than four minutes.

The final consecutive season of the original Biggest Loser premiered in January 2016. That spring, in May 2016, Kevin Hall, Ph.D., a researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and his team published a landmark study in the journal Obesity on 14 Biggest Loser contestants from Season 8, many of whom had regained most of the weight they’d lost on the show.

Danny Cahill, on the set of The Biggest Loser: Where Are They Now? in 2011. NBC Getty Images

The findings were shocking. The New York Times published a 3,000-word story examining the reasons behind the regained weight. “It has to do with resting metabolism,” the article said. “As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover. They became even slower, and the pounds kept piling on.”

A Season 8 contestant named David Cahill was the story’s leading example: “As he regained more than 100 pounds, his metabolism slowed so much that, just to maintain his current weight of 295 pounds, he now has to eat 800 calories a day less than a typical man his size,” wrote author Gina Kolata, the well-known Times health and science reporter. “Anything more turns to fat.”

More coverage of Hall's study followed, mostly feeding off the Times story—in The Atlantic (“the culprit appears to be the contestants’ metabolisms”), in Vox (“the most remarkable finding was that the participants' metabolisms had vastly slowed down through the study period”), and in other outlets.

But Hall told me that this viral interpretation of his work was, at best, misleading, and at worst, completely wrong.

“In some ways,” he said, “the opposite is true.”

"The way that most people have portrayed this has been: These poor folks went on the show, they did this crazy intervention—which I agree with—and as a result their metabolisms were destroyed, they slowed down, and that’s what was responsible for them regaining all the weight,” Hall said in an interview two weeks before the premiere of the reboot. “And that’s not accurate.”

Hall found that, in fact, “the people who were most successful at keeping the weight off were actually the ones who had the greatest amount of metabolic slowing.” Metabolism was a side effect of Hall’s findings. On average, his study participants regained about two thirds of the weight that they’d lost. But they maintained 12% to 13% weight loss over six years. The most successful were the ones who kept up a rigorous exercise regimen.

“It just looks like a failure because they lost so much, so quickly early on,” Hall said.

NBC declined to comment on the record about why the show went off the air, but the Hall study wasn’t the first controversy the show faced near the end of its run. The year before, in 2015, contestant Rachel Frederickson shocked Harper and Michaels by walking on set for the season finale looking shockingly thin. When people learned that Frederickson, who is 5’4”, had gone from 260 to just 105 pounds, it drew public outrage.

2015 contestant Rachel Frederickson, who lost 60% of her body weight by competing on The Biggest Loser. NBC Getty Images

“I quit when Rachel Frederickson walked down that aisle emaciated,” Michaels confirmed for the first time publicly earlier this month, during a visit to Prevention’s offices in New York. “That’s when I was like, OK, I did not train Rachel, but the fact that I profited off a platform where that happened, I felt an obligation to say, ‘I am guilty by proxy here because I am a part of this machine and I have to take responsibility for that.’ So I walked away from the show and never looked back. I have no idea what the show is now.”

On the new Biggest Loser site, what the show is now is described this way:

“A revamped version of the original hit series, The Biggest Loser will provide the contestants with a 360-degree view of what it takes to make a serious lifestyle change, rather than focus solely on weight loss. In addition to competing to win a cash prize by losing the highest percentage of weight relative to their initial weight, the contestants will also learn how to prepare and make healthful food choices, and use group therapy to help overcome the obstacles that are preventing them from living a healthy life.”

On the set, I sat in a living room with this year’s Red and Blue teams. They had been prepared by the network on how to speak with me, and everyone was aware that the purpose of our conversations were to promote the show.

Still, their stories were their own, and they were undeniably compelling.

Kim Davis, 58, is a 19-year breast cancer survivor from Tennessee who told me she “could whoop cancer’s ass but can’t whoop a cheeseburger’s ass.” She compared going on the show to entering rehab. “I have a lot of respect for people who go through drug rehab, alcohol, of course,” she said. “But a drug addict cannot drive down the main street of their city and pass 15 places that they can a $5 fix in two minutes. I do—I face it every single night.”

