The first winner of “The Biggest Loser” reveals that the show’s producers did everything they could to sabotage the diets: “They were preparing us for failure.”
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Ryan Benson, the first winner of “The Biggest Loser,” revealed in an interview with People that the show’s producers went to great lengths to sabotage the diets and set up the participants to fail in their weight loss efforts.
According to Benson, producers placed large bowls of unhealthy food around to tempt the contestants and publicly shame them in front of the cameras.
“In the first season, they had food everywhere,” he said, noting that the large bowls contained fast food and desserts.
“There was a part of me that thought they wanted to catch people on camera just stuffing their faces with this food and almost making it funny… I don’t know what they expected, but there were times I felt like, ‘Yeah, they want us to fail.’ We were definitely exploited.”
Benson entered the reality show with a starting weight of 155 kg and ended up taking home $250,000 in prizes and the title of “biggest loser” after losing 55 kg in 24 weeks of the show’s inaugural season.
But Benson says things didn’t go as he expected after the show ended; “Three days after the show, I had regained 11 to 14 kg just in water weight,” he said, eventually regaining all the weight he had lost.
“You feel guilty for going through it and not living up to what you did on the show, even 20 years later,” Benson said.
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