Biggest Loser - Why Did They Stop Losing??
January 11, 2008
I’m not a huge fan of the Biggest Loser show but for whatever reason my wife and I have been recording the shows this season. If you watch the show you’ll know that during the first week the contestants lost an incredible amount of weight (30lbs in a week!); but this week the weight loss was SLOW and one woman gained a pound. My wife and I talked a bunch about what happened to cause such a great halt in weight loss.
I was going to write about it but here on the NN Blog but I just read a post by Adam Campbell over at Men’s Health and he laid things out very clearly so I won’t rehash it. Click the link and read what Adam had to say:
Adam’s Take on The Biggest Loser
I should note that one thing that I think happened that Adam didn’t address was metabolism and I think this plays a big role. These people were used to consuming a large amount of calories. To some extent the more you eat the more your metabolism increases (to some extent). Then these people started exercising a TON. But they also started to severely restrict their calories (SEVERELY). I hypothesize that during the first week there was a period in which the contests’ metabolisms were way up and their intake was way down. This huge gap in intake vs expenditure caused huge weight loss for some people.
But this week their bodies responded (via a survival mechanism) in an almost supercompensation mechanism and their metabolisms were greatly down regulated. Thus the gap between intake and expenditure was much smaller.
I have a feeling that this coming week their weight loss number will increase again as their bodies adapt a little and go out of metabolic/caloric deprivation shock. We’ll see.
Now go read Adam’s Take on The Biggest Loser
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