A middle-age man from the Philadelphia suburbs, Jim DiBattista, said he liked the show’s new 360-degree approach. “This is a process,” he said. “I’m trying to change my brain.”

As they spoke, I was liking these people, media-trained though they may have been. I could never imagine being on the specific mission they were on, but I could imagine being so committed to a goal that you would do anything to achieve it.

I liked Teri Aguiar, 47, from Columbia, IL, who told me that “none of us are here because we’re looking for some ho-clothes. It has very, very little to do with trying to fit into that dress anymore. It’s about being strong and physically capable to hike, swim, run, kayak, be present with my children.”

I liked Delores Tomorrow, 33, from Chicago, who in 2010 helped former First Lady Michelle Obama start her Let’s Move campaign against childhood obesity. “I remember one day I walked into the boardroom before launching a huge rally with about 20,000 kids, and I was the only overweight person in the room,” she said. “I remember thinking, I can’t be on the Let’s Move campaign if I’m sneaking to Wendy’s eating cheeseburgers after work.”

Even given the misinterpretation of Hall’s findings, “making it stay” is what health experts I spoke with say the show’s new wellness approach still does not address.

“It’s deceptive and inauthentic,” said Elyse Resch, M.S., R.D.N., a nutrition therapist in Beverly Hills and co-author of Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works, which has been in print since 1995 (a fourth edition will be published in June). “They’re using this whole wellness thing as a cover for weight loss. This isn’t about wellness, this is about weight.”

Resch and other experts I interviewed said the problem with competing to lose weight—even if contestants are given a gym membership, healthy meal prep tutorials, and group therapy—is that biological factors are inevitably going to kick in (including metabolism, Hall’s study confirmed) that will need to be countered.

Fatima Cody Stanford, M.D., M.P.H., M.P.A., who specializes in obesity medicine and nutrition at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, compared the body to a gas tank: “Someone who has severe obesity has a gas tank the size of a big army tank. Someone who’s lean has a gas tank that’s the size of a Prius. Let’s say we have severe obesity, which is where the contestants on the show have gotten. The brain is going to do whatever it can to work with the rest of the body to bring itself back, so that the gas tank is full. This is ‘metabolic adaptation’—the body wants to get back to its highest weight.”

The issue isn’t that the new Biggest Loser contestants will go on the show and end up with a slower metabolism. As Hall pointed out, the study participants who were most successful in keeping the weight off over the six years they were monitored also had the greatest slowing in metabolism.

The question is whether they’ll be able to counter the metabolic adaptation with enough physical activity to keep it off.

That’s a challenge, particularly when contestants go from exercising for six hours a day on the show back to real life—desk jobs, commutes, the couch at the end of a long day.

Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, who specializes in obesity at the University of Ottawa, has called the original Biggest Loser “an atrocity” and said that “the approach is not endorsed by anyone in the medical community.”

When I read this feedback aloud to Harper, he said, “I’m not a doctor. All I know is that I’m the one that is walking around the airport and the grocery store, and the people that I’ve worked with thank me for being a part of something like this.”

What will be different about this new version, in his words?

“Overweight people are not overweight because they like to eat pizza. They’re overweight because that pizza represents something, and what we’re trying to do on this show is get to the root of that.”

Lynn Saladino, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist who has studied health psychology, was the most optimistic expert I spoke with about the reboot.

“It does sound like they’re trying,” she said. “It sounds like they’re considering things that I felt were lacking, but I’m curious how they’re going to execute those things.”

That’s where the trainers come in.

A large part of the reboot’s execution will come down to Erica Lugo, who lost more than 170 pounds on her own and was a finalist in fellow Hearst publication Women's Health's 2016 Next Fitness Star competition; and Steve Cook, a competitive body-builder and gym-owner who has 2.4 million Instagram followers.

