Before going on The Biggest Loser, 26-year-old Kai Hibbard tipped the scales at 265 pounds. Her best friends convinced her to try out for the NBC reality series, and Hibbard made the cut and lost 121 pounds, a more comfortable weight for her 5-foot-6 frame to carry around. Would she recommend that others struggling with their weight do the same?

“The whole f*cking show,” she says today, “is a fat-shaming disaster that I’m embarrassed to have participated in.” (Via)

Hibbard and another anonymous contestant spoke to the New York Post about the “brutal secrets” behind the fat camp of TV shows, including cast members not being able to leave their hotel room when the cameras weren’t on, bugged laptops, and “sick” trainers, who “took satisfaction in bringing their charges to physical and mental collapse.”

Hibbard had the same experience. “They would say things to contestants like, ‘You’re going die before your children grow up.’ ‘You’re going to die, just like your mother.’ ‘We’ve picked out your fat-person coffin’ — that was in a text message. One production assistant told a contestant to take up smoking because it would cut her appetite in half.” Hibbard says the bulk of food on her season was provided by sponsors and had little to no nutritional value. “Your grocery list is approved by your trainer,” she says. “My season had a lot of Franken-foods: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray, Kraft fat-free cheese, Rockstar Energy Drinks, Jell-O.” (Via)

So, the diet of every college student. Anyway, Hibbard isn’t the only one to criticize The Biggest Loser‘s techniques: Dr. Charles Burant, director of the Michigan Metabolomics and Obesity Center, is “waiting for the first person to have a heart attack.” He went on to say, “I have had some patients who want to [follow the show’s regimen], and I counsel them against it. I think the show is so exploitative. They are taking poor people who have severe weight problems whose real focus is trying to win the quarter-million dollars.”

But that’s nothing compared to the harm the show’s theme song will do to your ears.

Via NY Post