Tough-talking “Biggest Loser” trainer Jillian Michaels has drawn ire for some of her insensitive comments about the participants on the popular NBC reality show. Michaels called the contestants “half dead” at the start of the show and said that opposed to “normal” people they can’t start off with moderate exercise. That may be true that they can’t start an exercise regime like someone who is moderately overweight, but it’s pretty obnoxious to call them “half dead” even if they’re warned to lose weight by doctors or face complications that may lead to an early death. It’s just rude to act like they’re less than “normal” people due to their weight:
Contestants on “The Biggest Loser” aren’t just overweight. They suffer from being not normal and even half-dead.
That’s according to Jillian Michaels, the buff, tough-talking trainer on the hit weight-loss show.
Michaels said she would never insult the plus-size players she is helping trim down. But sometimes they need an extra push to get the lead out.
“I push them really hard,” the fitness guru said this week. “They are 400 … pounds! Hello! They are not just going to get on the treadmill and run. It doesn’t work that way.”
The “Biggest Loser” contestants need special attention, and Michaels said her aim is to provide it.
“A normal person, I could be like ‘OK, mama, jump up there. Warm up five minutes.’ You’d be like, ‘OK.’
“THESE people are half-dead. I mean, it’s not the same.”
Michaels marveled that anyone could misinterpret her training style.
“People are like, ‘She’s so mean to them.’ And it’s like, ‘Really? Do you REALLY think so? Do you really watch the show?’ … Now if I was calling them names, that would be mean.”
“The Biggest Loser” airs Tuesdays on NBC.
[From AP via Huffington Post]
I’ve watched some clips of this show online, and Jillian is really nasty and often uses the “die” metaphor when she’s training contestants. In one clip from last year, shown below, she tells a man “The only way you’re getting off this treadmill is if you die on it,” and then she turns to his weight loss partner, his daughter, and sneers “and every time you want to quit, think about your father who is about to drop dead on the treadmill.” She yells at everyone “unless you faint, puke or die, keep walking.” Jillian looks like she has absolute contempt for the contestants and you can see how she would consider them somehow less than “normal” for having gained weight.
For those of you who have watched this regularly, how bad is Jillian’s method? Is she really as obnoxious and mean as she seems? I personally would rather have a trainer who is nice to me and am not motivated at all by mean people. I’d be more likely to quit if I was subject to abuse like that. You can see how she landed this gig, because an over the top nasty person makes for better TV than someone who motivates with mutual respect and care. It seems like the contestants have signed up for a lot of humiliation by participating on this show, but they do gain their health and strength back in the end. From what I’ve heard it’s a positive show overall though and the results are often amazing.
Jillian Michaels is shown on 12/5/08 at the Women in Power Breakfast. Credit: WENN.com
Is she tough on them? Yes. But she obviously cares about the contestants. When Laura got injured last week Jillian was literally in tears about it. She just has a different training style. Would I want her as my trainer? No, not really. But she gets results and the people that respond well to that kind of personality really love her.
Jilian is not obnoxious, its just her training style. If you watch the show you really see how much she helps these people.
She is right when she says she can’t train these people like she trains normal people, its just not the same. They need to be pushed a lot. And when they start seeing results they all LOVE her so much.
Nothing but love for Jilian!
She’s amazing. These contestants are hard cases and in order to get results she needs to set a fire under their asses. I applaud her. I’d definitely take her on as a trainer.
LOVE her! Love her brutal frankness about the fact that these morbidly obese people ARE nearly half dead! Their arteries are clogged, their heart has to work extra hard to pump blood, diabetes, high blood pressure, pounds and pounds of adipose (FAT) … they absolutely could drop dead with mild to moderate exercise and are NOT “normal” – it is a disease state, obesity, and is, by definition, abnormal. Why must we mollycoddle obese individuals? The reality is they are closer to death due to their disease. Why should we blow smoke up their ass and sugar-coat it? Jillian DOES care! Very much. She may not be for you, but she’d be perfect for me!
I don’t think the insulting people to lose weight works beyond the show. Those people lose a lot of weight from dehydration alone and put back on 10lbs just from drinking water.
Her approach seems to work on the show because that’s how they edit it but ask any of those people who keep it off or lose weight another way, I bet the self-insult method doesn’t work.
I’m pretty sure a lot of overweight people already stay heavy because of the insults they level at themselves.
I just don’t believe in this method, sorry.
