(Marci sobbing) - She says she can't breathe, but she wouldn't be able to
talk if she couldn't breathe. (upbeat music) - [Kiana] This show can only be described as "The Biggest Loser", but for teens. What could go wrong? (Marci sobbing) - Let's go, you've gotten
a long enough break. It's time to get to it. (Marci coughing) Off the floor, let's go. Don't make me ask you twice. Let's go. Marci, if you don't get
up out of that stall, I'm leaving and you can stay fat. (upbeat rock music) - The whole premise of this show is that these 17 to 18 year old kids would be assigned a personal
trainer and a nutritionist between the summer of high school and when they went off to college and have the opportunity
to transform their bodies and change their lives. That personally, was like
a recurring fantasy for me as an overweight slash obese teen, and so when this show came out, I was literally obsessed with it. And it's really only now in retrospect that I can see just
how problematic it was. This show is kind of the playbook for how not to lose weight, or how to do it in the most
unhealthy way humanly possible. And I actually got in contact with the person we'll be
discussing today, Marci, and she told me just how
problematic things were and how much worse they
were behind the scenes. So if you stay tuned to the
latter half of the video, I'll be talking about
that a little bit then. Also a big thank you to Noom
for sponsoring this video, but more about that later. Meet Marci. This episode follows the short, very short journey, as we'll see, of this 18 year old girl, Marci, who has been overweight her entire life. - [Marci] I want to be skinny and healthy and not feel like I have
to eat every five minutes just to feel like I'm somebody. I want to change so bad because I know that it would help me. It would change my whole life. - [Kiana] So I guess the issue with Marci is she spends almost all of her time alone because she was actually pulled
from school at a young age due to bullying about her weight. - I really don't have that many friends. I do everything by myself. It's kind of like food's my friend. Like, I know that this
is going to make me fat, but this is going to make me feel so good. - When I knew I was going
to do a video on this show, I was like, I have to
do the Marci episode, because I could relate
to that girl so much and her episode really
stuck out in my mind because we were the same starting weight, we both didn't really have a
lot of friends at that age, and at that age, I really relied on food
to kind of entertain me and to be my friend. And I feel like this show
did a really good job of picking a wide array of people with different backgrounds and stories so that you or whoever was watching could find someone that
kind of represented you and had a similar story. Like, if you had body image issues or you're overweight or you're obese, whatever your situation was, you could probably find something at least a little bit similar modeled throughout the characters on this show. A lot of these kids were using
food to fill some sort of gap that existed in their lives. So, what does MTV do to help
these emotional young adults with maladaptive coping mechanisms? Meet Justin Bradshaw, the ex-military turned bootcamp owner come to whip Marci into shape. - How you doing? Marci, I'm Justin. - Nice to meet you.
- Nice to meet you, I'm going to be your trainer this summer helping you change your life. What are you doing in bed at 10:30? - I shouldn't be in bed. - That's why your lifestyle
is the way it is right now. We're going to fix it now. - This very friendly and
clearly staged interaction kind of sets the stage for
the very aggressive style that will be used to
help Marci get healthy. - Are you ready? - I am.
- Let's go, out of bed. - 250. That's really, really bad. - What's your goal weight? What do you want to get down to? - 160 would be a really,
really good number. - [Justin] That's 90 pounds. - I know.
- That's a lot of weight. We've got about 13 weeks to work that off. That's going to be about seven
pounds a week of weight loss. - Yeah.
