The Biggest Lie

I watched the first episode of The Biggest Loser last night. Apart from Hayley Lewis being completely terrible (looks great, sounds awful), I was again disappointed to see that the show has not developed any level of integrity or honesty into it’s format.

14kg lost in a week? It’s not possible.

Each kilo of fat that we store on our bodies is worth about 9000 calories. So to LOSE that 1 teeny tiny kilo, we need to have a DEFICIT, that’s right, of 9000 calories.

For the sake of this exercise let’s imagine we have a client called Julie. Julie is 35 years old, average height and weighs 150kg. Julie consumes the very minimum amount of daily calories recommended for a woman – 1200. Over the course of a week, Julie would therefore consume 8400 calories (and she’d be starving).

Now, let’s take into consideration Julie’s BMR (basal metabolic rate – the amount of calories burnt over the course of a day, not including exercise). A 35 year old woman of average height, who weighs 150kg would have a BMR of 2227. This means Julie would naturally burn 2227 calories a day, (even if she is sedentary) through bodily processes like a beating heart, maintenance of body temperature, breathing etc.

So without any exercise, Julie naturally burns 15,600 calories a week.

So far, we have a deficit of 8400 calories (in) minus 15600 calories (out) = 7,200. Not even a kilo of fat would be lost!

Now let’s say we make Julie do 2 hours of exercise a day. This exercise would need to be relatively low-impact because she is very overweight. So, 2 hours of light aerobics per day would burn 1520 calories, or 10,640 calories a week.

Keep in mind that 14 hours of exercise a week is ALOT in anyone’s book. And almost unachievable for someone of that weight (she’d be starving AND exhausted).

Lets re-calculate to include the exercise Julie is doing.

8400 calories (food) minus 15600 calories (BMR) minus 10,460 (exercise) = 17,660 calories deficit.

A deficit of 17,660 cals equates to just under 2kg of fat lost in one week. And that’s with a very low-cal diet and a stack of exercise.

Can you see why 14kg in one week is physically impossible?!?! I tell you, this show makes my job very difficult indeed.

And if you’re wondering what my calorie deficit needs to be (and I’ve worked it out just this morning)….. To lose 6kg of fat by my competition on July 10th, I need to have a deficit of 337 calories a day. Basically, if I eat 1330 cals a day and burn off 400 cals a day through exercise, then taking into account my BMR of 1270, I should lose exactly 6kg in 160 days if I follow the formula. I’ll let you know how I get on!!