‘Biggest Loser’ Winner Says Competitors Are ‘Exploited’ On Show
Biggest Loser Season 1 winner Ryan Benson has opened up about his experience on the show. He says the reality show, which has been controversial over the years, exploited vulnerable people. Keep reading to see what he revealed about what happens behind the scenes.
Season 1 Winner Opens Up About Biggest Loser Tactics
In 2005, Ryan Benson hopped on the scale during the live season finale for the very first season of The Biggest Loser. The scale clocked him in at 208 pounds. Over the span of 24 weeks, he’d lost 122 pounds. Because he lost the most weight over the 24-week program, he took home the $250,000 grand prize.
While it may have felt good at the moment, the good feelings and the weight loss didn’t last for Ryan. “Within three days after the show, I had gained 25 to 30 pounds back just in water weight alone,” he told People.
At the time, Ryan was an aspiring actor looking for his big break. A friend approached him about the weight loss reality show. He said that it was “appealing” because he would get to take a few months off work and just focus on shedding extra weight.
However, he didn’t know what he was signing up for. In fact, most contestants didn’t. It was the first season of The Biggest Loser. As Ryan points out, many of the producers and trainers were “kind of learning as they went.” This led to the contestants undergoing intense workouts and people like Ryan Benson going to great lengths to win the competition.
In the last 24 hours of the competition, Ryan didn’t eat or drink anything. He just “went to the gym and had a rubber suit on to sweat.” Overall, he said they were setting everyone up on the show to fail. “I just wanted to win,” Ryan said.
You may be thinking, “How could they want everyone to fail?” Well, according to Ryan, producers on the show would set up temptations for the contestants. “In the first season, they had food out everywhere,” Ryan recalled. There would be platters of unhealthy food that were placed there in hopes of catching someone cheating on their diet.
The Biggest Loser alum said, “There was a part of me that thinks that they wanted to catch people on camera, just gorging themselves on this food and kind of almost making it funny…I don’t know what they expected, but there were times that I felt like, ‘Yeah, they want us to fail.’ We were definitely exploited.”
Ryan Benson Pushed Himself To The Edge For $250K
In the end, it became about winning for Ryan Benson. He admitted that he was hyper-competitive at the time and it had a serious impact on his health. Ryan talked about a “master cleanse” he did while on the show. For the cleanse, you only drink fresh squeezed lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup mixed together for 10 days. During that time, he also worked out a lot.
Physicians tested the contestants’ urine at the finale weigh-in and doctors found blood in Ryan’s sample. He was so dehydrated that his body was starting to shut down. “My wife was so mad at me, she said ‘Nothing is worth this,'” he remembered.
Ryan’s extreme approach on The Biggest Loser helped him bring home the $250K, but his weight loss didn’t stick around. As mentioned above, he gained some weight back immediately. Eventually, he gained every single pound back.
Although his experience on the show wasn’t a great one, Ryan Benson said he can appreciate how the show changed over the years. In the end, Ryan said, “It did become inspirational.”
Would he do it all again? “If I was in the same position as I was then, I would probably do it again,” Ryan said. “It would have to have a whole different spin. They’d have to take a more holistic approach, focusing on both mental and physical health as opposed to just the number on the scale.”
The Biggest Loser aired for 18 total seasons until it was canceled in 2016.
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