Biggest Loser Help

I have a problem with Biggest Loser because I don't think it is the best way to go about it all. Is it super motivating, YES. I do not think, however, that there is any way those contestants are getting all the nutrients that they need to be healthy with a 1200 cal diet and extreme exercise. (I hadn't heard how many cals they eat, so I am just going off whay you said) I prefer to do it my way, nourish and exercise my body and see some lasting results!

This is part of the reason that I do not watch this show anymore. I want to see what they use to eat in a day. I want to see what they eat now and I want to see how they deal with the pain in their bodies after a crazy workout. This show to me now is just two hours of wasted time. All they do is show them working out and taking an hour for the weigh-ins.

It all goes back to that calorie in-calorie out thing. You can either eat less or exercise more or in an ideal world do both and carefully balance your nutrient ratios. For the rapid weight loss on Biggest Loser there is some evidence that you can lose huge quantities of fat if your BMI is very high (higher than 30 I think they said) to start with and you up your exercise to give you a bigger deficit per day. You still can't go below the 1200 lower limit, but you can ramp up the exercise to give you a huge daily deficit which would mean you could, in theory, lose up to a 1lb a day (3500 calorie deficit). There are some other threads on here about that, and you can take a look at some of Tom Venuto's articles too.

It's meant to be healthy to do it this way (if your BMI is high enough) because you have to manage your diet carefully with regard to ratios/vitamin content etc. Also, I figure if your BMI is that high the medical staff probably think ANYTHING is healthier than carrying on like that.

I looked into it because I did something similar a couple of years ago and lost a fair amount of fat % by working with a personal trainer. My BMI is currently 31, and if I do an hour of Zumba I get around 600 calories and an hour on the treadmill (run/walk) nets me around 800 cals. So if I did three or four hours in the gym every day I could quite easily lose that 1 lb a day. But ...and this is a big but - what would happen to all the other stuff I have to do? I don't work so in theory I could give up my mornings, but even so it is an enormous commitment in both time and energy and after that much work in the gym I'd probably not be able to fulfill my commitments to my kids. I might do it with my boyfriend when he has holidays to get the fat % down super quick (and then we can collapse together in the afternoons!)

I still have a big question that has been plaguing me for a while now. How come on the Biggest Loser, they stick to a 1200 calorie diet, exercise up to 8 hours a day (so I've heard... this is all hearsay) and manage to lose such ridiculous amounts of weight? Is it because they are burning so many more calories than they're eating? How is this healthy? I get that I'm not going to lose anywhere near as fast as the contestants. For one thing, I don't have enough time in my day to be exercising that much. I don't have a trainer keeping an eye on me 24/7. I don't have a team of doctors, nutritionists, physios to keep my body in good condition while I run it into the ground.

It also frustrates me because I need to lose this weight - seeing a 1 kilo loss on the scale each week is a triumph to me... and they cry when they lose less than 5 kilos and think that they're failures???

Besides everything you already mentioned in your post regarding the team of experts the contestants have access to...Remember, it's a TV show. It's edited to show only what the producers want the public to see. It's not real life.