How dangerous is The Biggest Loser?

I just caught an article in a Hartford newspaper that talks about how dangerous the Biggest Loser TV show is for people that are morbidly obese or at lease sedentary with no fitness level because it would encourage them to exercise hard. The article made me mad because discouraging exercise is in itself irresponsible..

Who’s The Loser?: ‘Biggest Loser’ Workouts Questioned — Courant.com.

Well I was a little shocked although I am not sure if I really should be. This is the time for the backlash against the Biggest Loser. The Biggest Loser has now been on for a few years and the ratings are falling so why not say that the show is irresponsible and dangerous to copy.

I have to disagree. I would like to point out what would happen instead of a heat attack to someone trying this out. Let’s take some guy that weighs in at 400 pounds and has never exercised. We will call the guy Joe. Joe goes to a sports store, buy a pair of running shoes and then walks out and joins a fitness bootcamp.

What is going to happen? Joe is going to do a one hour workout, get really winded and feel sick and then wake up the next day feeling sick, sore and tired. No workout today. Tomorrow Joe goes back and works out, gets winded quicker and after the hour he realizes that he will never workout again.

The fact is that most people will not workout until it kills them. They will get too sore and tired first before it hurts their health

I feel for Joe, the workouts are tough, the chance of success if driven to hard to fast are low and he will try his best but this is not really what it is going to take to get in shape for him although it is just a short term workout system.

The real fact is that exercise is the single best way to improve your fitness level and therefore your health. The Biggest Loser is helping everyone to show that we set the bar far too low as far as pushine ourselves and improving our fitness is concerned.

I have written before about what it takes to lose weight if you have a lot to lose and actually have a post about how to lose 100 pounds in a year that has gotten a lot of attention and a group of people supporting each other. It all comes down to exercise in lots of different ways as well as monitoring and improving what goes into your mouth.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 8:06 am and is filed under Weight Loss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.