November 19, 2025 • 38 mins
Shock value makes great TV, but it makes terrible health. We dig into the Netflix documentary on The Biggest Loser and trace the fallout of extreme weight loss: starvation-level calories, dehydration before weigh-ins, and punishing workouts that tanked metabolism and broke trust. The headline the show never printed is simple: you can’t out-train bad choices, and you can’t bully biology. When intensity replaces consistency, the body fights back with slower burn, louder hunger, and a rebound that feels like failure.
I share why my philosophy—stop dieting, start choosing—lands differently. Instead of humiliation and quick fixes, we focus on small, smart choices that respect physiology and psychology. Think exercise as a tool, not a cure; food as a partner, not an enemy. We break down the NIH findings on metabolic adaptation, why cortisol makes fat loss harder, and how identity-based habits beat hype. This is about autonomy over external control: building simple systems that work when no one’s watching—anchored meals, enjoyable movement, better sleep, and friction against impulse.
We also talk about the hidden price: the emotional whiplash of tying worth to a number. Shame isn’t a plan; it’s a trap. Real transformation starts in your head, then shows up on your plate and in your calendar. The wins we celebrate aren’t just pounds—they’re energy, peace, and follow-through. If you’ve tried the spectacle and burned out, you’re not broken; the method was. Trade punishment for partnership and let your choices compound into a life you can actually live in.
If this hit home, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs a saner path, and leave a review. Ready to take the next step? Grab my free weekly tips at jonathanwrestler.com and get the book Shut Up and Choose on Amazon. Then tell me: what’s one small choice you’ll make today?
Stop Dieting. Start Choosing.
I’m Jonathan Ressler, Transformation Guide and author of Shut Up and Choose. I lost 140 pounds and built a movement the diet industry hopes you never find. No starvation. No obsession. No gym marathons. Real transformation starts when you stop outsourcing discipline and start leading yourself.
The truth is simple: weight loss isn’t about willpower—it’s about integrity. Every time you keep a promise to yourself, you rebuild confidence. Every smart choice strengthens self-trust. That’s the foundation of lasting change. My mission is to help busy, high-performing people take back control of their health, energy, and mindset—without diets, shots, or shame.
Each episode of the Shut Up and Choose Podcast cuts through the noise with real talk, proven strategies, and small, smart steps that actually last. No gimmicks. No hype. Just truth that works in real life.
Get free weekly tips at JonathanRessler.com/weekly-tips.
Grab my book Shut Up and Choose on Amazon.
Follow me on Instagram @JonathanResslerFatLoss.
Leave a review—it helps real people find real answers.
Connect directly: Jonathan.Ressler@gmail.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Annoucer (00:02):
If you're a whiny snowflake that can't handle the
truth, is offended by the wordfuck and about 37 uses of it in
different forms, gets ass hurtwhen you hear someone speak the
absolute real and raw truth, youshould leave.
Like right now.
This is Shut Up and Shoes.
(00:22):
The podcast where we cutthrough the shit and get real
about weight loss, life, andeverything in between, we get
into the nitty-gritty of makingsmall, smart choices that add up
to big results.
From what's on your plate andhow you approach life's
challenges, we'll explore howthe simple act of choosing
(00:43):
differently can transform yourhealth, your mindset, and your
entire freaking life.
So, if you're ready to cutthrough the bullshit and start
making some real changes, thenbuckle up and shut it up,
because we're about to chooseour way to a healthier, happier
life.
This is Shut Up and Choose.
(01:04):
Let's do this.
Now your host, JonathanRessler.
Jonathan Ressler | Transfo (01:13):
Hey, welcome back to Shut Up and
Choose, the podcast that's thenoise.
Instagram, internet, feelingyour way, it's all a bunch of
garbage.
You know that.
It's all built on lies.
That's why my philosophy isstop dieting, start choosing,
because as soon as you stopdieting and you start making
choices for yourself, you'll beamazed at how much easier the
(01:35):
whole weight loss thing is.
But today I want to talk aboutsomething that I actually saw
this on TV.
Netflix just recently dropped adocumentary a few months ago, I
think it was in August, but Ijust watched it the other night
that basically approves myentire philosophy.
It's called Fit for Life, theReality of the Biggest Loser.
So look, if you've everbelieved that extreme exercise,
(01:56):
boot camp diets, or just sheerwillpower were the keys to
weight loss, you need to hearthis.
You need to watch thisdocumentary.
Because what the film exposesisn't just the truth about the
one show.
It's a truth about an entireindustry built on lies, shame,
and short-term spectacle.
But let's rewind for a second,because back in the mid-2000s,
(02:18):
the biggest loser became acultural phenomenon, is the only
word for it.
Millions of people tuned inevery week to watch the
contestants, who, as we know,were real overweight men and
women.
They watched them cry and sweatand suffer their weight toward
dramatic weight loss.
It had everything a networkexecutive could dream of.
(02:39):
It had transformation,competitional, and of course the
obligatory emotionalbreakdowns.
The show made stars out oftrainers, both idiots, but
that's beside the point.
That's not what this is about.
It made household names out ofdiet products, and it gave
America the illusion that anyonecould lose hundreds of pounds
if they just worked hard enough.
(02:59):
You know I think that'sbullshit, but I'm gonna I'm
gonna take you deeper.
So you remember the scenes oftrainers like screaming, that
Gillian Michael screaming inpeople's faces, contestants
collapsing on the treadmill,giant wands that felt like
gladiator battles.
It was marketed as inspiration,but it wasn't about health.
It never was.
It was about humiliationpackaged as hope.
(03:22):
And here's the thing thecameras didn't show.
Behind those sweaty montageswere starvation diets,
dehydration tactics, andsometimes even drugs being
handed out like protein bars.
Contestants weren't justtraining hard, they were
surviving on as little as 800calories a day.
(03:42):
800.
And that's less than what atoddler should eat.
And guess what?
Of course, it worked, but onlyfor a minute.
The pounds flew off, theymelted off, the before and after
photos went viral, and the showraked in millions of dollars.
But as this new Netflixdocumentary shows, almost every
(04:02):
single one of those contestantsregained the weight, and a lot
of them, and more.
Many ended up heavier andslower and even more
metabolically damaged than whenthey started.
They didn't just break bodies.
That show didn't break bodies,it broke spirits.
Think about that for a second.
These were people who alreadystruggled with weight and shame
(04:24):
their whole lives.
They were desperate for change.
I know because honestly, atthat time I kind of thought
about like, hey, maybe I'll goon the biggest loser because I
wasn't 411 pounds, but I was inthe mid-threes and I was
thinking, man, am I fat?
And the people on the show wereonly three in the beginning
were, you know, 300, 305.
I was a 350.
I was like, fuck, I'm acontestant.
(04:44):
But anyway, these people wereso desperate for change and they
were handed an opportunity thatlooked like salvation.
But instead of being taught howto live differently, they were
taught how to perform thinnessfor television.
That's what I said, performthinness.
They were taught that sufferingequals success, and that's the
exact reason that it all fellapart.
And don't get me wrong, theywent for a lot of seasons, but
(05:06):
it all fell apart, and there wasa lot of shit behind the
scenes.
So the show exposes it all.
The manipulation, the weigh-intricks, the complete lack of
aftercare.
When the show was over, theywere fucking done.
They didn't want to speak tohim ever again.
One former contestant said thatthe producers told her to drink
uh as little water as possiblebefore the weigh-ins so the
number would drop.
Others admitted to takingdiuretics and diapills and all
(05:29):
kinds of shit just to hit theirgoal.
Trainers pushed workouts soextreme that hospitalizations
became almost fucking normal.
There's even an account of onecontestant collapsing with some
disease.
I can't say it, but I don'tonly because I don't know the
name of it, but it was apotentially fatal condition
(05:50):
caused by overexertion duringfilming.
And that's fucking insane.
They had to take this woman outwith a helicopter, an airlifter
to the hospital.
And then, of course, there'sthe biggest shocker of all, this
guy who is the winner of seasoneight, I can't remember his
name, but he lost 239 pounds insix months on national
(06:10):
television.
But that guy's today, he'sheavier than he's ever been.
And he's, of course, in thedocumentary.
That's not failure, though.
That's the body fighting back.
That's biology doing exactlywhat it's supposed to do after
being starved, punished, andbetrayed, abused.
You picked the word.
So yeah, Netflix just made mypoint for me.
(06:31):
For years, I've been saying thesame thing.
