The Biggest Loser Won't Show Fat People Kissing

The Biggest Loser has amassed millions of fans by forcing a bunch of very very overweight people to exercise until they puke, weighing them in front of everyone, and then repackaging their suffering as inspiration for a nation of other, similar very very overweight people. But it doesn’t take many hours of Biggest Loser viewing for an observer to realize that the string pullers behind show doesn’t really seem to like its contestants at all.

Kai Hibbard was a runner up on season 3 of The Biggest Loser, and since she’s left the show she hasn’t been shy about speaking up about the ways in which the show is awful. But in a piece that appeared today on Cracked, Hibbard goes even deeper into ways it seems that the people who make The Biggest Loser seem to kind of hate all displays of fat people being happy. Case in point: Hibbard claims that relationships between contestants were very common, but that the camera crew wouldn’t show them showing affection for each other until they’d lost an acceptable amount of weight. She says,

The Biggest Loser had romantic subplots that would build throughout the season, too, but the producers and editors made sure to Jim & Pam that shit as slowly as possible. Those “relationships” weren’t allowed to bloom until both partners were skinny enough that their kisses were safe for a presumably very shallow audience that knows love only as something bedazzled on the butts of pretty girls’ pink sweatpants.

And no, that wasn’t because those couples were only down to clown once they were both skinny. Obese people like genitals and emotions as much as anybody else. It was just the cameramen’s sacred duty to make sure as little of that got caught on film as possible. They’d straight up refuse to follow actual couples to catch a glimmer of real romance because, and this was their actual reasoning, “Who wants to see two obese people making out?”

Hibbard says that the show expresses its disdain for its contestants in other ways, too. For example, at the beginning of every season, female contestants are required to participate in “weigh ins” while wearing only a sports bra and biker shorts. Once they’ve lost enough weight to satisfy producers, she says they earn the right to wear tank tops during that portion of the taping.

The show’s “weekly” weigh ins don’t happen every week, either. Sometimes multiple weeks pass between stepping on the scale (which is fake; in reality they’re weighed on a different scale that isn’t as camera friendly) and sometimes it’s only a matter of days.

Meanwhile, in the Biggest Loser Lair, producers and execs are working on ways to “revamp” the show, after last season’s winner Rachel Frederickson “shocked” viewers with her dramatic weight loss and shattered many fans’ illusions that the show is somehow a good, healthy thing for contestants instead of an exploitative schmaltz factory that harms people with lies.