Three contestants shared truly staggering stories in “Fit For TV” — Ryan Benson, who emerged victorious in Season 1, and Danny Cahill and Tracey Yukich, competed in Season 8. (Cahill was the Season 8 winner.) Even Bob Harper shared some genuinely troubling anecdotes, including that producers encouraged him and Jillian Michaels to push the contestants to get physically sick while working out. “Producers loved that sh**,” Harper recalled. “They were like, ‘We want ’em to puke. We want the madness of it all.”
Besides the mental abuse that Michaels inflicted on contestants — which isn’t alleged, as it’s all on camera during the original series, including moments where she screamed in contestant’s faces, made them keep working out after vomiting, and dumped water on them — contestants like Cahill allege that their calories were count and they were given caffeine pills called “stackers” that basically forced their bodies to lose weight faster. “My calorie count was lower than I think it should’ve been,” Cahill shared. “I was eating 800 calories and burning 6,000 to 8,000 a day. When I lowered the calories, I lost more.” As for those caffeine pills, Dr. Robert Huizenga was quite clear that they were against the rules: “It was in the show rules, and the patients signed off to that and the trainers signed off to that, and all the producers signed off to that.” Apparently, Harper and Michaels were, according to the contestants, providing these stackers anyway.
Benson also made this claim, even saying that before his victory in the Season 1 finale, he stopped eating for over a week. “The last 10 days I didn’t put any food in my body,” Benson said. “I was doing the master cleanse, just drinking lemon juice and maple syrup, cayenne pepper, all these tricks that are super unhealthy just to cut weight.” The result of this was horrifying; as Benson revealed, “At the final weigh-in, we had to do a urine test and they said, ‘Ryan, there’s blood in your urine,’ which obviously means you’re so dehydrated.”
As for Yukich, she suffered pretty immsensely throughout Season 1 of “The Biggest Loser.” In the very first episode of Season 8, Yukich collapsed during an exercise where competitors ran a mile while carrying heavy packs. “I just cheated death,” Yukich, who was then hospitalized for rhabdomyolysis (an exercise-related injury that causes muscles to break down) but ultimately elected to return to the competition. “Rhabdomyolysis is your body saying, ‘I’m going to shut down on you’,” she explains. “It started with my liver, then it went to my kidneys and then it goes to your heart. And that’s where I almost died.”
This is far from an exhaustive list of the complaints and allegations made by former contestants of “The Biggest Loser” on “Fit For TV,” and even though Harper participated in the documentary — seeming to regret many of his actions by doing so in the first place, despite footage of him treating some contestants, including Joelle Gwynn, very horribly — his former coworker Michaels is speaking out.