You don't need another diet oranother trainer or another gym
membership or any of that shit.
You need to start choosingbecause weight loss isn't about
punishment.
It's about participation inyour own life.
It's not about willpower, it'sabout awareness.
And it's sure as shit not abouthours in the gym.
It's about the decisions youmake when nobody else is
(06:53):
watching.
So the biggest loser was builton the fantasy that if you work
hard enough, scream loud enough,and hate yourself enough, you
can fix everything.
But here's the truth of theshow certainly didn't tell, but
the documentary did.
You can't out-exercise your badchoices.
You can't outrun an unhealthyrelationship with food, and you
sure as shit can't bully yourbody into long-term change.
(07:15):
The contestants didn't failbecause they were weak, because
obviously they spent hours inthe gym and they worked
themselves to exhaustion.
They failed because the systemthey trusted was designed for
television and nottransformation.
And the documentary finallyshows that.
So when I say stop dieting,start choosing, I'm not giving
you just a cute slogan.
I'm giving the antidote todecades of damage, the opposite
(07:39):
of what the biggest loser stoodfor, because lasting change
isn't created by starvingyourself or sprinting or working
out until you puke.
It's created by making onesmall, smart choice today and
another one tomorrow and eachday after that.
That's what this show proves.
That's what this documentaryproves.
That's what my entirephilosophy has been about.
(08:00):
So buck up because in thisepisode, we're going to break
down exactly what Netflixrevealed and how everything they
expose about the biggest loserconfirms that the only thing
that truly changes your life ischoice.
This is the uncomfortable truththat no one of the biggest
loser ever told you.
You can't out-train badchoices.
That's it.
That's the whole secret theyhave buried under hours of
(08:22):
screaming workouts andsweat-drenched bullshit drama.
You can spend six hours a dayin the gym.
You can run until your shoesfucking melt.
You push your body past thepoint of exhaustion.
But if the choices behind thoseactions are rooted in
punishment and desperation ormanipulation, you're just
spinning your wheels.
(08:43):
Documentary makes that crystalclear.
It shows contestants spendingentire days in the gym working
out until they literally fuckingcollapse on the floor.
We're talking six, seven,sometimes eight-hour sessions
designed not for health, but forspectacle.
They weren't learningsustainable movement, they were
learning survival.
(09:04):
And the reason they lost weightso fast wasn't because of the
magical training techniques, itwas because they were fucking
starving, plain and simple.
I told you, people admitted toeating 800 calories a day.
800 calories.
That's not discipline, that'sdeprivation.
For reference, just so youknow, the average adult burns
twice that, twice the 18, 1,600calories just sitting on the
(09:26):
couch and breathing.
So imagine pushing throughmarathon-level workouts on a
toddler's diet.
That's not commitment, it'smetabolic suicide.
And the kicker of this wholething, they weren't doing it
alone.
Trainers and producers werecomplicit.
Contestants were encouraged todehydrate before weigh-ins, to
skip water for 24 hours and totake diuretics and pills that
(09:47):
would strip the scale of anotherpound or two.
Because on TV, results areeverything.
Ratings don't care about yourthyroid or your hormones or your
mental health.
They care about the number thatflashes on the giant digital
scale.
When you see that, it's easy tobelieve weight loss is purely
about the grind.
Work harder, sweat more, andyour fat will melt away.
(10:08):
But here's what the documentaryactually exposes, and what I've
been preaching for years.
Exercise is just a tool.
It's not the cure.
Think about it like this.
If your car is leaking oil, youdon't just keep driving faster
hoping the leak stops, you fixthe leak.
Exercise without fixing thechoices behind it is the same
(10:30):
insanity.
Sure, of course, you'll getsomewhere, but it won't be where
you think you're going.
The contestants, I have to say,they got immediate results, and
massive drops on the scale, allthe accolades and applause and
confetti and all that shit.
But their bodies were actuallyin crisis.
The documentary even cites theNational Institute of Health
(10:51):
Study that followed them yearslater.
Nearly every single one gainedback the weight, and many gained
back more.
Their metabolism sloweddramatically, some burning
hundreds of fewer calories inthe day than before they started
the show.
Their bodies literally learn toresist weight loss.
That's biology's defensemechanism.
(11:11):
When you starve it, it fightsback.
When you punish it, it protectsitself.
And when you finally stop themadness, it rebounds hard.
So let's call that what it is.
The biggest loser didn't createwinners.
It created metabolic chaos forthe contestants.
It proved that suffering canproduce results, but not the
(11:31):
kind that lasts becausetransformation doesn't come from
violence against your body.
It comes from partnership withit.
That's why my approach looks sodifferent.
I don't tell people to killthemselves in the gym.
You know, I don't even go tothe gym.
I tell them to make one small,smart choice, then another, and
another, because the smallchoices compound and chaos
collapses.
So let's get something straightthough, right now.
(11:53):
I'm not anti-exercise.
I try to move my body everysingle day, but I do it because
it feels good, not because Ihate myself.
Movement should support yourlife, not dominate it.
The people on that show weren'tbuilding lives.
They were fighting for survivalunder the fucking lights and
all the makeup of the camera andthe camera lenses themselves.
And here's the part that nobodywants to say out loud.
(12:14):
A lot of those contestants camehome broken.
Physically, yes, brokeninjuries, exhaustion, hormonal
imbalances, but emotionally too.
They were conditioned tobelieve that thinness equals
worth.
And when the weight crept back,so did the shame.
They didn't fail because theywere weak, they failed because
they were taught the wronglesson.
The real lesson should havebeen change comes from choosing
(12:37):
differently, not suffering more.
That documentaryunintentionally delivers that
message on a silver platter.
Every frame shows the cost ofconfusing movement with meaning
and effort with effectiveness.
You can force your body to obeyfor a season, but unless your
mindset changes, it will alwaysfind its way back to where it
feels safe, even if that meansfat and slow.
(13:01):
And that brings us right backto choice.
The people who maintain theirresults long term aren't the
ones who trained the hardest orsweated the most.
They're the ones who changedtheir daily decisions, the ones
who stopped eating out of guilt,the ones who redefined what
success looked like, and theones who understood that you can
love food and still loveyourself.
(13:22):
Exercise can definitely helpyou, absolutely, but it's not
the magic pill that you've beensold that everybody's trying to
sell you on the internet.
The magic pill doesn't fuckingexist.
Just by the way, neither doesthe magic shot, but that's a
conversation for another day.
What exists is the truth.
Every decision you make, everybite, every thought, every step
(13:48):
adds up to either chaos orcontrol.
The biggest loser taught peopleto chase control through
punishment.
My mission is to teach you toreclaim control through choice.
Because when you choosedifferently, your body doesn't
need to fight you anymore.
It finally gets to work withyou.
That's the difference betweenlosing weight and losing
(14:10):
yourself.
And that's exactly what thenext part of this documentary
revealed.
The science they ignored andhow their quest for quick
results destroyed their abilityto maintain them.
This part really got to me.
For a show that claimed to beabout health, the biggest loser
ignored almost every bit ofactual science about how the
(14:32):
human body works.
In this documentary, you havedoctors and former contestants,
and they describe what happenedonce the camera stopped rolling,
and it's fucking brutal.
Their bodies didn't just goback to normal.
They rebelled.
Every system that had beenpushed to its breaking point
decided never again.
Metabolism tanked, hungerhormones went haywire, and their
(14:54):
energy vanished.
Why?
Because biology isn't a fan ofextremes.
Your body's number one job isto keep you alive, not to make
you look good on a scale.
When you starve it, itinterprets that as danger.
When you force it through eighthours of cardio on 800 fucking
calories, it doesn't clap foryou.
(15:14):
It fucking panics.
In the documentary, they talkabout that.
I discussed this before, butthey talked about the 2016
National Institute of Healthstudy that followed the biggest
loser contestants for six yearsafter the show.
Every single one of themregained weight.
Not most, every one.
The resting metabolic ratesplummeted and never recovered.
(15:37):
That means even sitting still,their bodies burn hundreds of
calories less every single daythan they did before the show.
Imagine that.
You lose a couple hundredpounds, think that you fixed
your life, and now your body isworking against you 24-7 just to
get back what it lost.
That's not failure.
That's physiology.
And that's exactly what I'vebeen telling you all along.
(15:57):
You can't bully your biology.
You have to work with it.
But TV doesn't give a shitabout hormones or adaptation, it
cares about drama.
