Kai Hibbard, Biggest Loser Finalist
by Golda Poretsky, H.H.C.
www.bodylovewellness.com
A few months ago, I wrote yet another post on why The Biggest Loser is so bad for its contestants, the millions who watch the show, and the culture in general. I expected to see the usual comments from my usual readership.
What I didn’t expect to see was a comment from Season 3 Biggest Loser finalist, Kai Hibbard, saying how much she enjoyed my post and asking if we might speak.
Shortly thereafter, Kai and I spoke on the phone about her experiences on the Biggest Loser. From seeing her fellow contestants forced to workout with injuries against doctor’s orders, to the extreme dehydration prior to weigh-ins, to the resultant eating disorder that Kai still is working to heal, the story she told was nothing like the fantasy that the Biggest Loser seeks to promote.
I’ve held off on sharing this interview for the last few months, mainly because I have no journalism background and wasn’t quite sure how to present the material. But given that the Biggest Loser continues to be popular I felt that it was time to share our talk with all of you.
Because Kai’s story is so powerful in her own words, and because she has so much to share on the reality of this reality TV series, I’ve decided to break the interview into 3 parts, and give you the actual audio to listen to if you so desire.
So here goes with Part 1 of my interview with Kai Hibbard. By the way, part 2 is now available here. Part 3 is now available here.
Kai on the audition process:
“So I haven’t really talked about this because I’m not really supposed to. . . . So they put us in hotel rooms and they take your key away so you can’t leave. And you spend a week locked in a hotel room and if you want to go anywhere you have to call a production assistant to take you to get groceries or get dinner or whatever you might need. You also get loaded up in these vans with other possible contestants and you’re not allowed to speak when you’re in the van, with anybody, and then we had to go through these like doctor’s tests . . . . You get poked and prodded by complete strangers and nobody will tell you a single thing about what’s going on. And that point was where I really believe that the dehumanization process started, where they start teaching you that because you are overweight you are sub-human and you just start to believe it. Through the whole process, they just keep telling you, over and over, how lucky you are to be there. You’re being yelled at by people [whose] job is basically to keep the ‘fat people’ in line and you start to believe it.”
“They reminded you almost daily that you were supposedly lucky to be there and you got that for, gosh, I was on that ranch for 3 months so I heard for 3 months how lucky I was to be there and, let me tell you, my feet were bleeding, I was covered in bruises, I was beat up, but boy, I kept hearing about how lucky I was to be there.”
On the seclusion of the ranch:
“A lot of people don’t know that once we were actually on the ranch, it was 6 weeks before we were allowed to get mail from home and our mail was opened and censored. And it was 8 weeks before we were allowed to speak to anybody on the phone and it was for 5 minutes at a time with a chaperone.”
On the meaning of a “week” on the Biggest Loser:
“It varied. It went from 14 days and I believe that near the end we had one week that was 5 days.”
On then-host Caroline Rhea’s reaction to the blown up “before” pictures located throughout the ranch:
“She walked and she saw the photos of us that were shot deliberately to make us look as poorly as possible hanging up around the house and she lost it. She lost it on the crew and she demanded that they take them down and that it was humiliating. [She said that] we were people and should be treated as people.”
On being treated as “an expendable commodity”:
“We did one challenge in a stadium in California. It was about 100 degrees that day and the challenge involved running up stairs and then doing the wave all the way around the stadium and then running down the stairs and back across the football field. When we were done, we were obviously covered in sweat, we were all out of shape, and that was a really hard challenge in that heat. They brought us bottles of water that we had packed ourselves in the truck that had been sitting in the heat all day, and they broke out coolers for the trainers, the cameramen, the audio people, and for Caroline Rhea and they had cool water and we drank 90 degree water after we ran the challenge. . . . And actually one of the contestants, Eric, from New York (won my season) lost it at that point and screamed about how we weren’t animals and to please stop treating us like animals and they handled it the way they handled us always, [they] quieted him down, and reminded him how lucky we were to be there, that it was saving his life.“
On the way contestants (and viewers) are brainwashed into believing that fat people are subhuman:
“I believe that . . . most of the contestants, felt like it was okay to treat us like we were subhuman when we were there, that the ends justify the means. If they were going to make us thin, then it was totally worth it to humiliate us and treat us poorly all the way along. I just don’t feel that way.”
Click here to listen to the first portion of my interview with Kai.
Next week, hear about the real Biggest Loser diet and exercise plan, what happens when the finalists leave the ranch to lose more weight, and how what she learned on the ranch led Kai into a full-on eating disorder. Also, find out why other contestants never seem to speak out like Kai has.
You can now read and listen to part 2 here and part 3 here.
Golda is a certified holistic health counselor and founder of Body Love Wellness, a program designed for plus-sized women who are fed up with dieting and want support to stop obsessing about food and weight. To learn more about Golda and her work, click here.
This is similar to an interview I read where they talked about how Suzy, I believe, passed out before the finale because she was so dehydrated. Losing weight and getting fit is one thing, but this show is setting up unrealistic expectations to say the least.
It sounds very similar to new ‘Boots’ in the military. Their job is to break you down, humiliate you, and polish you into a fine fighting machine…I see nothing wrong with this. It works for a reason. Of course the pictures blown up to life size are going to be awful…it makes all the progress you’ve made look even better (I see that as a confidence boost and even some encouragement ‘hey look how far I’ve come!’).