I watch the show religiously. She is a good trainer. You are talking about people who have let themselves get to 300 to 400 pounds. They are a different kind of person when they arrive, and they leave changed forever. She has won every season she has been in. Bob is more of the kind of person who motivates through kindness. The people he trains certainly love him, but his win record is no comparison to Jillian’s. And the death comments she makes to them while training them are more like, “The only way you can quit training today is if you die.” Like over my dead body type stuff, not “if you don’t do this you are bound to die.” If you do not watch it then she can be taken drastically out of context. In the first episode they always show the contestants going to the doctor, and the stuff they are told is aweful. The amount of meds most of the people are on is outrageous. At the end of the show these contestants are healthy people most of whom do not have to take many if any of the meds aforementioned, and they have Bob and Jillian to thank for the motivation and themselves for the hard work. They are completely retrained, mind, body, eating, all of it. Jillian also always helps her contestants realize WHY they allowed themselves to get where they are and tries to help them change that mind pattern so it doesn’t happen again. The whole show is quite inspirational and when you see the contestants from the beginning to the end it is cry-worthy the transformation!
jillian is awesome and means what she does sincerely. she isn’t mean. and honestly? to be 400 pounds means you have victimized yourself over a long period of time to get that obese and she ends the victim crap immediately upon beginning to train. I get what she means by half dead. literally and figuratively, they are. you cannot approach people who are that obese like you would a person who needs to drop 10 or 20 lbs. i used to be a personal trainer. in order to be 400 pounds, you literally have to be killing yourself slowly every day. keeping up 400 pounds of body weight is actually hard and takes maintenence and a perverse kind of dedication. to get people out of that mindset is superhard and it takes a jolt, a kick, a yell, a hard truth. coaxing and cooing and soft positive reinforcement wont get very far. anything less and these people are fully dead.
right on michelle.
@FF I agree with your assessment of self criticising being incredibly damaging to those trying to change anything about themselves but I also think that seriously obese people spend a lot of time lying to themselves about their condition and their health and sometimes being confronted with the hurtful and painful truth can be just the motivation needed to get going. I think it’s a very subjective matter tho.
Wow. Jill looks great here. I totally agree with her training style. I mean, I’m 5’5 and 130 lbs, and if my trainer didn’t push ME this way, I wouldn’t be motivted either. I just don’t see how you allow yourself to get to the weight that these people are. If they didn’t want to be pushed, they wouldn’t be on the show.
People have different training methods. My boyfriend is my trainer and when I’m getting ready for a show there are times I hate him at the gym…but like he tells me he’s there to push me not to be my friend. Really good point with playing the victim – he calls it PMS (Poor Me Syndrome).
Er– If you are obese, your body is pretty much half dead. Once your body fat gets large enough, it becomes its own organ with its own blood supply and starts dumping hormones into your system. Fat prevents you from absorbing Glucose, witch results in the Glucose being converted to FAT as well as a higher chance for DIABETES (Type II diabetes is just the fact that your cells are so coated with fat, insulin cannot be utilized).
So, half dead? No more half dead than a two-pack-a-day smoker or a gallon-a-day Vodka drinker.
Its true. Only half-dead people would be desperate enough to go on this show (not that its un-popular or bad but because it takes a lot of nerve to take off your shirt when you weigh that much)
There are lots of obese people who aren’t half dead, but they’re still confident enough in themselves that they don’t feel the need to go on this show.
Let the woman do her thing, she obviosly gets results and I would kill to have her as my pt
Love her, love the show.
I also watch the show religiously, and I’ve never seen her insult anyone. Is she brutally honest, yes, but when you are morbidly obese, you need someone to be brutally honest with you. She pushes them, which obviously they need. They are on the show because they’ve been unable to lose the weight on their own. They need someone to push them. And I would like to point out that the people who train with her are incredibly loyal to her.
I don’t ever watch this show, however, I was in the military for 3 years and I can vouch for the effectiveness of this method even if it seems incredibly harsh. Now I hate to exersize and am horribly lazy (confused? haha) and when I was in bootcamp I had two drill instructors that were night and day personality wise. The nice one would instruct us through out workouts and we would slack and stop at times without much thought. The other one was possibly the meanest man I’d ever met and would scream detestable things at everyone every moment of everyday and believe me–It worked. I should have thanked him at graduation in fact for my ripped abs cause without him they wouldn’t have been nearly as impressive. Sometimes people need that kick in the ass as motivation to drastically change there lives. And I think that’s what these people signed on for–A hand to help them change.
as a trainer. I can tell you her approach works. It’s not for everyone but we have a trainer like her. (except he’s very quiet) No breaks, no drinks, I don’t care, you are not going to die. Do it! His clients see massive results very quickly. But very few people really want to be pushed to their potential.
I specialize in extreme obese cases. Let me tell you from personal experience that they give up at every opportunity. You can’t give them the chance to get off the treadmill because quite frankly they will. Giving up and retreating into food is too easy. It’s pattern. You have to break that pattern. Jill is lucky she has them locked away, where they can’t escape.
