Biggest Loser Trainer Was 'Stunned' By Winner's Weight Loss

Rachel Frederickson’s win on this season of The Biggest Loser was marred by adverse fan reaction and concern trolling that she’d lost too much weight. Now, it seems that the fans weren’t the only ones upset.

Trainer Bob Harper told Rachael Ray,

“What people don’t understand is, when the contestants leave to go home…they’re in charge of themselves,” he began. “I had not seen her until that night, and so when she walked out, I was just kind of like, ‘Whoa.’ And I’ve been on the show since the beginning, forever.”

“I was stunned,” the longtime fitness trainer admitted. “That would be the word. I mean, we’ve never had a contestant at 105 pounds.”

Everyone is very, very, very worried. Because Rachel is thin. Rachel is a size 0 or 2. In the eyes of a critical audience, Rachel is doing it wrong, in a different way than she was doing it wrong before, when she weighed 260 lbs.

The way Frederickson’s weight has been discussed — by fans, by gossip rags, and now, by a trainer from the show — has pointed to something dismaying about the way the good old US of A talks about weight that’s been right there in front of us for longer than The Biggest Loser has squeezed inspiration from the suffering of fat people (something adeptly implied by commenter bokjoy) on an earlier piece about the subject: no one has a problem when fat people are subjecting themselves to unhealthy exertion in the quest to lose weight. Their pain is entertainment. But when a thin person does the same, their pain is disturbing.