Great Big Huge Loser

I watched the season premier of The Biggest Loser last night. Nothing makes a fat person trying to lose weight feel better than watching even fatter people losing weight. This is apparently a landmark season because it has the oldest contestant ever, the youngest contestant ever, the heaviest contestant ever, and the heaviest female contestant ever. This is also the first season I've ever sat down to watch.

I'm actually watching it because when I was at the gym the other day, there was a TBL marathon and the show turns out to actually be kind of interesting. And, since I myself am trying to lose weight (fairly unsuccessfully thus far) I thought it might be helpful to see other people going through it.

So, last week, after going to the gym for 5 days and working on portion control (good food is expensive, and I'm still trying to get by on the $300 a week I make on unemployment), I lost 5 pounds. Yay me!

So I watch the show, and the first episode takes in the first week that the contestants are in the program, ending with a weigh in and elimination (of contestants, not of additional calories via vomiting or pooping). I'm feeling good about my 5 pound loss, but I also know that healthy weight loss is 2-3 pounds per week. My feel-goods, however, were quickly squashed when the people on the show get on the scale and are losing double digits worth of weight. The biggest loss for the first week of the program was like 35 pounds. 35 pounds!! I'd be almost done if I'd lost 35 pounds last week!

Granted, these people are all a lot heavier than I am. All of them are over 250 pounds, some of them are over 400 pounds; I'm still weighing in at well less than 200 pounds (but I'm keeping the number to myself). So they have a lot more weight to lose. But seriously, a 35 pound weight loss in a single week...that's like having a baby, and I promise you, the man who lost it, didn't have a baby, unless something about biology is different.

Now I have to wonder what they're doing to these people. Are they making them work out for 12 hours a day? Are they feeding them nothing but lettuce and water? How can any human being naturally drop 35 pounds in a single week and not have some kind of unhealthy reaction to that?

I know whenever I go to the gym, my body panics a little, and I only work out for about an hour and a half. It's like my body thinks, "Ahhhh!! Calories being burned!! Save the nutrients!! Save the nutrients!!" and then it starts grabbing nutrients and calories from anywhere I've been storing them (like around my waist). And then, I poop, presumably because of the desperate grab for stored nutrients. Could this guy have lost 35 pounds through a similar nutrient-panic? Try not to think about a 35 pound poop.