- That's no joke. It's not easy. - Okay, but you guys aren't
going to make her lose 90 pounds in 13 weeks, right? - There's the 89 days to change your life. It's going to keep track of
how many days you have left. - A pound a day? A deficit of 3,500
calories every single day? This was filmed around 2012, 2013 I think, which is less than 10 years ago. Surely, we knew that it was inappropriate for teens to be losing a pound a day. Not to mention who is the
audience for the show, MTV? Obviously, it's a bunch of
people with body image issues, people who are overweight, just young teens and adults in general, obese kids, people who've struggled with their weight are obviously the target
audience for this content. And being on MTV, we're also going to have a bunch of kids who are just watching
MTV when this comes on. I really can't believe that
entire boardroom full of people signed off on this and went, yep, teens losing a pound a day, love that idea. Greenlight. Perfect. Let it go. I was so disturbed by the
entire premise of this show that I was like, who made this? I need to know. Who's making this? And I looked it up and of
course it was our friends, the sadists at "The Biggest Loser". They strike again. As I'm sure we all know by now, though this is technically possible, it can cause a litany of complications and should not be attempted
by anyone anywhere. What kind of complications? Well, I'm glad you asked. Loss of lean body mass, hair loss, weight regain, heart complications, gallstones, binge eating or other ED. And of course we know, even from some studies conducted on "The Biggest Loser"
contestants themselves, a lot of these contestants
sustained permanent and metabolic damage that
left them chronically hungry, susceptible to weight regain and had that burning
considerably less calories than it would be expected at their size. But as we'll see after this
message from our sponsor, it just gets worse. This video is sponsored by Noom. Quite unlike this TV show, the evidence suggests that a healthy and sustainable weight loss journey involves a more gradual
to a healthy lifestyle. Weight loss is not just a numbers game. Most weight loss efforts
work in the short term but fail in the longterm. What makes the difference seems to be gradually changing your habits and improving your mindset over time so that you're genuinely
changed as a person. And what makes Noom so
great in my opinion, is their daily psychology based lessons that help you do just that. They give you insights into
how our minds really work while teaching you about yourself, which I think is so important. Here's an example of one
of my favorite lessons which teaches you how to
work on your bad habits by breaking the behavior chain. You'll learn that we're
all surrounded by triggers, and triggers lead to thoughts, thoughts lead to actions, and of course, actions have consequences. The lessons are always interactive. This one asks you what your bad habit is, what thoughts you have and
what triggered that thought, creating your very own behavior chain. These are the types of
insights into our behavior that produce lasting change. Going on TV is one way
to make a big change, but Noom wants to help you
approach weight loss differently by teaching you the
behavioral skills you need to move toward healthy habits
and away from bad ones. Noom takes a healthy gradual
approach to weight loss that helps you work on
your mindset and yourself and how you feel as opposed
to what we see on TV. - [Justin] Marci, if you don't
get up out of that stall, I'm leaving and you can stay fat. (upbeat rock music) - The program will help
you set good goals, work on your relationship with food, work on your relationship with yourself and create new healthy habits
around nutrition and exercise. If you're interested in trying out Noom, and click the link in the description box to take your free 30
second quiz to get started. - I want this workout to
be a reality check for her, and so this workout is
going to be designed to show her how out of shape
she really is right now, how unhealthy it is to be this overweight. - Like what? What? I really do not know where to start with everything that he just said. It's honestly just shocking to me. - I do this for a living, I know what- - Sure, you're in shape already. - Marci go, start, One minute, one minute.
- No, I'm serious. - Let's go, 30 seconds then you're going to start again. No hands, let's go. Keep it up. You could give me one minute-
(Marci whimpering) - I'm gonna pass out. - For attitude, thumbs down for today. - From my understanding, Marci had never set foot
in a gym prior to this day, and now this is her first
experience working out. - I just need a break, I swear. (Marci sobbing) I don't mind working out, I just need a break. (Marci sobbing) - The very first thing this show did was take exercise and
turn it into a punishment. A deserved punishment actually, based on the language in the show, for Marci being overweight. The likelihood that anyone
would enjoy exercise after the duration of this show, with this kind of an introduction to it, is very, very low. Marci is spending her days
being forced into exercise where she's crying and puking. - I just need a break, I swear. - And with very little other reference for what exercise feels like, her brain is learning exercise
equals crying and puking and crying, which could, unchecked, very easily lead to an
aversion to exercise. Not only is this a negative for Marci, but for everybody watching
this show as well. I believe that there was
a study a few years ago that said that after
watching "The Biggest Loser", and obviously, shows like it, people's attitude toward
exercise was a lot worse. People had a lot worse of a view of what exercise was
supposed to look like. I know for me personally, I thought exercise didn't count. It wasn't doing anything for
you unless it looked like that, unless it looked like torture. And I know a lot of people feel like that. And the thing is, if we go back through our references for what exercise looks like, I mean, "The Biggest Loser"
was a massive show on TV and also gym class where we're being told and forced to run laps, sometimes as a punishment, we have to do all these things that maybe we hate or dislike, especially if you were like me and you were an overweight kid and it was a little bit
more difficult for you to do the exercises. All of us have learned
associations with exercise. Some people have good ones, some people have bad ones, everybody has a little
mix of both, I'm sure, but what these shows accomplished was that they taught people that this is what exercise looked like. It created a negative association between exercise and punishment. And yeah, that's not a great thing. And it's really no wonder that there's a huge
portion of the population that's not interested in exercising. But of course, exercise, it doesn't have to look
like that to count, and I mean, science would suggest that the best way to get yourself to stick to exercise which is going to benefit you the most if you can do something
for a longer period of time is to do something that you
actually enjoy for the longterm. Do something that you
want to keep going back to as opposed to forcing
yourself to do something to obtain a reward like weight loss. (lively music) - 222.6. Almost 29 pounds. Whoo!