The producers wanted tears, nottruth.
They wanted the sound of atreadmill belt squealing, not
some nutritionist explainingmetabolic slowdown.
The science is so simple, butnobody on that show wanted to
(16:19):
hear it.
When you crash your calories,your metabolism slows to
survive.
When you exercise to absoluteexhaustion, your body releases
cortisol.
That's the stress hormone thatliterally tells your body to
hold on to fat.
You put those two together andyou built the perfect recipe for
burnout, rebound, andultimately shame.
(16:39):
The show has footage ofcontestants gaining the way back
and feeling like shit.
But the real failure wasn'ttheirs, it was the systems.
They were set up to fail fromday one because no one explained
that the key to sustainablechange isn't force, it's
feedback.
When you treat your body likean enemy, it defends itself.
(17:00):
When you treat it like apartner, it cooperates.
That's the entire foundation ofmy philosophy.
I lost 140 pounds and kept itoff because I stopped fighting
my biology and I startedlistening to it.
I learned how to choose foodsthat work for me, not against
me.
And I learned how to move inways that felt good, not
punishing.
I fucking hate the gym.
(17:20):
I'm not going there.
That's punishment.
I'm not doing it.
But most importantly, I stoppedstarving myself to prove a
point.
The contestants on that shownever got that chance.
They were given a set of rules,and most of them wrong, by the
way, and told to follow them orgo home.
Eat less, sweat more, pushharder, cry for the fucking
camera.
They weren't being taughthealth.
They were being taught how toperform suffering.
(17:43):
The show also reveals that someof the contestants were
terrified to eat after thefilming ended.
They'd been trained to believethe food was their enemy.
I'm talking about somethingthat's fucked up.
That one wrong bite would undoeverything for them.
And that's not health, man.
That's trauma.
One woman said she was sometabolically broken she'd gain
weight eating 1,200 calories aday.
(18:04):
Her body wasn't broken.
It was protecting her from everstarving again.
That's what the science says,anyway.
This is where I get passionatebecause it's the heart of what I
teach.
Real transformation isbiological, psychological, and
behavioral.
All three of those thingsworking together.
Diet culture and shows like TheBiggest Loser pretend that it's
(18:25):
simple math.
Calories in, calories out.
And of course, that is the mostbasic thing.
You have to burn more caloriesthan you consume, but that's
just the tip of it.
It's not the math, it'schemistry.
It's the hormones, it's sleepand stress and mindset and
habit.
It's a thousand choices thathappen before you ever even pick
up a dumbbell or a fork.
(18:46):
The science says sustainableweight loss comes from
consistency, not extremes, fromfueling your body and definitely
not starving it.
And from lowering your stressand not living in that state of
fight or flight, which is whatthose contestants lived in.
And honestly, what most dietinfluencers and diet doctors
tell you.
They want you to be in aconstant state of fight or
(19:07):
flight.
If you eat the wrong thing,you're fucked.
That's not the truth.
And the biggest lesson of all,from training your brain to make
better choices automatically,not forcing your body into
submission temporarily.
That's why every quick fixeventually collapses, because
you can't override human biologyforever.
(19:28):
If the biggest loser hadbrought in just one
endocrinologist instead of aHollywood producer, and they did
have a doctor, but they reallydidn't listen to them, but if
they had brought in anendocrinologist, they might have
built something that actuallyhelped people, but they didn't
want help.
They wanted headlines.
And that's why what I do is sodifferent.
When I help clients, especiallybusy executives, I don't give
(19:49):
them a diet.
I give them a strategy.
I teach them how to eat andmove and think in a way that
their body can sustain for life.
No starvation, no fuckingcortisol overload, no rebound,
just small, smart,science-backed choices that
stack up over time.
Because science isn't theenemy, but misusing it is.
(20:12):
And now, thanks to Netflix, theworld finally sees the result
of ignoring it.
Those contestants didn't justlose weight, they lost trust in
themselves.
They were taught that effortequals results.
But the truth is, alignedeffort equals results.
Unaligned effort, the kind thatfights your biology, leads
straight to burnout.
(20:33):
So when people tell me, butJonathan, I just need to work
out more, I shake my head.
No, no, you don't.
You need to work with your bodymore.
You need to understand the datathat your body's been giving
you all along.
Your hunger cues, your energydips, your stress signals,
that's the science that matters.
Because here's the headlinethat the Netflix documentary
(20:54):
didn't print.
The body always keeps score.
Every skip meal, everysleepless night, every
punishment workout, it fuckingremembers.
The good news is that it alsoremembers the healing.
So the moment you startchoosing smarter and fueling
yourself better, sleeping,lowering your stress, all those
things, it responds every singletime.
(21:14):
That's the real science oftransformation.
And it's not found in the gymor on a TV stage or on a
starvation plan.
It's found in your choices.
And that kind of brings me tothe next part of the story: the
emotional fallout.
Because when your entireidentity is built on a number
and then that number comes back,the damage isn't just physical,
(21:35):
it's psychological.
The physical damage, obviouslythat was brutal, but the
emotional fallout was evenworse.
This show shows what happenswhen your entire sense of worth
gets tied into a number on thescale.
And that number eventuallystops cooperating.
When the cameras were rolling,the people on the show were
fucking heroes.
(21:56):
They were America'sinspiration, the living proof
that anything was possible withenough pain, sweat, and
screaming.
They were parated around acrossmorning shows and all kinds of
shows.
They'd given sponsorship deals,celebrated as success stories,
got product placement.
They were told they'd won theirlives back.
But then the lights went off.
And the applause stopped.
And the weight came back.
(22:16):
And that's when the realnightmare began.
Contestants talk about feelingashamed, broken, and even
worthless because of the sameculture that glorified their
transformation now mocked theirfailure.
The very audience that oncecried for them on TV was now
whispering about how they letthemselves go.
Some of them were ridiculedonline, others isolated
themselves entirely.
And you know what?
(22:36):
It's not really hard tounderstand why.
When your value is measured inpounds lost, what happens when
the pounds come back?
It should be measured in healthand the life that you gain.
But you start to believe itwhen your value is only in
pounds lost, you believe thatyou came back, the old you, the
failure, the one that youthought you killed on national
television.
That's the part no one sees.
(22:58):
The psychological whiplash ofchasing an external finish line.
One former contestant said shecouldn't look at herself in the
mirror for years after the show.
Another one admitted that shewas terrified to eat, terrified
that food undo everything.
Some, and Manny actually,developed eating disorders.
Some fell into depression.
One even said that the showmade her hate herself thin.
(23:20):
That line kind of knocked meout, you know.
Hate yourself thin.
That's the whole problem, rightthere.
You can't hate yourself intohealth.
You can't shame yourself intotransformation.
And yet, that's exactly whatthe biggest loser, and honestly,
most of the diet cultureteaches people to do.
It's why I wrote my book, ShutUp and Choose, because the only
(23:41):
transformation that lasts comesfrom respect, not punishment,
from awareness and notrestriction, and obviously from
small, smart choices, not fromfear.
The emotional cost of that showwas enormous.
They weren't actors, these werereal human beings who believed
losing weight on national TVwould fix their lives.
But instead of being taught howto live differently, they were
(24:03):
taught how to performdifferently.
They were taught that theirworth depended on a result.
And as you know, results fade.
And think about the messagethat sends.
You're only valuable if you'resmaller.
You're only lovable if you'redisciplined, you're only
successful if you're suffering.
Fuck that noise.
No wonder so many of themcrumbled when the whole show
(24:25):
ended because the system nevertaught them what to do.
There was no mental reset, noemotional rebuild, no support
network.
When the filler wrapped up,they were sent home, alone, with
fucked up metabolisms, brokenroutines, and zero tools to
handle real life.
And this long-term weight lossis all about how to learning how
(24:45):
to live your life and stilleating food.
Maybe what they had, thatwasn't transformation, that was
trauma.
And here's the wild thing (24:52):
the documentary really didn't spin
it.
It doesn't have to.
The paint on the faces of thesepeople pretty much says it all.
You can feel the betrayal, notjust their bodies, but their
belief that this was finallytheir way out.
And it it's not just them.
Millions of viewers absorbedthat same toxic fucking message.
(25:14):
Honestly, I did.
They watched these contestants,thought, if I can just work out
harder, maybe I'll finally begood enough.
They tried the same extremediets, the same fucking crazy
workouts.
And when they inevitably burnedout, they blame themselves.
I'm guilty of that.
