Netflix released a new docuseries, FIt for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser, last week
Netflix
The new Netflix docuseries Fit for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser rips the glossy veneer off one of America’s most successful reality franchises, exposing the cruelty that was sold as “health.” What millions of viewers once consumed as inspirational entertainment is revealed instead as a case study in public humiliation, exploitation, and weight stigma disguised as self-improvement.
The series isn’t just about revisiting past abuses, though. Watching Fit for TV in 2025, during the cultural frenzy over GLP-1 induced weight-loss, makes the show feel less like a cringy relic and more like a looming prophecy. With 71% of people going off GLP-1s within one year, and 80% going off within two years, and weight regain occurring within weeks after going off the medication, the biggest question this all raises is one we urgently need to confront: what really happens to people when weight is lost rapidly, at any cost?
Contestants on The Biggest Loser were paraded as “success stories” for dropping significant amounts of weight in record time. What the show never revealed was the aftermath. Fit for TV documents lives marked by long-term physical trauma and metabolic damage. A 2016 NIH study tracked contestants for six years. Almost all had regained the weight they’d lost on the show, and many surpassed their starting weight. They all exhibited slower metabolisms than before, making the sustained weight-loss they desired nearly impossible.
Behind the screaming trainers and televised weigh-ins was a worldview shaped entirely by fatphobia. The show thrived on unexamined cultural myths: that there’s no such thing as “too far” when it comes to forcing fat people into thinness, that higher-weight people are secretly lazy frauds withholding their “true” thin selves, and that fat people cannot be trusted with their own health unless punished into submission by people who are smaller than them.
The horror stories are chilling. Contestant Tracey Yukich nearly died of rhabdomyolysis after collapsing during competition: “I just cheated death… I didn’t die,” she recalled. “My organs were literally shutting down,” Yukich shared with People earlier this year in an interview. Trainers admitted that brutality was the point. “What’s not boring television?” Bob Harper, former host of the show, shrugged. “To see us in a gym yelling and screaming.” Co-creator David Broome put it even plainer, “We created results. We didn’t create wellness.”
That blunt admission cuts to the heart of something significant – results and wellness are not the same thing. What made The Biggest Loser “good TV” is the same illusion fueling our present-day obsession with GLP-1 weight-loss: the fantasy that transformation is the same as healing, and that short-term weight loss equals long-term well-being.
If Fit for TV proves anything, it’s that America’s appetite for spectacle has not changed. We’ve simply traded one medium for another. Yesterday it was contestants collapsing on treadmills. Today it’s viral before-and-after Ozempic reels on Instagram. The cruelty may be quieter, the shame may be less overt, but the underlying message remains intact: rapid weight-loss at any cost is worth celebrating no matter what.
The truth is harder to watch. Neither reality TV nor pharmaceuticals can change what bodies have always known: that forced thinness is unsustainable, and the demand for it can be damaging in the long-run or potentially life-threatening. The Biggest Loser was never just a show. It was a cultural tutorial in fatphobia. And in the Ozempic era, we have to ask ourselves: are we doomed to repeat history?