(woman laughing) (upbeat rock music) - I really want her to see
while losing weight is like, how hard you have to work to do it. - [Kiana] I don't really get
what this guy's obsession is with showing Marci how hard
it will be to lose weight, but that is what the entire
rest of the show consists of. We see Marci constantly exhausted, doing HIT bootcamp drills
day in and day out- - You wanna stay like that? - [Kiana] While being told she sucks and is not putting in
enough effort by Justin. And that's pretty much
(Marci crying) the extent of the weight
loss journey that we see. - Marci's progress so far is
not where I want it to be. - Okay.
- I don't think she grasps how serious the situation is and how difficult it's going to be for her to really lose this weight. - Well, I seem to think
that she is motivated. Do you not see it? - I think her motivation level is still not where it needs to be. Tell her to suck it up. (gentle music) - Just remember kids,
you're not motivated enough unless you make yourself
puke from exercising. And also, it's not a
real weight loss journey unless you lose a hundred
pounds in three months, yet at MTV, you want people to see, for whatever reason, that it's going to be extremely
difficult to lose weight. And the message from this show, and of course, "The
Biggest Loser" as well, that losing weight or transforming at all is this intense process where
you give it all you have for a short period of time, you go balls to the wall, you drop all the bad food, your exercise 24/7, you transform seemingly overnight. And thanks to shows like
these and even social media, where the most popular
transformations are the very quick and very dramatic ones, this is probably the most common model of a successful weight loss journey we see represented in
the media and online, and then this becomes the benchmark that people either
consciously or subconsciously gauge themselves against. - You want to say like that? - Except that as we've already discussed, it's incredibly unhealthy and unlikely to lead to
permanent weight loss, which is of course the
issue with weight loss. Many people can lose
weight in the short term and very, very few can
lose it in the longterm. And when I spoke to Marci, she told me it was even worse
than it was portrayed on TV. "They said we were monitored by doctors. We weren't. My trainer had me eating
two protein shakes and one protein bar a day during the show, even though they showed
me cooking healthy, which was BS. I was in the gym four to six hours a day only taking in 500 calories. They didn't show us how to keep up in the real world with diet." I totally didn't expect
her to message me back, so when she did, I was like so unprepared. She messaged me like instantly. I was like, shit, I don't know what to say. But you can see that she said
in there that they did not, there was nothing to
do with healthy eating. In the show, they didn't
even show it at all. There wasn't even enough for
me to talk about in this video because it was literally
like a 30 second clip. - This looks good Marc. You like it? - It's very good. - [Marci's Mum] The spinach is good. (lighthearted music) - The behind the scenes
account that Marci gave and that we've heard from
people on "The Biggest Loser", if you followed that at all, it really shows how
sketchy these shows are and how they pretend to be about
helping people get healthy, but they really have no
interest in that whatsoever. The show's modeled as
completely unhealthy, unrealistic, three month
transformation that's dangerous. They put these people through
a dangerous situation, these young people, in this instance. At least with "The Biggest Loser", these people are older
and they're fuller adults. I know an 18 year old is an adult but they're still a very young person, and I don't know, just something really pisses me off about preying on young
people who are not old enough to like fully understand the magnitude of their choices in this situation. I'm on a tangent, but it really makes me mad. And the travesty of these
shows is really two-fold. You have the core contestants
who go through this show eating 500 calories a day, being told it's for their health, meanwhile, it's incredibly unhealthy, and then you have the
people watching this show being negatively impacted by everything that's going on on there, and then modeling their
weight loss journey off of what they see on TV. I can't tell you how many times in my life I've personally tried to
lose weight like that. Tried to lose weight by eating nothing or by exercising a lot, not that I got too many days into the exercising a lot thing, but I still tried. And I thought that if I
wasn't doing it that way, then I wasn't going to lose weight. When in reality, a weight loss journey looks pretty much the exact opposite of that. And now we have lots of data
to support that conclusion that it's a more slow reformation of habits and mindset over time as opposed to what we
see on these TV shows, which clearly give no fucks
about the health of the people that are on there or are watching it and are really just trying
to make a quick buck. - Today's my final weigh in. This is the moment of truth. It's to see if all the hard
work that I put in the summer, all the dieting, all the exercising, working out every day, putting up with Justin like I have. - Marci did go on to lose
90 pounds in 89 days. And regardless of the unhealthy
and or unethical method used to get her there, it's still inspiring to see
someone reach their goals and transform themselves. Testing yourself and pushing your limits is one of the best parts
of a weight loss journey. But there are healthy ways
and unhealthy ways to do so. (gentle music) Anyway, thank you guys so
much for watching this video. Let me know if you enjoyed it. Let me know if you have seen this show. I used to love it when
I was, already said, I loved it when it came out, but now looking back, I'm like, oh shit, that's not right. But yeah, thank you guys
so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one. (upbeat music)