If the follow up Jill’s folks seem much more likely to keep the weight off than Bob’s. Both however are excellent trainers (unlike that barbie they tried)
She’s not insulting them like ‘you fat slob’ she’s being honest as in ‘i’m saving your life’
I forget what the question was. UH yes she’s mean but in a good way. lol
I loved the way they watched the contestants ‘work out’ this year before they met the trainers. One guy passed out. Everyone else was so lost. It just goes to show. To me it’s such common sense but to some people the right choices are as foriegn to them as nuclear fusion is to me. Some people just really have no idea whatsoever. 2 double cheeseburgers and a diet coke anyone?
Oh and that guy in the video was very very unhealthy!!! He looks great now and has implemented a workout system in his firehouse.
Jillian herself was once an overweight pre-adolescent who used junk food as a crutch while her parents struggled in their marriage (eventually divorcing). She found personal and physical strength thru martial arts, which is the foundation of her fitness approach. I respect her. Although Jillian is not the right trainer for every person, you can’t argue with results she gets.
Having recently lost 30 lbs. myself, on my own, I pushed myself every time I worked out. In the past, I followed the fitness experts advice about starting slow. I would eventually give up because I was sick of not seeing much in the way of results. This time, I exercised twice a day and pushed as hard as I could, and began seeing results within a week. I must say, it wasn’t fun, but I stayed motivated because I had worked too hard to give up.
i would take jillian as a trainer in a heart beat. she cares so much her trainees its ridiculous. she gets the most results everytime. most of the people who go on the show openly talk about how they hope they get her as their trainer.
sorry, but people who are this obese are in danger of dying and need more than sweet talk and coddling -they need a kick in the ass called reality. and the reality is they are not normal…there is nothing normal about weighing 400 lbs. i am 5’3″ and weigh 120 lbs, but i used to weigh 150. i had a trainer was sweet and nice and nothing happened. i then got a trainer who was quite strict and i despised working out with him…but guess what? i lost 30 pounds and i have kept it off. my deal with myself is that if i gain back the weight i have to go see him again – that is enough of an incentive, believe me! these folks need the same.
I am so glad that nearly all of us can agree that a 400-pound person is NOT normal and truly are half dead.
A 400-pound person is a prisoner of their own fat body. It’s like their organs, muscles and bones are all locked away in layers and layers of fat. It’s an extremely dangerous condition and is a disease.
I feel extremely sorry for people who are that obese because there is something wrong in their thinking and that is why Jillian is so effective. She might yell at them at such, but she only does it because she has so much passion for what she does. The contestants on the show become way more than just people she’s training.
During the course of the show, they develop a very unique relationship and its evident when they had to switch trainers and people didn’t want to and were friggin crying over it. Then they got to choose their trainer and some chose Jillian because her method works.
She changes their way of thinking; she talks to them constantly about why they are the way they are. And that is the only thing that will really change them. All that exercise at the ranch won’t do shit unless they realize why they got that big and Jillian really tries her best to find the root of the obesity in the mind.
ITA with the majority of the comments here. Love the show and a fan since day one. Jillian is right. She’s effective and her contestants gets results. It’s a multi-layer issue and I understand what she’s saying in context.
Tough trainers like Jillian and Bob on the show have to deal with contestants who are dealing with a myriad of health issues and emotional issues that comes with being overweight. Kudos to them. When someone is taking medications to stave off life threatening illnesses that are caused by obesity, being obese is a walking death sentence. One can’t deny that.
Being obese and carrying around extra weight is hard on your system and your joints. If your doctors ar telling you to lose weight or you will die, then yes, you are ” half dead”.
If I were under Jillian’s instruction, I’d welcome the abuse. I use to be sixty pounds overweight and changing my lifestyle was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, mainly because of one thing: I’d baby myself. Every does it. In fact that’s probably the main reason people fail. It takes discipline to live a healthy lifestyle (to not eat whatever you want because it tastes good or its easy, to stop excusing your lack of activity because you’re too “busy” or tired), and she’s instilling that discipline that they lack. It might be extreme…but nothing worth having comes easy. I remind myself that every time.
Scuse me while I go off to jump rope for ten minutes! ‘Cause I have the time and its good for you!
Oh please she’s such a loud mouth. I know tons of skinny people who wouldn’t be able to jump on a treadmill either.
I’ll say one thing about Jillian she has done more to increase hatred of the obese than anyone in the past 20 years. I just hope we don’t start rounding up “these” people and eliminating them from society.
What? You think there’s a danger of our society rounding up and killing the morbidly obese? That’s the nuttiest thing I’ve heard today, but then again, I haven’t turned to the news just yet.
