The Horrifying Secrets Behind "The Biggest Loser"

1/11 You don't get to keep your own story. When you sign up to be a contestant on The Biggest Loser you have to sign a waiver that gives NBC the rights to your own personal story. This is so they can use it for promotional purposes later on. According to Hibbard, the contract you sign when you join also forbids you from speaking badly about the show. (Photo is of winner Kai Hibbard from Getty)

2/11 Contestants are confined to their hotel rooms. According to Hibbard, when she arrived in Los Angeles for the show the production assistant that met her at the hotel informed her that she was not permitted to leave the hotel room when they weren't filming. "The hotel will report to them if you leave your room," Hibbard said. "They assume you’re going to talk to other contestants." Another competitor says that when she first checked in, a production assistant also took her cellphone and laptop for 24 hours. She suspects her computer was bugged. “The camera light on my MacBook would sometimes come on when I hadn’t checked in,” she says. “It was like Big Brother was always watching you.”

3/11 No phone calls home. Hibbard said that contestants were not permitted to call home at all during filming: “You might give away show secrets”. Only after the first six weeks were people allowed to call their families, but the call had to be kept to just five minutes and was closely monitored by the production team. "I know that one of the contestants’ children became very ill and was in the ICU," Hibbard said. "He was allowed to talk to his family — but he didn’t want to leave, because the show would have been done with him."

4/11 The workouts are dangerous. On the show, contestants' workouts are made to seem tough, but not impossible. That's not the case, says Hibbard. The typical workouts that contestants have to endure for the show are at least four hours long, but can run as long as eight hours. For people who aren't used to exercising, this can be disastrous. "There was no easing into it," said Hibbard. "That doesn’t make for good TV. My feet were bleeding through my shoes for the first three weeks."

5/11 The trainers are sadists. Hibbard detailed the frequent and severe verbal abuse that the show's hired trainers put the contestants through. The trainers, she says, took satisfaction in bringing their charges to physical and mental collapse. “They’d get a sick pleasure out of it,” she says. “They’d say, ‘It’s because you’re fat. Look at all the fat you have on you.’ And that was our fault, so this was our punishment.” "They would say things to contestants like, 'You’re going die before your children grow up.' 'You’re going to die, just like your mother.' 'We’ve picked out your fat-person coffin' — that was in a text message. One production assistant told a contestant to take up smoking because it would cut her appetite in half," said Hibbard.

6/11 Calories were dangerously restricted. A healthy daily calorie intake is considered to be around 1,200 and 1,600 calories. However, contestants on The Biggest Loser are forced to eat far less than 1,000 calories a day. Contestants were also required to have trainers approve their shopping lists. "By the end of the show, I was running on 400 calories and eight- to nine-hour workouts per day. Someone asked me where I was born, and I couldn’t remember. My short-term memory still sucks.” Photo: Getty

7/11 Contestants' food lacked nutritional value. "Your grocery list is approved by your trainer," said Hibbard. “My season had a lot of Franken-foods: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray, Kraft fat-free cheese, Rockstar Energy Drinks, Jell-O." At one point, Hibbard says, production did bloodwork on all the contestants, and the show’s doctor prescribed electrolyte drinks. “And the trainer said, ‘Don’t drink that — it’ll put weight on you. You’ll lose your last chance to save your life.’ ”

8/11 Physical injuries are common. When contests on The Biggest Loser are injured, it's not often shown. For example, in 2009, two contestants were so seriously injured that they needed to be hospitalized, one was even sent via airlift. "One contestant had a torn calf muscle and bursitis in her knees," said Hibbard. "The doctor told her, 'You need to rest.' She said, 'Production told me I can’t rest.'" Another contestant, Ryan Benson, went from 330 pounds to 208 — but after the show, he said, he was so malnourished that he was urinating blood. “That’s a sign of kidney damage, if not failure,” Darby says. Benson later gained back all the weight and was disowned by the show. Hibbard’s own health declined dramatically. “My hair was falling out,” she says. “My period stopped. I was only sleeping three hours a night.” Hibbard says that to this day, her period is irregular, her hair still falls out, and her knees “sound like Saran Wrap” every time she goes up and down stairs. “My thyroid, which I never had problems with, is now crap,” she says. “One of the other ‘losers’ and I started taking showers together, because we couldn’t lift our arms over our heads,” says the other contestant. “We’d duck down so we could shampoo each other.”

9/11 Contestants also suffer physiological damage. Despite the terrible show conditions and merciless trainers, the contestants stick with it. Why? Because they are brainwashed to keep going. One doctor even told a former contestant that she was showing signs of Stockholm syndrome. "You’re brainwashed to believe that you’re super-lucky to be there," said Hibbard. “I was thinking, ‘Dear God, don’t let anybody down. You will appear ungrateful if you don’t lose more weight before the season finale.’ ” The other contestant had a similar response. Despite “the harassment and the bullying, I wanted to please them,” she says. She lost seven pounds in one week and apologized. “I’d lost 12 pounds the week before,” she says.

10/11 After the show, health problems persist. It's no secret that many contestants on The Biggest Loser gain back some or all of the weight they lost on the show. Many, though, leave the show with more severe health problems than they had when they were overweight. Hibbard tells the story of when she got back from filming the show. Her best friend and boyfriend took her right to the doctor. "She said I had such severe shin splints that she didn’t know how I was still walking," said Hibbard.

11/11 The show’s most famous trainer, Jillian Michaels, quit “The Biggest Loser” for the third time in June 2014, with People magazine reporting she was “deeply concerned” about the show’s “poor care of the contestants.” In a statement to The Post, NBC said only: “Our contestants are closely monitored and medically supervised. The consistent ‘Biggest Loser’ health transformations of over 300 contestants through 16 seasons of the program speak for themselves.” Photo: AP