In a small room, similar to the one where I spoke with Harper, Lugo talks first. “I had been overweight my whole life,” she said. Six years ago, she had her son and struggled with postpartum depression, which only made her gain more weight. One day she stepped on the scale: 322 pounds. “My heart sank through my stomach,” she said.

Lugo signed up for a membership at Planet Fitness. Her goal, in her first workout: Run for one full song. Then two songs. Then three.

She started documenting her story on Instagram, where she now has more than 565,000 followers. She found an old garage next to an auto-body shop and launched her business as a personal trainer. “I pumped whatever money I had into it. I bought all my equipment secondhand. I bought my mirrors at Lowe’s,” she said.

Erica Lugo lost 170 pounds as a single mom before she joined The Biggest Loser reboot as the trainer for the Red Team. USA Network Getty Images

Then, at the start of 2019—just after signing a $30,000 check to remodel her “dream” gym—Lugo was diagnosed with stage II papillary thyroid carcinoma. The doctors found a lump on her neck during an MRI for a car crash she’d survived in October 2019. She had surgery in January of last year, went through radiation and chemotherapy, and isolation. “I got my cancer-free diagnosis a month before I got this job,” she said. Today, Lugo is healthy and fit at 150 pounds.

“If you guys want, you can just focus on her,” Cook joked after listening to Lugo’s story.

Cook is one of seven children. He grew up in Idaho with a strict dad who’d “take all of us kids to the track” at night to run out their energy. He played high school football and won a scholarship at Dixie State University in Southern Utah. He married his high school sweetheart. But at 23, he hadn’t been drafted to the NFL—his dream—and he was living with his parents again, about to get a divorce.

“I was like, Where do I go from here?” he said.

Cook turned to fitness again, competing in national body-building competitions. But his outward appearance was still at odds with how he felt inside. “I realized that the way people appear on magazines, the way people appear on stage, it’s not realistic,” he said. After a couple cycles of binge eating and “really unhealthy yo-yo dieting,” Cook ditched the body competitions, deciding he could be more honest with his fans on YouTube and Instagram. He, too, fits the mold of someone who got in shape and then stayed dedicated to Hall’s “increased physical activity” success marker.

Cook, a former college football player and body builder, had millions of followers on Instagram before joining The Biggest Loser reboot to coach the Blue Team. USA Network Getty Images

When I spoke with Lugo and Cook, they hadn’t yet been announced as the reboot’s trainers. They were nervous about that upcoming reveal, they told me, and I knew the ideal outcome of our conversation, in their minds, would be for me to like them and write about them favorably.

I did like them. Just as I liked the contestants. That’s the point, of course: This is television, and we like to root for people, so smart producers choose likeable people.

But when you like people, you care about what happens to them. I liked the Biggest Loser folks all so much that after I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about where the show would leave them in the long-term.

Would they lose a ton of weight and be able to keep it off?

Or would they succumb to everyday demands of work and family, demands that render exercise and healthy, homemade meals too difficult for so many Americans?

By the end of my research, it seemed like the biggest—and perhaps only—clear proponents of the Biggest Loser’s methods were the people involved in the show. The trainers and the contestants have the very best intentions, but they’re working within a system that puts rapid weight loss for the purposes of entertainment and television ratings ahead of their long-term health and wellbeing.

To return to the question: Will we watch?

Will I watch?

Some people who have gone on The Biggest Loser turned out fine. Lost weight, felt good, didn’t gain it back. Some did not turn out fine. But here’s the thing: All participated by choice. They all know, on some level, the risks. The long odds. The potential for humiliation. The manipulation that happens on these shows in the editing room. The insanity—the ridiculousness—of going on a television show and competing to lose weight faster than the other people.

But they tell thems­elves they have a shot. They believe they have a shot, because they have to believe they have a shot, because you know what, it just might work. And if it doesn’t work, they don’t know what they’ll do.

They are trying, and you have to give them that.

So yeah. I’ll watch.

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