Dieters are at the mercy of their own bodies, which fight to pull them back to their old weights, a study on former The Biggest Loser contestants shows.
Former Newcastle contestant, Emma Duncan, said while she had regained some of the 62 kilograms she had lost on the show, she had managed to maintain a healthy weight for the past four years.
“I don’t know too much about the scientific side of it, but I do know after I came off finale, I put on nearly 15 kilos over the first several months,” she said.
“I don’t know if it was down to a changed metabolism, or if it was just me settling back into normal life, not going to the gym as much and balancing how much I should be eating.”
The Biggest Loser study, published in the journal Obesity in 2016, followed the contestants from season eight of the US version of the series. The researchers had already known that most people who deliberately lost weight would have a slower metabolism when the diet ended. But they were surprised that as the years went by, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover, and actually became even slower.
Ms Duncan, who appeared in season six in 2011, won the series after losing 62 kilograms.
She said there was no way anyone could maintain the training and diet regime outside of the show.
“We were training five, six, seven hours a day, and in the house you only had certain foods you could pick from – you weren’t going out for dinner or socialising, it was a different environment,” she said. “Leading up to the finale, we were on a very strict diet. Our calories were very low at that point and there was no way you would be able to sustain that. I did what I had to do at the time to win. My body was probably depleted of a lot of things.”
Ms Duncan said while some of the study’s findings rang true, a big part of maintaining her weight had boiled down to balance.
She said her weight fluctuated for about two years as she worked out what was most effective for her.
“People think that it’s this magical miracle cure and we learn all these amazing things on the show,” she said.
“We were told what to eat, and we ate pretty much the same thing every day for six whole months.”
Ms Duncan took up running three years ago, and in that time she has done 15 half marathons, a marathon, and she is now training for her second ultra-marathon.
Her active lifestyle balanced out her social life.
When she is training for an event, she runs between 40 and 60 kilometres a week, as well as does strength training at the gym.
“I am an emotional eater, so I do occasionally go through hard times and I eat more than I should.
“I don’t know much about the metabolism, but I know if I eat too much crap I put weight on that week. I believe it’s mainly got to do with what you put in your mouth.
“I still treat myself daily, but instead of having a big block of chocolate like I used to, now I have a little Freddo Frog or something.”
Ms Duncan said she had felt pressured to keep the weight off after the show.
“And that’s pressure I probably put on myself, really. You’d put on a kilo and panic a little bit,” she said.
“But because I had put on weight after the show I did feel like a failure, and that doesn’t help.”
