There are a few lessons one can take
from last night’s season finale of The
Biggest Loser.
1. It’s possible for a woman to win
this show, even though men are predisposed to quicker weight loss.
2. It’s possible for some people to
lose 50 pounds and still look basically the same.
3. Live TV – especially live TV
starring people who have no professional TV training – is awesome.
Ali, the former competitive swimmer
who’d let herself go, won the final weigh-in and, for this, a quarter of a
million dollars. She’d lost 112 pounds and looked as diesel as an angry Mac
truck. The other two finalists were Roger, a former football player from Alabama, and Kelly, a
shy working-class woman from Florida. I was
rooting for Kelly, because she’s older and divorced. She’s also had three
miscarriages and talked a lot about how she’d always been huge and asexual and
how now, at 38, she finally felt like a girl for the first time in her life.
It’s this kind of shit that gets me
sobbing like a mental patient. I’m getting misty just writing this. Which is
the entire point of The Biggest Loser – it’s the anti-reality show. There’s no
sniping or backstabbing. Everyone adores each other. Grown men bawl and hug and
say, “I love you, man” over and over again. Parents talk about how they want to
set a better example for their children.
And then, little by little, everyone
gets thinner. Not thin, per se, and
you do feel a little bit weird when the girl who dropped a buck twenty still
has a butt the size of the Great Pumpkin. But in general, everyone loses enough
weight that you feel good about it. Last night, they brought back all the
contestants who’d been eliminated over the past few months. Most of them had
kept losing weight after the show ended, and they did little video vignettes
for each of them, showing them continuing to work toward their goals by eating
salad and running on treadmills in their bedrooms. Somehow this led to more
crying. Curtis had needed to get his weight below 239 to qualify for health
insurance, and he did. Bernie has a thin girlfriend and had wanted to become
more attractive for her, and he was. In fact, Bernie looked hot in his fly
little purple shirt and tie. Also hot: Jackie, who’d gone from
still-sorta-chunky when she left the show a couple months ago to
MILF-who’s-well-aware-of-it last night.
Which is one of the craziest things
about watching The Biggest Loser from beginning to end: people who you found
physically repulsive at the beginning are sexy by the end, and you feel
superficial for not having found them sexy the whole time. It’s like being the
bad guy in a John Hughes movie, the one who shuns the girl because she’s not
pretty or popular enough, but then at the end, after her transformation, asks
her to the prom and she laughs in his face.
At the final weigh in, you kind of
figured Ali was going to win because Alison Sweeney had at this point
reiterated approximately eighty times that if
Ali won, she’d be the first female Biggest Loser ever. After all that buildup,
to have Roger win would have felt disappointing, and we basically knew it
wasn’t going to be Kelly, because while Kelly looked good, Ali looked ready to
run to Athens with an urgent message for the king. She seriously looked a bit
scary, like she’d kick your ass just because at 122 pounds, she can. That would
have been a cool ending: Roger and Ali duking it out. But there was no duking.
There was only confetti, and hugs, and crying, and a message for the kids:
being skinny gets you nowhere, but getting fat and then skinny gets you a quarter mil. Food for thought while you gnaw
on that Pixy Stix.
—
Will Doig