Bleeding, bruised, and beat up – yeah, I’d still feel lucky to be there. There is truth in the saying ‘no pain, no gain’…obviously keeping the footsies smooth and pedicured weren’t working for you healthwise. A muscle fiber must be damaged and torn to rebuild and become stronger. The same can be said for character.
As for the water issue, if you had guzzled all the cold water your body was craving after an intense workout in the sun, you would have thrown up and possibly caused more physical harm to your body.
I like what another poster said about perspective. It is what you make of it. Its a reality show…there are rules so as not to spoil the plot and waste all the time, energy, and intellect, and money put into making a great show while also kicking the snot out of people and transforming them. I am a fatty and I would LOVE to have someone to kick me into gear when my motivation is low. I am doing well enough on my own for now, but it is a slow process. I would be grateful for the oppurtunity.
I really liked the interview so far, and I thought Kai was brave to comment here on why she promoted the product she did, and why she stopped.
I too believe that supplements are helpful–for example fish oils are important in staving off endogenous depression for me. I found it kind of weird that they were promoting the product as a weight loss supplement–from looking at the ingredients, it appears to be a greens supplement. You can get a nice Very Green supplement at Trader Joe or Vitamin Shoppe etc that has barley juice and spirulina, etc. in it. It’s not a mysterious fat burner but I do find that this type of thing helps me feel more satisfied with food–probably because it has micronutrients we need.
But that doesn’t make it a diet product. Kai, I admire you, and how you got back to fitness and health after having your baby.
We may not be able to pick the exact number on our bathroom scales, but we can certainly choose our lifestyles to be healthier and our relative size given our genes, history, etc. My favorite related affirmation is “Thin is a choice; thin is MY choice; I choose to be thin, energetic and vibrantly healthy.”
I love Golda’s work and people like Geneen Roth because it’s challenged me to do something about a tendency to eat to numb emotions so I don’t regain/reverse all the hard work of the weight I lost. Thank you, Golda for your work, and for the wonderful conference call.
I’m grateful to Kai for being brave and speaking out, and to you, Golda, for transcribing the interview for us. I can’t tolerate “reality tv”. The whole genre just turns my stomach.
The saddest thing to me about Kai’s experience on the show is that I can just foresee part II of the interview as the genesis of an eating disorder. My own experience with disordered eating began as a 12 year old whose mother paid for her to participate in Weight Watchers, thinking that would help me lose weight and boost my ailing prepubescent self-esteem. Instead, it taught me how to dichotomize food into categories of “good” or “bad” and since I learned from the age of 7 that fatness was clearly “bad” from a social standpoint, I made the typical deduction of “Fat is bad. I am fat; therefore I am bad.”
Thankfully, there is HAES and there is fat acceptance as movements that I can affiliate myself with, as alternatives to this “reality tv” environment.
Thank you for sharing this post. As someone who does watch this show, I like to hear what is really happening. I’ve known for a long time that reality TV is scripted and edited and have no grand illusions about it.
Something that I picked up from the last season was the idea of someone not being worthy of love at a large size (@Rachel – Thank you for reminding me of this theme.) While there are plenty of other things wrong with this show, I was shocked at how many times they keep saying that as soon as he or she loses weight, they will find a bf or gf. The funny part is that a lot of them find it on the ranch.
@Kai – Thanks for clarifying about the supplement.
Anyway, I can’t wait to hear the rest of the interview.
Golda, well done–and the link I’ll be sending around next time a FB friend posts about crying over an episode of the show. The only thing that show inspires me to do is change the channel.
I know that people want to blame the contestants for putting themselves out there. OK. But wait, this isn’t just about winning 50k or becoming a D-level celebrity or finding a TV husband. This is about a group of people who have spent (in most cases) the majority of their lives feeling bad about themselves because of their weight. And they tried and failed to lose it on their own. Over and over and over again. And then this opportunity presents itself and since NOTHING ELSE HAS WORKED, they do it. They wear the too-small sports bras on TV. They face the humiliation and the public shaming because they are beaten down and desperate and they are told that this is their only hope. And so, they submit. They could say no. But what if you really believe that this is the only way for you to get thin (or, to their minds: happy, fulfilled, successful, worthy of love, etc.)?
In other words, the contestants on The Biggest Loser aren’t the same people on Rock of Love or any of the tackier, sadder shows in the reality spectrum. It’s just not apples and apples.
It’s such a mess, and I hope this helps people realize it.
The truth is no one knows what happen behind the scenes of the Biggest Loser reality tv show, but Kai’s story needed to be told. Sometimes people forget it’s a SHOW, it’s BUSINESS. I don’t believe for one second the producers and network have the contestants best interest at heart. Not at all. It’s a freak show. They are being laughed at or “admired” for reinforcing stereotypes about fat people. It is just sad all around.
As far as perspectives, yes everyone has them but dehumanizing is dehumanizing. I don’t care how a person tries to dress it up.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I,too, have watched the show and wondered about many of the things that you wrote about in the first part here. I am glad that you had the courage to get that out in the open. Just because we are not sticks and skinny does NOT mean we are not human beings. I am really looking forward to the next article. Great article. Keep up the good work!!!!!