'Netflix just released a documentary on The Biggest Loser. It's an extremely confronting watch.'

If you want to support independent women's media, become a Mamamia subscriber. Get an all-access pass to everything we make, including exclusive podcasts, articles, videos and our exercise app, MOVE.

I was sick last weekend, so I dedicated some time to bingeing content that had been sitting on my watch list.

Sexy Eric Bana and gorgeous Sam Neill in Untamed? Absolutely. The final eps of And Just Like That? Of course. That crazy movie about a bunch of billionaires who get together for a poker night while the world is slowly going to hell because of one of their AI inventions (Mountainhead)? Also yes. But one documentary caught me completely off guard.

Fit For TV: The Reality Of The Biggest Loser is currently streaming on Netflix, and it is triggering as hell.

Watch the trailer here. Post continues below.

When The Biggest Loser debuted on Aussie TV in 2006, I was in my 20s and incredibly influenced by diet culture.

If you haven't seen it or were too young to catch it in its prime, the show followed contestants — some weighing nearly 170 kilos — after they were sent to the Biggest Loser Ranch to undergo an intensive regime of dieting and exercise. Each week, they'd be weighed to see what percentage of body weight they'd lost.

The winner would not only take home a massive cash prize, but also a whole new body and outlook on life — and, as this new documentary reveals, possibly permanent injuries, eating disorders, and long-term health issues.

Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels, the original trainers on the US version, flew over to Australia to host the first season here, bringing the same energy we saw in the American show.

They would scream in the faces of overweight women and men who were exercised until they fell down, passed out, or threw up. But after recovering, they would make them feel accomplished about how far they'd been pushed — because they'd actually done it in the end, hadn't they?

The documentary explains that contestants were often exercising up to eight hours a day and consuming just 800 calories a day, despite the show's medical doctor explaining to both them and the trainers that they needed more than that to properly fuel their bodies.

Fit For TV: The Reality Of The Biggest Loser. Image: Netflix.

What that mindset did to me — a woman in her twenties, heavily focused on my body and the fact it wasn't extremely thin as I was told it was supposed to be — had a few outcomes. None of them were good.

First, watching the shame and embarrassment of those people on screen validated that this is how we treat fat people. It's okay to hurl abuse at them and push them until they nearly die, because that's what fat people deserve. It's their own fault they can't say no to junk food, and thin people who can have every right to make them feel sh*t about it. I knew that if I got fatter, that's how I would be treated too.

Secondly, seeing people who weighed 50 or 60 kilos more than me made me feel better about myself because, whilst I was considered overweight, I wasn't THAT fat. How bloody awful to compare yourself to someone struggling with obesity — a disease that a Western diet and lifestyle actively works to create in us every day — and feel better than them.

The show also told me that in order to be thin, you had to starve and work out all day long. It made me think that exercise was completely unachievable for me, so I should just give up on that. But starve myself? Maybe that was doable.

What The Biggest Loser also did, seeing as it was a ratings hit across the country, was allow the bosses at the radio station where I worked to bring in a client who would essentially put my co-host and me through our own version of the show. We were publicly weighed in, given strict diets and a gym membership. I can't tell you how smug I felt when I started to drop kilos.

That public accountability and the attention I was getting for being successful at weight loss was like a drug. "See," I crowed to the world, "I am better than you. I am allowed to exist because, look at me, I am on my way to being thin."

With the client's money spent, the radio promotion ended and I was left to my own devices. Without the constant attention, without the pressure to not eat a single thing and work out every day, the weight returned. My GP, when seeing that I had gained 20 kilos in three years, asked what could possibly have caused that. I was too ashamed to admit that I couldn't do it on my own.

There is so much emotional baggage that goes with weight loss and weight gain, and when I watched The Biggest Loser documentary, it all came flooding back. I couldn't believe that I had sat on my couch and consumed this toxic messaging season after season.

The contestants from the US version of the show who speak during this documentary reveal the awful things that their bodies went through. Tracey Yukich described how she nearly died during her first challenge, her internal organs essentially shutting down. Trainer Bob Harper explained how the producers loved nothing more than when the contestants were pushed to vomiting. Season 1 US winner Ryan Benson says he worked out so much and ate so little in the lead-up to the finale that the doctors found blood in his urine.

Fit For TV: The Reality Of The Biggest Loser. Image: Netflix.

Reading through Reddit posts on the show, former contestants and people like me who watched from the comfort of our loungerooms are speaking about what the documentary brought up, including what contestants signed away before competing: "Fun fact: There was a clause in the contract that if you refused to film or quit the show they could commence legal proceedings against you."

Former contestants warned people about the treatment and health risks: "I'm a former contestant. I'd never recommend anyone do it. Extremely unhealthy way to lose weight… It was all about the ratings. No psychological help at all. Even after you left the show, when viewers have decided to make hate groups about you online and bully you. I literally had someone tell me I deserved to be dead all because I was overweight."

One former Biggest Loser contestant said they're still paying for being on the show all these years later: "I've never watched my season or the ones following due to knowing what it was really like. And to think over a decade later I still have people bullying me for it."

Viewers say they watched on as contestants suffered, realising in hindsight how dangerous it was: "I remember one contestant whose food issues started after her 12-year-old son died and she had a breakdown about it in a training session. That is SERIOUS trauma that the trainers were absolutely not equipped to treat."

And then there were the challenges, which we all sat glued to our screens to watch unfold: "I will never forget when they offered a contestant the choice to eat a giant portion of crème brûlée (like the size of a family lasagne) in exchange for calling her kids then after she did it the trainers kept screaming HOW DOES THAT CRÈME BRÛLÉE FEEL NOW in workout sessions."

Former Biggest Loser Australia host Ajay Rochester has also been sharing insights from her time on the show, revealing that what we saw on our screens was not always what was happening in the contestants' real lives.

@ajayrochester Replying to @Nat Maynard ♬ original sound - AjayRochester

The thing that stands out in the documentary is that for most of the contestants, within days of the cameras stopping rolling, they had already gained back 10 kilos or more. Like me, they were left to their own devices, and despite the millions and millions of dollars the show made from their suffering, none of that money went to any kind of aftercare for them.

A moment from the finale of the 2015 US season — just a couple of years before it would be cancelled — was so shocking that seeing it again in 2025 made me gasp. Rachel Fredrickson started at 117 kilos and walked onto the stage at the finale weighing just 47 kilos. Even Bob Harper admits in the documentary that he and Jillian Michaels were horrified at how far she had taken it.

While Rachel wrote, a year after that finale, that she was proud of herself for her achievement, she was deeply affected by the commentary in the aftermath of the show.

She did not contribute to the documentary.

If you were an impressionable young woman at the time The Biggest Loser aired in Australia, prepare to be triggered HARD by this. Enter at your own risk.

Feature Image: Supplied.