Biggest Loser or Biggest Joke

I'll admit, The Biggest Joke is what I thought of the hit TV show, The Biggest Loser. Rachel was watching the show, on and off, when a comment by one of the trainers responded to a voted off participant who claimed that she didn't lose much weight because she replaced the fat with muscle and had lost inches. The trainers response was, "...that's bull#?!! Trainers around the country keep saying that and it's not true, blah, blah, blah..." Anyhow, that wasn't verbatim, but you get the picture.

Rachel said to me, "Wonderful, now all of our UBCers that watch this show are going to be saying, 'hey wait a minute, didn't you just tell us that we are building muscle mass..." I thought long and hard about this stupid remark this trainer made.

After Rachel and I chatted for awhile on this, we identified how a fitness trainer could've made such a comment on TV. The comment was a gross over-generalization of people getting into shape. There is NOBODY in the UBC that would ever qualify to be a participant on The Biggest Loser. The people selected to go on the show are clinically obese to the max. In fact, if there were a category above clinically obese, they would be in it. We're talking 60 to 70 percent body fat.

If a trainer told a client, that was this obese, that they are replacing their fat with muscle mass, and that is why they are not losing any weight, then I would agree with the remark, however. Because, many of these Biggest Loser participants can afford to lose 90 to 150 pounds of fat, and, they may only put on 10 pounds of muscle mass. Check this out, they may even lose muscle mass. Can you guess why? Because after they lose 100 pounds of fat, their body no longer needs to work as hard to walk up and down stairs, get out of bed, roll over, stand up, sit down, etc. It's not uncommon for overweight people to go through a muscle mass adjustment after losing lots of body fat.

So, the bottom line is this, UBC students are in a different category. Some UBC students have more fat to lose than muscle to gain, others only require and even switch, and some can even put on a few over-all pounds (in the way of muscle mass). And, we are hearing everything just that from our students:

"I've lost 10 pounds already!"

"I've only lost 2 pounds, but my pants fit better." In fact, we had a student come in yesterday wearing a pair of jeans, just high on life. She said, "I'm so excited! I went shopping in my own closet!" Nice going!!!

"I feel stronger! I'm sleeping better, and I have more energy throughout the day!"

These are all real comments from students in the current UBC. Everybody is doing awesome, and we're proud of every single student for the effort you're putting into this.

Remember, if it were easy, everybody would be in shape!

Until next time...

Duncan Richardson
Chief Master Instructor
The Academy of World Taekwondo