The Biggest Loser slaughterfest rolls onward: ratings madness as the obese are trampled underfoot
21 September 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
As I watched a 350-pound contestant writhing in pain while lying on the ground injured during last nights rendition of the TV hit The Biggest Loser, it occurred to me that the biggest losers on this pathetic show were the two pompous personal trainers. The Nazi prison guard bitch-from-hell personal trainer had five minutes earlier yelled to the exhausted assortment of beat-up obese men, Now we shall sprint! And you shall sprint against me! And if you lose the sprint you shall have to sprint ten more times! She smiled like a cat playing with a cornered mouse. She had run the fat guys into the ground using an endless series of moronic cardio drills. She was about to embarrass them one more time in one more humiliating way. Shed softened them up and was set to deliver a knockout punch when something unexpected happened and she got the shock of her young tunnel-vision life. As the gasping men lined up for the sprint, chests heaving, tongues hanging out, sweat rolling off them in buckets, she dropped into a sprinters stance and barked, GO! What she hadnt counted on was one of the big fat fatties had wrestled for Iowa in a previous life, 150-pounds ago. Of course to her that was meaningless, like saying one of the contestants had won the Nobel Prize for science: she was not doubt oblivious to the fact that wrestling for Iowa is the equivalent of being a starting offensive tackle for Notre Dame or playing center for the UCLA basketball team. The exhausted 350-pound guy beat her ass from start to finish.
It was a delicious moment as we watched her stern meanness and large-and-in-charge confidence disintegrate with each succeeding sprint-step. As the run progressed she morphed sequentially from surprise to pure panic to total humiliated embarrassment, all captured perfectly by the finish line camera. The Big Man thundered down that track like a bull elephant during a stampede. The triumph was cut short when just as he passed the finish line he tore a quad muscle and went down in a painful heap. He got off lucky. His injury could have been far, far worsea dislocated knee, some ripped ligaments or sheared tendons…the injury spoiled the moment; I would have loved to heard the explanation from the fitness queen as to how a 350-pound out of shape exhausted fat man defeats a 105-pound fitness expert. She thought she was shooting clay pigeons but this pigeon had a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher left over from his glory days. At the end of the show they booted off a female contestant wearing an ankle cast; her teammates gave her the heave-ho saying that since she was going to be out of commission for 4-6 weeks she would be of little value to the team effort. I suppose she had received a serious injury in a previous episode. Next weeks preview teaser features someone being loaded into an ambulance: so the slaughterfest rolls on.
Meanwhile, on the distaff side, the nice guy trainer continues to beat the hell out of his obese ladies with his dazzling smile and sincere exhortations. He flashes wonderfully capped teeth at every opportunity and his stylishly artistic tattoos embellish 14-inch guns any 15-year old girl would be proud to own. He is so nice and so concerned and so wonderful. While he forced his ladies through their third hour of mindless cardio riding gerbil-wheel exercise bikes, he put his handsome face seductively close to one suffering pedal pusher and cooed, You can do itI know you canI believe in you. This elicited a sigh from the fat babe on the bike and in the next instant still flashing that million-dollar smile (no doubt practiced endlessly in front of a vanity mirror) he reached in to torque up the tension knob on the exer-cyle which elicited a gasp of pain from the rider. Sadism with a smile compounded with overt sexual innuendo. The game plan for these pathetic creatures, as far as I can tell, is to force them to perform endless aerobics followed by high-repetition forced-rep weight training and then finish the day with some clown-like challenge. Back at the mansion after its over for the day, the participants are starved with 1200-1500 calorie diets. Permanent catabolism is an awful thing; when the human body is overworked and underfed it will literally eat its own muscle tissue to fuel the caloric shortfall. Muscle cannibalism is a horrible thing particularly when inflicted by those who should know better. The reason the winners of these shows still look fat at the seasons conclusion is the body had eaten as much (if not more) muscle tissue than body fat. When the body perceives starvation primordial hardwiring automatically triggers and body fat, the last line of defense against death by starvation, is preserved at the expense of muscle tissue.
Catabolism eventually reduces the human body to the gaunt, emaciated, starved, hollow-eyed look weve come to associate with liberated concentration camp survivors. Protracted catabolism has a devastating effect on the central nervous system. Bad enough to crash diet but compound a bad diet strategy with massive overwork and health and well-being are seriously imperiled. The best approach is to work the body in short intense sessions and build the metabolism by eating often and selectively. Instead of starving a body traumatized by workouts, feed the body ample amounts of foods near impossible to end up compartmentalized as body fat: lean protein and fibrous carbohydrates. Eating often lessens the digestive burden and elevates the metabolism. Think of the metabolism as the bodily thermostat similar to the thermostat in your home used to control temperature. The body must gear up and elevate the metabolism to digest protein and fiber. By engaging in short intense progressive resistance training sessions and performing near daily cardio, the metabolic thermostat is raised and the body burns more calories at rest and in motion. An obese individual, inactive and sedentary, need only walk in order to generate a sufficiently elevated heart rate. Exercise sessions should be short and coordinated with a scientific eating regimen that promotes anabolism and builds and preserves muscle tissue while creating a metabolic environment that causes stored body fat to be mobilized and oxidized. This is the parallel universe compared to the deadly tactics and injurious techniques purposefully propagated by the biggest losers on The Biggest Loser.
Tags:Popularity: 3% [?]
Related Posts:
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
