Why The Biggest Loser has ZERO applicability for real people living real lives
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Monday December 5, 2005
Why The Biggest Loser has ZERO applicability for real people living real lives
1. Wheres my Hollywood Mansion? Contestants of the Biggest Loser reality fitness show are moved into a Hollywood Mansion for three months. It is undoubtedly a hell-of-a-lot easier to maintain fitness focus when youre sequestered in a Mansion for 12-weeks. Plus the cash incentive is huge: the winner banks $250,000. Cash and isolation make it far easier to maintain a commitment to the transformation process. Participants are not bothered with any of lifes distractions: work, family, stress and dilemmas.
2. Beat the hell out of themWhoever dreamed up the training regimen for this torture-fest ought to be indicted as a war criminal. If US Army personnel subjected Guantanamo Bay terror prisoners to the forced labor insanity the Biggest Loser personal trainers do show participants they would be subject to court martial. One day the little female PT made 400-pound men (miserably out of shape) run not walk not jog while carrying her on his back. Can you imagine the heart stress for a man who could generate a 90% age-related heart rate maximum walking to the mailbox and back? On the distaff side the metro-sexual non-gender specific male personal trainer had his female fat babes run up the side of a mountain! To make matters worse, both PTs inflicted psychological torture by taunting there respective crews with clichd fitness platitudes. Oh the horror! Theyre damn lucky someone didnt keel over dead.
3. Then starve themAfter making the obese people work like political prisoners in a Soviet Gulag circa 1952, participants are fed next to nothing. 350-400 pound men were allotted 1500-calories per day. This works out to 3.75 calories per pound bodyweight. Again, the Red Cross and Amnesty International should be alerted. This savage combination of over work in the gym and under-feeding after the fact causes a metabolic condition known as catabolism. Any 1st year medical student would know that combining sustained and intense physical effort with starvation-level calories is physiologically disastrous and dangerous. When the human body senses starvation primordial hardwire circuitry triggers and the body will preserve body fat at all costs. Cortisol is dumped into the bloodstream as a result of physical stress and a lack of nutrients. The body cannibalizes muscle tissue to cover caloric shortfall; the body literally eats its own muscle tissue in order to spare body fat. What a revolting development.
4. I picked the ultimate winner on day 1: This was easy: the deck was stacked. The ultimate winner was an athletic protge; a guy whod wrestled for Iowa, Matt was a national level athlete who had a shot at making the Olympic team. Hed allowed himself to get badly out of shape. Any athlete of this caliber has so much muscle memory that when I saw his credentials I knew he would be the ultimate winner: it was a foregone conclusion. At his athletic peak, weighing under 200, he was light years past the qualifications of shows dink-ass personal trainers. It was clear how superior an athlete he was when on one episode the prison guard female PT worked the men to exhaustion then challenged them to a sprint: how delicious a moment when the exhausted 340-pound fat man whipped her soundly. She was shocked speechless. Wrestlers know all about deprivation and anyone who wrestled at that level has the athletic work ethic of a machine. Give a guy like that 20-freaking weeks to beat himself into shape, wave $250,000 grand in front of his face and watch the normal people get trampled in his path. If they were serious they should have chosen untrained people of various ages and not allowed out-of-shape athletic wonders to compete. Plus it didnt hurt his weight loss regimen that he simultaneously kicked the booze.
5. Twenty weeks is a long time: Twelve weeks were spent isolated at the Mansion and eight weeks were spent at home. Is their any greater training and dietary motivation being in the final three with a quarter of a million bucks on the line? Normal obese people living regular lives are not provided that type of motivation. Its a lot harder to maintain focus and drive when no one is watching, when no one cares (other than concerned friends and relatives) and there is zero financial incentive. With its dubious methodology its doubtful any aspect of the Biggest Loser approach has the slightest applicability to real people leading real lives.
6. Not to cast stones without offer alternatives: Purposefully Primitive Obesity solution provides real results for real people leading regular lives.
Stress is making you vulnerable and sick
Australian researchers said they had scientifically proven a long-suspected link between emotional stress and illnesses ranging from the common cold to cancer. The group from Sydney’s Garvan Institute found that a hormone released into the body during times of stress, neuropeptide Y (NPY), undermined the body’s immune system and literally made you sick.
During periods of stress, nerves release a lot of NPY and it gets into the bloodstream, where it inhibits the cells in the immune system that look out for and destroy pathogens in the body. The findings were published in Monday’s edition of the Journal of Experimental Medicine. Herbert Herzog, another of the scientists, said neuropeptide Y had been known to affect blood pressure and heart rates, but discovering its impact on the immune system opened up new doors for tackling some illnesses.
“The best thing to do is to remove stress from our lives just by reorganizing the way we live, changing our lifestyle and using things like yoga and relaxation to the best of our ability,” she said.
I saw an interesting segment on 60-minutes that pointed to a relationship between stress and premature aging. Scientist postulated that external stress manifest internally and caused free-radicals havoc to the point that the human aging process was dramatically accelerated. Intense physical activity is the best stress reliever around. While light or mild exercise is insufficient to short-circuit the internal mental voice that always keeps problems and vexation in the forefront of our consciousness, the stress-voice is silenced when the body is exerting maximally: it is impossible to be mentally preoccupied while handling 400-pounds in a progressive resistance (or whatever your relative poundage equivalent) exercise. This enforced silencing of the over-heated, stressed-out brain allows it, the mind, to cool off and calm down. As with any muscle, the brain, rested and refreshed after being forced to not think, functions far better when switched back on.
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