Thank you! You have beautifully articulated many of my issues with this terrible show, and the with the attitude surrounding it. It is a joke to say this show has anything to do with health, it is about shamelessly laughing at the fatties and about perpetuating the idea that we all must be beautifully thin to be happy and fulfilled.

Good on you Noelle,

Yes, The Biggest Loser is TV food porn at its best or worst. Did you know that one of its sponsors is Dominos Pizza? Astounding really. The levels of irony are, well, overwhelming.

What is it about people that we find entertainment in other people's shame - or what they wrongly perceive is shameful. We're all fat, skinny, tall, short, black, white, tan, etc. So why pick on fat people? Because it makes great TV.

We empathise with the contestants as they go through their horror diets and exercises. In fact we empathise more with people we've never met on TV rather than the overweight office manager we work with or who we share the morning bus to work with. Odd that.

Keep up the good fight!

generally it takes sick hearts to want to be entertained by sick shows. generally men have been portrayed by most shows as dopes and women as sex objects. The biggest loser I suspect (never watched it) is no better or worse than Neighbours or the rest of the crap dished forward on TV. Obviously like porn people must want it. I suspect just as many women watch this crap as men. Parents who allow their kids to grow up in TV world should be charged with child abuse.

PT Barnum looked after his freaks: It seems that some of the clowns running the show might be endangering the lives of the participants. Biggest Loser might have a little more going for it were it to follow the example of Morgan Spurlock by monitoring the health of the participants and to stress the substantial benefits that they stand to gain from attaining a healthy weight range and exercising. Putting obese people through extreme exercise and dieting regimes, then putting the interim winners in a room full of fattening treats seems puerile as entertainment. The tragedy of the obese is the prospect of death and morbidity. Obesity is one of the great problems faced by our modern civilisation.

Reality shows are always manipulative and exploitative.
TBL is no exception but the fact they they engineer tears EVERY SINGLE EPISODE is really annoying.
I guess it is made worse by the fact that they masquerade as trying to help these people.
However, it can sometimes make for interesting viewing.

i prefer my women cuddly, curvy, not obese but soft & womanly as do 3/4s of the other men i have discussed it with.