That's the tragedy.
The show didn't break itscontestants, it broke its
(25:36):
audience.
But here's the good news.
The documentary also cracksopen the door, gives us a moment
to say, hey, wait, maybe we'vebeen doing this all wrong.
Because the truth is, there'snothing wrong with wanting to
lose weight, obviously.
There's nothing wrong withwanting to feel better, look
better, and live better.
The problem is how we've beentaught to do it.
(25:57):
You don't need to be humiliatedinto health, and you don't need
to be punished into progress.
You just need to be empoweredinto choice.
When I lost the 140 pounds, Ididn't do it by hating the guy I
used to be.
I did it by understanding thatguy, by forgiving him, by
learning what drove the stupid,fucking horrible choices that I
made in the first place.
(26:18):
That's what real transformationlooks like.
It starts in your head, not inyour abs, not in your stomach.
It starts in your head.
That's the missing piece.
The biggest loser neverunderstood.
Mindset.
Not motivation, not punishment,mindset.
You can change your diet andyou can get a new trainer.
You can go to the gym, you cantake crazy supplements.
(26:41):
But if you don't change how youthink about food and success
and failure and self-worth,nothing sticks.
It's not just psychology,that's a neuroscience.
Your brain builds habits aroundemotion.
You eat when you're stressed,that's a learned loop.
You binge when you feelunworthy.
That's not weakness, it'swiring.
The only way to rewire it is tochoose differently over and
(27:04):
over and over again until yourbrain catches up.
And that's why this documentarymatters so much, because it
exposes the lie thattransformation happens through
spectacle.
It doesn't.
It happens through small,quiet, consistent choices that
nobody claps for.
The contestants on the biggestlose didn't fail because they
(27:24):
didn't try hard enough.
They failed because they werenever given a chance to learn
choice.
The thing that actually changeseverything.
So when I say stop dining,start choosing, this is exactly
what I mean.
Stop chasing external approval.
Stop basing your worth onnumbers.
Stop hating yourself then.
Start making choices that youcan live with, not just survive.
(27:48):
Because health isn't measuredin pounds, mostly.
But it isn't measured inpounds, it's measured in peace.
So here's the bottom line.
Fit for TV, the reality of thebiggest loser, doesn't just
expose a show.
It validates an entire truththe weight loss industry has
ignored for decades.
Everything that went wrong onthe biggest loser is exactly why
(28:11):
I stopped dieting and startchoosing works.
The show sold punishment.
My method teaches partnership.
They built fear.
The extreme exercise, thestarvation diets, humiliation,
the lack of support.
(28:31):
All that shit didn't just fail.
They backfired.
Contestants lost hundreds ofpounds.
I think the record guy lost 239pounds.
That's fucking insane.
But because he never learnedsustainable habits or how to
make real-world choices, everyone of them gained it back.
It's the perfect proof thatshort-term results mean nothing
(28:52):
without long-term strategy.
And that's what I've beenpreaching since day one.
And I only stumbled on it.
I figured it out for myself.
And weight loss is not aboutrestriction, it's about
direction.
It's about choosing everysingle day to do the next small,
smart thing.
Not starving yourself forapplause, but building momentum
through consistency.
(29:13):
The show's philosophy wassimple push harder, eat less,
hurt more, win big.
But life doesn't work that way.
Not real life.
You can't punish your way topeace.
You can't shame your body intotrusting you, and you sure as
shit can't confuse weight losswith wellness.
What the biggest loser proved,and what the Netflix documentary
made pretty much undeniable, isthat change without choices
(29:37):
always collapses.
The contestants were controlledby the rules, the cameras, and
of course the fear ofelimination.
They were told what to eat,when to move, when to cry, and a
whole bunch of other stuff.
None of that builds autonomy.
And when you remove theexternal control, the internal
structure isn't there to sustainanything.
That's why my clients succeedbecause I don't control.
(29:59):
I teach them how to controlthemselves.
I give them the tools to makedecisions when no one's
watching.
I help them understand thattransformation doesn't come from
following orders.
It comes from owning theoutcomes.
If you look at the footage fromthat show, it's full of
desperation.
But real transformation doesn'tcome from desperation.
(30:19):
It comes from direction.
And direction starts withchoice.
You can't change what you don'town.
The documentary shows that thesecond these people stop being
told what to do, everything fellapart.
That's what happens when yououtsource your responsibility.
That's what happens when you goon a fad diet with rules.
That's what happens when youfollow the workout in the gym
(30:41):
that someone else gave you.
Choice is the antidote to that.
Choice is power.
When you decide what goes onyour plate, when you decide how
you move, when you decide howyou respond, that's
transformation.
Because choice means control,and control means freedom.
That's why stop dieting, startchoosing isn't just a slogan.
(31:03):
It's a rebellion against thenonsense that the biggest loser
and the whole diet industryrepresented.
Show even includes one formercontestant saying, We weren't
taught how to live, we weretaught how to lose.
Exactly.
Losing isn't living, and that'swhere I come in.
Teaching people how to livedifferently so they never have
to lose like that again.
(31:24):
The show tried to sell amiracle.
What I teach is a method, asustainable, sane, proven path
to results at last.
If you take one thing from thisdocumentary, it's this stop
chasing punishment and startpracticing choice.
Because the real transformationdoesn't happen on a treadmill
or in front of TV cameras.
It happens in the quiet momentswhen you decide to choose
(31:45):
better.
So after everything we've seen,and hopefully you watch this,
after everything that you saw,the starvation, the screaming,
the rebound, the pain, thequestion becomes what does real
transformation actually looklike?
Because the biggest loser gavethe world a lie wrapped in
sweat.
It said, suffer enough andyou'll be saved.
(32:06):
Netflix just showed the truth.
Suffering isn't salvation, it'sspectacle.
Real transformation doesn'thappen in the gym, it happens in
your fucking head.
It starts the moment you stopasking, how fast can I lose
this?
And start asking, how can Ilive differently so I never have
to lose it again?
For me, that moment came when Ihit rock bottom at 411 pounds.
(32:30):
I had tried every version ofwhat the biggest loser sold, the
diets, the detoxes, the bootcamps, the shame.
I even tried the gym.
I hated my body, and I thoughthating it harder would make a
change.
Here's a spoiler alert.
It didn't.
What changed everything was theday I stopped dieting and
started choosing.
I made one small decision, notto starve and not to punish
(32:53):
myself, certainly not to go tothe gym, but just to choose
differently.
One meal, one step, one thoughtat a time.
And when I did it again thenext day, that's it.
No camera crew, no train airscreaming in my face, and I
probably would have knocked themout anyway.
No magic supplement, justchoice.
And I repeated it until itbecame who I was.
(33:14):
That's the part the biggestloser missed, the quiet part.
The part that doesn't look goodon television, doesn't look
good on Instagram, the partwhere you're alone in your
kitchen at 10 o'clock at night,staring at the fridge, and you
make a better decision than youmade yesterday.
That's transformation.
Real transformation, I say itall the time, it's not sexy, but
(33:35):
it is steady.
It's not about the applause,it's about getting aligned, and
it's not about the finish line.
It's about a foundation.
The finish line will come.
You'll know when you get there.
Or you may never get there.
But it's about building afoundation, and the documentary
proves that.
The contestants changedeverything except the thing that
mattered the most, the way theymade choices.
(33:56):
They were told what to eat,what to burn, what to fear.
And they never learned how tothink for themselves around food
and emotion.
So when the noise stopped, theydidn't have a voice of their
own.
When I help clients, that'sexactly what I fix.
I don't hand them a diet, Ihand them back their power.
I teach them how to navigatereal life dinners and stress and
travel and kids and chaos,because that's where weight is
(34:19):
lost, in the ordinary, not inthe extraordinary.
The weight doesn't come backwhen you finally understand that
you're in charge.
The shame disappears when yourealize your choices, not your
calories, define you.
And the freedom begins when youstop fighting your body and
start listening to it.
The biggest loser made peoplebelieve they had to earn their
worth.
I'm here to remind you that youalready have it.
(34:41):
You don't need to get your lifeback.
You just need to stop givingaway to the wrong approach.
The documentary kind of ends ona bittersweet note.
The contestants saying theywish someone had taught them how
to live, not just how to lose.
That's the mission now.
That's the work.
That's what I do every singleday.
I teach people how to live wellso the weight part takes care
of itself.
(35:02):
Because transformation isn't a12-week contest, it's a lifetime
conversation between you andyour choices.