I read somewhere that Jillian’s mom has a PhD in psychology. I’m not sure about the particular theory that Jill’s mom subscribes to – but Jillian’s training smacks of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.
As a point of comparison – Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy is an aggressive form of therapy that forces the individual to look inward at maladaptive cognitions to correct dysfunctional patterns of behavior. It isn’t an easy-going, “tell me about your mother” type of therapy, CBT places all the responsibility of wellness on you and your choices (therapists are trained to sniff out and directly challenge attitudes of “victimization”).
And CBT has been clinically proven to be the most effective form of therapy for people with affect disorders (depression, anxiety, eating disorders) because it requires individuals to challenge their irrational thoughts before they manifest into dysfunctional behavior.
All that said, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jillian “bully” someone beyond their limits. She’s just trying to challenge their self-image. If I was “half dead” or morbidly obese I’d pick Jillian in a heartbeat. If I wanted just to lose 30-50 lbs, I’d pick Bob.
I admit I cringe at some of the stuff she says, but it’s usually the contestants training with Jillian that lose the most weight. It sometimes takes some “tough love” to reform the habits of people who’ve known nothing other than sitting around stuffing their faces. I know it would take some hard-core yelling to get me to change MY diet and exercise habits!
On the other hand, I think Bob is better at recognizing that one size does not necessarily fit all with regard to his approach to disheartened contestants.
I think that Jolene was “mishandled” on the show. She had a major co-dependency issue with her friend, and a dose of sensitivity would have been more helpful than having everyone gang up to beat her down further. I hope she’s doing well these days . . .
Didn’t read all the comments but I think I agree with most of them in defense of Jillian. Different trainers have different styles that work for different people and goals. I had a trainer for awhile, and at the points where I think Jillian would have been screaming at me, he would just turn and walk away. Shamed me in a similar way to Jillian’s “beatings” but I’d have worked harder if he had stayed in my face. Someone may have already pointed out that Jillian is “undefeated” on Biggest Loser. Bob’s trainees have never won. If I had a tremendous amount of weight to lose in a short period of time, I would definitely want Jillian but for long-term maintenance I’d want someone like Bob. My goals would determine the type of trainer I needed.
Just have one more thing to say about the “you’re not going to die” thing. Once on the show, a contestant Jillian was training said she felt like she was going to die. Jillian said “no you won’t.” That stuck with me. Just cause I feel like I’m going to die, doesn’t mean I will. 🙂 On the other hand, morbidly obese people most probably have high blood pressure and other conditions and high-intensity training like this could cause a heart attack or other life-threatening situation. Contestants on the show are monitored closely for potential problems but it’s important to heed that “don’t try this without consulting a doctor” disclaimer. Once, I went for a session with my trainer and the girl he had worked out before me collapsed about 10 minutes into my session (she had stayed at the gym to work out more). He cancelled my session so he could go with her in the ambulance to the hospital and he definitely didn’t work me out as hard in my next few sessions. Sorry, this comment is only tangentially related. The girl turned out fine, by the way, just dehydrated but it also turned out she had high blood pressure that she hadn’t told the trainer about.
Shelby, your comment about Jolene and the treatment of her on the show is spot on. I hated the way the contestants ganged up on her. What Bob did was over the line and my perception of him has changed for positive to negative. Can’t stand the Survivor-esque game play. Weeks later, I am still disgusted. Also, the co-dependency towards Bob is cultish. Those contestants need a dose of humble pie.
Mike is the only one I’m cheering for since he’s showed more maturity than the older contestants. I am so impressed with his transformation.
She is why I will never try out for the show – unless they can guarantee that Bob would be my trainer. I had enough harsh berating growing up, and am trying to retrain my brain to not do it to myself now.
I imagine if I was in the house w/ Jolene I would have ‘ganged up on her’ too. Talk talk talk I think Bob was spot on. When have you seen Bob lose his temper? She wasn’t making any changes or working even up to let alone beyond her comfort level. Plus her whole attitude. Just saying, if I was in the house with her I would have lost it long before Bob did. Hubby and I were yelling at her through the t.v. probably starting with the money/limo temptation. She was never about making a change. I’m very interested to see what excuse and lines she uses on the finale when she’s still the size of a house. Her partner changed my impression and actually impressed me greatly.
i’d rather be 400 pounds than be dehumanized by some self righteous bitch…
sam and koli are my friends and honestly, every reality show is edited for drama and what not – it’s never as bad as it seems.
Jillian Michaels is definitely the biggest success in running a business at the moment. She ought to take care not to promote rubbish products however when she says that the actual approach to fitness is healthy food and exercise.
I am Diabetic now,readjusting my diet after 40yrs.is no picnic,but u can do it.Focus on what u can eat,not what u can’t eat 🙂