So here's the truth that I wantyou to walk away with.
You've heard me say it before.
You don't need another diet,you don't need another trainer,
you don't need anotherpunishment plan, you need a
decision.
One good choice today, anothertomorrow.
(35:24):
And the belief that consistencybeats intensity every single
time.
If the biggest loser showed uswhat happens when you try to
force change, this documentaryshows what happens when you
finally stop.
And that right there is theproof that what I've been saying
all along is the only thingthat works.
Stop dieting and startchoosing.
(35:47):
So if the biggest loser taughtyou to hate yourself thin, this
documentary is your permissionto stop.
Stop punishing yourself forwhat you weigh.
Stop confusing suffering withsuccess.
And sure as shit, stop lettingthe scale define your value.
That showed glorified pain andcalled it progress.
(36:07):
Netflix just confirmed whatI've been saying for years.
It doesn't work.
And it never will.
And it never did.
Because real transformationdoesn't come from starvation or
sweat.
It comes from awareness andfrom ownership and from learning
how to make better choicesevery single day.
Not for a season, but for life.
(36:28):
The contestants on that showdidn't fail because they lacked
effort.
God, they worked their assesoff.
They failed because they lackedunderstanding.
They were taught rules and notreasons.
They were taught control andnot choice.
And when the cameras turnedoff, they were left with nothing
to sustain them.
So here's your chance to do itdifferently.
(36:48):
Your moment is stop dieting,stop outsourcing your willpower,
and start building a life youcan actually live in.
So if you're ready to stopdieting and start choosing, go
to my website,jonathanressler.com, and get my
free weekly tips.
They're free.
I'm not going to sell you shit.
They take less than a minute toread, but they're real
strategies for real life thatactually stick.
(37:09):
And if you want the completeblueprint for lasting change,
get my book, Shut Up and Chooseon Amazon.
We're an Amazon bestseller soldthousands and thousands of
copies.
But I warn you, it's not a dietbook.
It's a transformation plan foryour entire life.
It's about how to think, eat,move, and live differently so
that you never have to dietagain.
Because you don't need a cameracrew.
(37:30):
You don't need a crash plan.
You just need a decision.
One small, smart choice today.
So if you want undeniable proofthat the diet industry is
scamming you and teaching youall the wrong things, then I
urge you to watch thatdocumentary.
It's called Fit for TV, thereality of the biggest loser.
And if you're truly ready tostart your transformation, if
(37:50):
you're ready to shut off thenoise and diet industry
nonsense, then the answer issimple.
Shut up and choose.
Annoucer (37:59):
You've been listening to Shut Up and Choose.
Jonathan's passion is to sharehis journey of shedding 130
pounds in less than a yearwithout any of the usual
gimmicks.
No diets, no pills, and we'lllet you in on a little secret.
No fucking gym.
And guess what?
(38:20):
You can do it too! We hope youenjoyed the show.
We had a fucking blast.
If you did, make sure to like,rate, and review.
We'll be back soon, but in themeantime, find Jonathan on
Instagram at JonathanWrestlerBoca Ratan.
Until next time, shut up andchoose.
If you're a whiny snowflake that can't handle the
truth, is offended by the wordfuck and about 37 uses of it in
different forms, gets ass hurtwhen you hear someone speak the
absolute real and raw truth, youshould leave.
Like right now.
This is Shut Up and Shoes.
(00:22):
The podcast where we cutthrough the shit and get real
about weight loss, life, andeverything in between, we get
into the nitty-gritty of makingsmall, smart choices that add up
to big results.
From what's on your plate andhow you approach life's
challenges, we'll explore howthe simple act of choosing
(00:43):
differently can transform yourhealth, your mindset, and your
entire freaking life.
So, if you're ready to cutthrough the bullshit and start
making some real changes, thenbuckle up and shut it up,
because we're about to chooseour way to a healthier, happier
life.
This is Shut Up and Choose.
(01:04):
Let's do this.
Now your host, JonathanRessler.
Jonathan Ressler | Transfo (01:13):
Hey, welcome back to Shut Up and
Choose, the podcast that's thenoise.
Instagram, internet, feelingyour way, it's all a bunch of
garbage.
You know that.
It's all built on lies.
That's why my philosophy isstop dieting, start choosing,
because as soon as you stopdieting and you start making
choices for yourself, you'll beamazed at how much easier the
(01:35):
whole weight loss thing is.
But today I want to talk aboutsomething that I actually saw
this on TV.
Netflix just recently dropped adocumentary a few months ago, I
think it was in August, but Ijust watched it the other night
that basically approves myentire philosophy.
It's called Fit for Life, theReality of the Biggest Loser.
So look, if you've everbelieved that extreme exercise,
(01:56):
boot camp diets, or just sheerwillpower were the keys to
weight loss, you need to hearthis.
You need to watch thisdocumentary.
Because what the film exposesisn't just the truth about the
one show.
It's a truth about an entireindustry built on lies, shame,
and short-term spectacle.
But let's rewind for a second,because back in the mid-2000s,
(02:18):
the biggest loser became acultural phenomenon, is the only
word for it.
Millions of people tuned inevery week to watch the
contestants, who, as we know,were real overweight men and
women.
They watched them cry and sweatand suffer their weight toward
dramatic weight loss.
It had everything a networkexecutive could dream of.
(02:39):
It had transformation,competitional, and of course the
obligatory emotionalbreakdowns.
The show made stars out oftrainers, both idiots, but
that's beside the point.
That's not what this is about.
It made household names out ofdiet products, and it gave
America the illusion that anyonecould lose hundreds of pounds
if they just worked hard enough.
(02:59):
You know I think that'sbullshit, but I'm gonna I'm
gonna take you deeper.
So you remember the scenes oftrainers like screaming, that
Gillian Michael screaming inpeople's faces, contestants
collapsing on the treadmill,giant wands that felt like
gladiator battles.
It was marketed as inspiration,but it wasn't about health.
It never was.
It was about humiliationpackaged as hope.
(03:22):
And here's the thing thecameras didn't show.
Behind those sweaty montageswere starvation diets,
dehydration tactics, andsometimes even drugs being
handed out like protein bars.
Contestants weren't justtraining hard, they were
surviving on as little as 800calories a day.
(03:42):
800.
And that's less than what atoddler should eat.
And guess what?
Of course, it worked, but onlyfor a minute.
The pounds flew off, theymelted off, the before and after
photos went viral, and the showraked in millions of dollars.
But as this new Netflixdocumentary shows, almost every
(04:02):
single one of those contestantsregained the weight, and a lot
of them, and more.
Many ended up heavier andslower and even more
metabolically damaged than whenthey started.
They didn't just break bodies.
That show didn't break bodies,it broke spirits.
Think about that for a second.
These were people who alreadystruggled with weight and shame
(04:24):
their whole lives.
They were desperate for change.
I know because honestly, atthat time I kind of thought
about like, hey, maybe I'll goon the biggest loser because I
wasn't 411 pounds, but I was inthe mid-threes and I was
thinking, man, am I fat?
And the people on the show wereonly three in the beginning
were, you know, 300, 305.
I was a 350.
I was like, fuck, I'm acontestant.
(04:44):
But anyway, these people wereso desperate for change and they
were handed an opportunity thatlooked like salvation.
But instead of being taught howto live differently, they were
taught how to perform thinnessfor television.
That's what I said, performthinness.
They were taught that sufferingequals success, and that's the
exact reason that it all fellapart.
And don't get me wrong, theywent for a lot of seasons, but
(05:06):
it all fell apart, and there wasa lot of shit behind the
scenes.
So the show exposes it all.
The manipulation, the weigh-intricks, the complete lack of
aftercare.
When the show was over, theywere fucking done.
They didn't want to speak tohim ever again.
One former contestant said thatthe producers told her to drink
uh as little water as possiblebefore the weigh-ins so the
number would drop.
Others admitted to takingdiuretics and diapills and all
(05:29):
kinds of shit just to hit theirgoal.
Trainers pushed workouts soextreme that hospitalizations
became almost fucking normal.
There's even an account of onecontestant collapsing with some
disease.
I can't say it, but I don'tonly because I don't know the
name of it, but it was apotentially fatal condition
(05:50):
caused by overexertion duringfilming.
And that's fucking insane.
They had to take this woman outwith a helicopter, an airlifter
to the hospital.
And then, of course, there'sthe biggest shocker of all, this
guy who is the winner of seasoneight, I can't remember his
name, but he lost 239 pounds insix months on national
(06:10):
television.
But that guy's today, he'sheavier than he's ever been.
And he's, of course, in thedocumentary.
That's not failure, though.
That's the body fighting back.
That's biology doing exactlywhat it's supposed to do after
being starved, punished, andbetrayed, abused.
You picked the word.
So yeah, Netflix just made mypoint for me.
(06:31):
For years, I've been saying thesame thing.
You don't need another diet oranother trainer or another gym
membership or any of that shit.
You need to start choosingbecause weight loss isn't about
punishment.
It's about participation inyour own life.
It's not about willpower, it'sabout awareness.
And it's sure as shit not abouthours in the gym.
It's about the decisions youmake when nobody else is
(06:53):
watching.
So the biggest loser was builton the fantasy that if you work
hard enough, scream loud enough,and hate yourself enough, you
can fix everything.
But here's the truth of theshow certainly didn't tell, but
the documentary did.
You can't out-exercise your badchoices.
You can't outrun an unhealthyrelationship with food, and you
sure as shit can't bully yourbody into long-term change.
(07:15):
The contestants didn't failbecause they were weak, because
obviously they spent hours inthe gym and they worked
themselves to exhaustion.
They failed because the systemthey trusted was designed for
television and nottransformation.
And the documentary finallyshows that.
So when I say stop dieting,start choosing, I'm not giving
you just a cute slogan.
I'm giving the antidote todecades of damage, the opposite
(07:39):
of what the biggest loser stoodfor, because lasting change
isn't created by starvingyourself or sprinting or working
out until you puke.
It's created by making onesmall, smart choice today and
another one tomorrow and eachday after that.
That's what this show proves.
That's what this documentaryproves.
That's what my entirephilosophy has been about.
(08:00):
So buck up because in thisepisode, we're going to break
down exactly what Netflixrevealed and how everything they
expose about the biggest loserconfirms that the only thing
that truly changes your life ischoice.
This is the uncomfortable truththat no one of the biggest
loser ever told you.
You can't out-train badchoices.
That's it.
That's the whole secret theyhave buried under hours of
(08:22):
screaming workouts andsweat-drenched bullshit drama.
You can spend six hours a dayin the gym.
You can run until your shoesfucking melt.
You push your body past thepoint of exhaustion.
But if the choices behind thoseactions are rooted in
punishment and desperation ormanipulation, you're just
spinning your wheels.
(08:43):
Documentary makes that crystalclear.
It shows contestants spendingentire days in the gym working
out until they literally fuckingcollapse on the floor.
We're talking six, seven,sometimes eight-hour sessions
designed not for health, but forspectacle.
They weren't learningsustainable movement, they were
learning survival.
(09:04):
And the reason they lost weightso fast wasn't because of the
magical training techniques, itwas because they were fucking
starving, plain and simple.
I told you, people admitted toeating 800 calories a day.
800 calories.
That's not discipline, that'sdeprivation.
For reference, just so youknow, the average adult burns
twice that, twice the 18, 1,600calories just sitting on the
(09:26):
couch and breathing.
So imagine pushing throughmarathon-level workouts on a
toddler's diet.
That's not commitment, it'smetabolic suicide.
And the kicker of this wholething, they weren't doing it
alone.
Trainers and producers werecomplicit.
Contestants were encouraged todehydrate before weigh-ins, to
skip water for 24 hours and totake diuretics and pills that
(09:47):
would strip the scale of anotherpound or two.
Because on TV, results areeverything.
Ratings don't care about yourthyroid or your hormones or your
mental health.
They care about the number thatflashes on the giant digital
scale.
When you see that, it's easy tobelieve weight loss is purely
about the grind.
Work harder, sweat more, andyour fat will melt away.
(10:08):
But here's what the documentaryactually exposes, and what I've
been preaching for years.
Exercise is just a tool.
It's not the cure.
Think about it like this.
If your car is leaking oil, youdon't just keep driving faster
hoping the leak stops, you fixthe leak.
Exercise without fixing thechoices behind it is the same
(10:30):
insanity.
Sure, of course, you'll getsomewhere, but it won't be where
you think you're going.
The contestants, I have to say,they got immediate results, and
massive drops on the scale, allthe accolades and applause and
confetti and all that shit.
But their bodies were actuallyin crisis.
The documentary even cites theNational Institute of Health
(10:51):
Study that followed them yearslater.
Nearly every single one gainedback the weight, and many gained
back more.
Their metabolism sloweddramatically, some burning
hundreds of fewer calories inthe day than before they started
the show.
Their bodies literally learn toresist weight loss.
That's biology's defensemechanism.
(11:11):
When you starve it, it fightsback.
When you punish it, it protectsitself.
And when you finally stop themadness, it rebounds hard.
So let's call that what it is.
The biggest loser didn't createwinners.
It created metabolic chaos forthe contestants.
It proved that suffering canproduce results, but not the
(11:31):
kind that lasts becausetransformation doesn't come from
violence against your body.
It comes from partnership withit.
That's why my approach looks sodifferent.
I don't tell people to killthemselves in the gym.
You know, I don't even go tothe gym.
I tell them to make one small,smart choice, then another, and
another, because the smallchoices compound and chaos
collapses.
So let's get something straightthough, right now.
(11:53):
I'm not anti-exercise.
I try to move my body everysingle day, but I do it because
it feels good, not because Ihate myself.
Movement should support yourlife, not dominate it.
The people on that show weren'tbuilding lives.
They were fighting for survivalunder the fucking lights and
all the makeup of the camera andthe camera lenses themselves.
And here's the part that nobodywants to say out loud.
(12:14):
A lot of those contestants camehome broken.
Physically, yes, brokeninjuries, exhaustion, hormonal
imbalances, but emotionally too.
They were conditioned tobelieve that thinness equals
worth.
And when the weight crept back,so did the shame.
They didn't fail because theywere weak, they failed because
they were taught the wronglesson.
The real lesson should havebeen change comes from choosing
(12:37):
differently, not suffering more.
That documentaryunintentionally delivers that
message on a silver platter.
Every frame shows the cost ofconfusing movement with meaning
and effort with effectiveness.
You can force your body to obeyfor a season, but unless your
mindset changes, it will alwaysfind its way back to where it
feels safe, even if that meansfat and slow.
(13:01):
And that brings us right backto choice.
The people who maintain theirresults long term aren't the
ones who trained the hardest orsweated the most.
They're the ones who changedtheir daily decisions, the ones
who stopped eating out of guilt,the ones who redefined what
success looked like, and theones who understood that you can
love food and still loveyourself.
(13:22):
Exercise can definitely helpyou, absolutely, but it's not
the magic pill that you've beensold that everybody's trying to
sell you on the internet.
The magic pill doesn't fuckingexist.
Just by the way, neither doesthe magic shot, but that's a
conversation for another day.
What exists is the truth.
Every decision you make, everybite, every thought, every step
(13:48):
adds up to either chaos orcontrol.
The biggest loser taught peopleto chase control through
punishment.
My mission is to teach you toreclaim control through choice.
Because when you choosedifferently, your body doesn't
need to fight you anymore.
It finally gets to work withyou.
That's the difference betweenlosing weight and losing
(14:10):
yourself.
And that's exactly what thenext part of this documentary
revealed.
The science they ignored andhow their quest for quick
results destroyed their abilityto maintain them.
This part really got to me.
For a show that claimed to beabout health, the biggest loser
ignored almost every bit ofactual science about how the
(14:32):
human body works.
In this documentary, you havedoctors and former contestants,
and they describe what happenedonce the camera stopped rolling,
and it's fucking brutal.
Their bodies didn't just goback to normal.
They rebelled.
Every system that had beenpushed to its breaking point
decided never again.
Metabolism tanked, hungerhormones went haywire, and their
(14:54):
energy vanished.
Why?
Because biology isn't a fan ofextremes.
Your body's number one job isto keep you alive, not to make
you look good on a scale.
When you starve it, itinterprets that as danger.
When you force it through eighthours of cardio on 800 fucking
calories, it doesn't clap foryou.
(15:14):
It fucking panics.
In the documentary, they talkabout that.
I discussed this before, butthey talked about the 2016
National Institute of Healthstudy that followed the biggest
loser contestants for six yearsafter the show.
Every single one of themregained weight.
Not most, every one.
The resting metabolic ratesplummeted and never recovered.
(15:37):
That means even sitting still,their bodies burn hundreds of
calories less every single daythan they did before the show.
Imagine that.
You lose a couple hundredpounds, think that you fixed
your life, and now your body isworking against you 24-7 just to
get back what it lost.
That's not failure.
That's physiology.
And that's exactly what I'vebeen telling you all along.
(15:57):
You can't bully your biology.
You have to work with it.
But TV doesn't give a shitabout hormones or adaptation, it
cares about drama.
The producers wanted tears, nottruth.
They wanted the sound of atreadmill belt squealing, not
some nutritionist explainingmetabolic slowdown.
The science is so simple, butnobody on that show wanted to
(16:19):
hear it.
When you crash your calories,your metabolism slows to
survive.
When you exercise to absoluteexhaustion, your body releases
cortisol.
That's the stress hormone thatliterally tells your body to
hold on to fat.
You put those two together andyou built the perfect recipe for
burnout, rebound, andultimately shame.
(16:39):
The show has footage ofcontestants gaining the way back
and feeling like shit.
But the real failure wasn'ttheirs, it was the systems.
They were set up to fail fromday one because no one explained
that the key to sustainablechange isn't force, it's
feedback.
When you treat your body likean enemy, it defends itself.
(17:00):
When you treat it like apartner, it cooperates.
That's the entire foundation ofmy philosophy.
I lost 140 pounds and kept itoff because I stopped fighting
my biology and I startedlistening to it.
I learned how to choose foodsthat work for me, not against
me.
And I learned how to move inways that felt good, not
punishing.
I fucking hate the gym.
(17:20):
I'm not going there.
That's punishment.
I'm not doing it.
But most importantly, I stoppedstarving myself to prove a
point.
The contestants on that shownever got that chance.
They were given a set of rules,and most of them wrong, by the
way, and told to follow them orgo home.
Eat less, sweat more, pushharder, cry for the fucking
camera.
They weren't being taughthealth.
They were being taught how toperform suffering.
(17:43):
The show also reveals that someof the contestants were
terrified to eat after thefilming ended.
They'd been trained to believethe food was their enemy.
I'm talking about somethingthat's fucked up.
That one wrong bite would undoeverything for them.
And that's not health, man.
That's trauma.
One woman said she was sometabolically broken she'd gain
weight eating 1,200 calories aday.
(18:04):
Her body wasn't broken.
It was protecting her from everstarving again.
That's what the science says,anyway.
This is where I get passionatebecause it's the heart of what I
teach.
Real transformation isbiological, psychological, and
behavioral.
All three of those thingsworking together.
Diet culture and shows like TheBiggest Loser pretend that it's
(18:25):
simple math.
Calories in, calories out.
And of course, that is the mostbasic thing.
You have to burn more caloriesthan you consume, but that's
just the tip of it.
It's not the math, it'schemistry.
It's the hormones, it's sleepand stress and mindset and
habit.
It's a thousand choices thathappen before you ever even pick
up a dumbbell or a fork.
(18:46):
The science says sustainableweight loss comes from
consistency, not extremes, fromfueling your body and definitely
not starving it.
And from lowering your stressand not living in that state of
fight or flight, which is whatthose contestants lived in.
And honestly, what most dietinfluencers and diet doctors
tell you.
They want you to be in aconstant state of fight or
(19:07):
flight.
If you eat the wrong thing,you're fucked.
That's not the truth.
And the biggest lesson of all,from training your brain to make
better choices automatically,not forcing your body into
submission temporarily.
That's why every quick fixeventually collapses, because
you can't override human biologyforever.
(19:28):
If the biggest loser hadbrought in just one
endocrinologist instead of aHollywood producer, and they did
have a doctor, but they reallydidn't listen to them, but if
they had brought in anendocrinologist, they might have
built something that actuallyhelped people, but they didn't
want help.
They wanted headlines.
And that's why what I do is sodifferent.
When I help clients, especiallybusy executives, I don't give
(19:49):
them a diet.
I give them a strategy.
I teach them how to eat andmove and think in a way that
their body can sustain for life.
No starvation, no fuckingcortisol overload, no rebound,
just small, smart,science-backed choices that
stack up over time.
Because science isn't theenemy, but misusing it is.
(20:12):
And now, thanks to Netflix, theworld finally sees the result
of ignoring it.
Those contestants didn't justlose weight, they lost trust in
themselves.
They were taught that effortequals results.
But the truth is, alignedeffort equals results.
Unaligned effort, the kind thatfights your biology, leads
straight to burnout.
(20:33):
So when people tell me, butJonathan, I just need to work
out more, I shake my head.
No, no, you don't.
You need to work with your bodymore.
You need to understand the datathat your body's been giving
you all along.
Your hunger cues, your energydips, your stress signals,
that's the science that matters.
Because here's the headlinethat the Netflix documentary
(20:54):
didn't print.
The body always keeps score.
Every skip meal, everysleepless night, every
punishment workout, it fuckingremembers.
The good news is that it alsoremembers the healing.
So the moment you startchoosing smarter and fueling
yourself better, sleeping,lowering your stress, all those
things, it responds every singletime.
(21:14):
That's the real science oftransformation.
And it's not found in the gymor on a TV stage or on a
starvation plan.
It's found in your choices.
And that kind of brings me tothe next part of the story: the
emotional fallout.
Because when your entireidentity is built on a number
and then that number comes back,the damage isn't just physical,
(21:35):
it's psychological.
The physical damage, obviouslythat was brutal, but the
emotional fallout was evenworse.
This show shows what happenswhen your entire sense of worth
gets tied into a number on thescale.
And that number eventuallystops cooperating.
When the cameras were rolling,the people on the show were
fucking heroes.
(21:56):
They were America'sinspiration, the living proof
that anything was possible withenough pain, sweat, and
screaming.
They were parated around acrossmorning shows and all kinds of
shows.
They'd given sponsorship deals,celebrated as success stories,
got product placement.
They were told they'd won theirlives back.
But then the lights went off.
And the applause stopped.
And the weight came back.
(22:16):
And that's when the realnightmare began.
Contestants talk about feelingashamed, broken, and even
worthless because of the sameculture that glorified their
transformation now mocked theirfailure.
The very audience that oncecried for them on TV was now
whispering about how they letthemselves go.
Some of them were ridiculedonline, others isolated
themselves entirely.
And you know what?
(22:36):
It's not really hard tounderstand why.
When your value is measured inpounds lost, what happens when
the pounds come back?
It should be measured in healthand the life that you gain.
But you start to believe itwhen your value is only in
pounds lost, you believe thatyou came back, the old you, the
failure, the one that youthought you killed on national
television.
That's the part no one sees.
(22:58):
The psychological whiplash ofchasing an external finish line.
One former contestant said shecouldn't look at herself in the
mirror for years after the show.
Another one admitted that shewas terrified to eat, terrified
that food undo everything.
Some, and Manny actually,developed eating disorders.
Some fell into depression.
One even said that the showmade her hate herself thin.
(23:20):
That line kind of knocked meout, you know.
Hate yourself thin.
That's the whole problem, rightthere.
You can't hate yourself intohealth.
You can't shame yourself intotransformation.
And yet, that's exactly whatthe biggest loser, and honestly,
most of the diet cultureteaches people to do.
It's why I wrote my book, ShutUp and Choose, because the only
(23:41):
transformation that lasts comesfrom respect, not punishment,
from awareness and notrestriction, and obviously from
small, smart choices, not fromfear.
The emotional cost of that showwas enormous.
They weren't actors, these werereal human beings who believed
losing weight on national TVwould fix their lives.
But instead of being taught howto live differently, they were
(24:03):
taught how to performdifferently.
They were taught that theirworth depended on a result.
And as you know, results fade.
And think about the messagethat sends.
You're only valuable if you'resmaller.
You're only lovable if you'redisciplined, you're only
successful if you're suffering.
Fuck that noise.
No wonder so many of themcrumbled when the whole show
(24:25):
ended because the system nevertaught them what to do.
There was no mental reset, noemotional rebuild, no support
network.
When the filler wrapped up,they were sent home, alone, with
fucked up metabolisms, brokenroutines, and zero tools to
handle real life.
And this long-term weight lossis all about how to learning how
(24:45):
to live your life and stilleating food.
Maybe what they had, thatwasn't transformation, that was
trauma.
And here's the wild thing (24:52):
the documentary really didn't spin
it.
It doesn't have to.
The paint on the faces of thesepeople pretty much says it all.
You can feel the betrayal, notjust their bodies, but their
belief that this was finallytheir way out.
And it it's not just them.
Millions of viewers absorbedthat same toxic fucking message.
(25:14):
Honestly, I did.
They watched these contestants,thought, if I can just work out
harder, maybe I'll finally begood enough.
They tried the same extremediets, the same fucking crazy
workouts.
And when they inevitably burnedout, they blame themselves.
I'm guilty of that.
That's the tragedy.
The show didn't break itscontestants, it broke its
(25:36):
audience.
But here's the good news.
The documentary also cracksopen the door, gives us a moment
to say, hey, wait, maybe we'vebeen doing this all wrong.
Because the truth is, there'snothing wrong with wanting to
lose weight, obviously.
There's nothing wrong withwanting to feel better, look
better, and live better.
The problem is how we've beentaught to do it.
(25:57):
You don't need to be humiliatedinto health, and you don't need
to be punished into progress.
You just need to be empoweredinto choice.
When I lost the 140 pounds, Ididn't do it by hating the guy I
used to be.
I did it by understanding thatguy, by forgiving him, by
learning what drove the stupid,fucking horrible choices that I
made in the first place.
(26:18):
That's what real transformationlooks like.
It starts in your head, not inyour abs, not in your stomach.
It starts in your head.
That's the missing piece.
The biggest loser neverunderstood.
Mindset.
Not motivation, not punishment,mindset.
You can change your diet andyou can get a new trainer.
You can go to the gym, you cantake crazy supplements.
(26:41):
But if you don't change how youthink about food and success
and failure and self-worth,nothing sticks.
It's not just psychology,that's a neuroscience.
Your brain builds habits aroundemotion.
You eat when you're stressed,that's a learned loop.
You binge when you feelunworthy.
That's not weakness, it'swiring.
The only way to rewire it is tochoose differently over and
(27:04):
over and over again until yourbrain catches up.
And that's why this documentarymatters so much, because it
exposes the lie thattransformation happens through
spectacle.
It doesn't.
It happens through small,quiet, consistent choices that
nobody claps for.
The contestants on the biggestlose didn't fail because they
(27:24):
didn't try hard enough.
They failed because they werenever given a chance to learn
choice.
The thing that actually changeseverything.
So when I say stop dining,start choosing, this is exactly
what I mean.
Stop chasing external approval.
Stop basing your worth onnumbers.
Stop hating yourself then.
Start making choices that youcan live with, not just survive.
(27:48):
Because health isn't measuredin pounds, mostly.
But it isn't measured inpounds, it's measured in peace.
So here's the bottom line.
Fit for TV, the reality of thebiggest loser, doesn't just
expose a show.
It validates an entire truththe weight loss industry has
ignored for decades.
Everything that went wrong onthe biggest loser is exactly why
(28:11):
I stopped dieting and startchoosing works.
The show sold punishment.
My method teaches partnership.
They built fear.
The extreme exercise, thestarvation diets, humiliation,
the lack of support.
(28:31):
All that shit didn't just fail.
They backfired.
Contestants lost hundreds ofpounds.
I think the record guy lost 239pounds.
That's fucking insane.
But because he never learnedsustainable habits or how to
make real-world choices, everyone of them gained it back.
It's the perfect proof thatshort-term results mean nothing
(28:52):
without long-term strategy.
And that's what I've beenpreaching since day one.
And I only stumbled on it.
I figured it out for myself.
And weight loss is not aboutrestriction, it's about
direction.
It's about choosing everysingle day to do the next small,
smart thing.
Not starving yourself forapplause, but building momentum
through consistency.
(29:13):
The show's philosophy wassimple push harder, eat less,
hurt more, win big.
But life doesn't work that way.
Not real life.
You can't punish your way topeace.
You can't shame your body intotrusting you, and you sure as
shit can't confuse weight losswith wellness.
What the biggest loser proved,and what the Netflix documentary
made pretty much undeniable, isthat change without choices
(29:37):
always collapses.
The contestants were controlledby the rules, the cameras, and
of course the fear ofelimination.
They were told what to eat,when to move, when to cry, and a
whole bunch of other stuff.
None of that builds autonomy.
And when you remove theexternal control, the internal
structure isn't there to sustainanything.
That's why my clients succeedbecause I don't control.
(29:59):
I teach them how to controlthemselves.
I give them the tools to makedecisions when no one's
watching.
I help them understand thattransformation doesn't come from
following orders.
It comes from owning theoutcomes.
If you look at the footage fromthat show, it's full of
desperation.
But real transformation doesn'tcome from desperation.
(30:19):
It comes from direction.
And direction starts withchoice.
You can't change what you don'town.
The documentary shows that thesecond these people stop being
told what to do, everything fellapart.
That's what happens when yououtsource your responsibility.
That's what happens when you goon a fad diet with rules.
That's what happens when youfollow the workout in the gym
(30:41):
that someone else gave you.
Choice is the antidote to that.
Choice is power.
When you decide what goes onyour plate, when you decide how
you move, when you decide howyou respond, that's
transformation.
Because choice means control,and control means freedom.
That's why stop dieting, startchoosing isn't just a slogan.
(31:03):
It's a rebellion against thenonsense that the biggest loser
and the whole diet industryrepresented.
Show even includes one formercontestant saying, We weren't
taught how to live, we weretaught how to lose.
Exactly.
Losing isn't living, and that'swhere I come in.
Teaching people how to livedifferently so they never have
to lose like that again.
(31:24):
The show tried to sell amiracle.
What I teach is a method, asustainable, sane, proven path
to results at last.
If you take one thing from thisdocumentary, it's this stop
chasing punishment and startpracticing choice.
Because the real transformationdoesn't happen on a treadmill
or in front of TV cameras.
It happens in the quiet momentswhen you decide to choose
(31:45):
better.
So after everything we've seen,and hopefully you watch this,
after everything that you saw,the starvation, the screaming,
the rebound, the pain, thequestion becomes what does real
transformation actually looklike?
Because the biggest loser gavethe world a lie wrapped in
sweat.
It said, suffer enough andyou'll be saved.
(32:06):
Netflix just showed the truth.
Suffering isn't salvation, it'sspectacle.
Real transformation doesn'thappen in the gym, it happens in
your fucking head.
It starts the moment you stopasking, how fast can I lose
this?
And start asking, how can Ilive differently so I never have
to lose it again?
For me, that moment came when Ihit rock bottom at 411 pounds.
(32:30):
I had tried every version ofwhat the biggest loser sold, the
diets, the detoxes, the bootcamps, the shame.
I even tried the gym.
I hated my body, and I thoughthating it harder would make a
change.
Here's a spoiler alert.
It didn't.
What changed everything was theday I stopped dieting and
started choosing.
I made one small decision, notto starve and not to punish
(32:53):
myself, certainly not to go tothe gym, but just to choose
differently.
One meal, one step, one thoughtat a time.
And when I did it again thenext day, that's it.
No camera crew, no train airscreaming in my face, and I
probably would have knocked themout anyway.
No magic supplement, justchoice.
And I repeated it until itbecame who I was.
(33:14):
That's the part the biggestloser missed, the quiet part.
The part that doesn't look goodon television, doesn't look
good on Instagram, the partwhere you're alone in your
kitchen at 10 o'clock at night,staring at the fridge, and you
make a better decision than youmade yesterday.
That's transformation.
Real transformation, I say itall the time, it's not sexy, but
(33:35):
it is steady.
It's not about the applause,it's about getting aligned, and
it's not about the finish line.
It's about a foundation.
The finish line will come.
You'll know when you get there.
Or you may never get there.
But it's about building afoundation, and the documentary
proves that.
The contestants changedeverything except the thing that
mattered the most, the way theymade choices.
(33:56):
They were told what to eat,what to burn, what to fear.
And they never learned how tothink for themselves around food
and emotion.
So when the noise stopped, theydidn't have a voice of their
own.
When I help clients, that'sexactly what I fix.
I don't hand them a diet, Ihand them back their power.
I teach them how to navigatereal life dinners and stress and
travel and kids and chaos,because that's where weight is
(34:19):
lost, in the ordinary, not inthe extraordinary.
The weight doesn't come backwhen you finally understand that
you're in charge.
The shame disappears when yourealize your choices, not your
calories, define you.
And the freedom begins when youstop fighting your body and
start listening to it.
The biggest loser made peoplebelieve they had to earn their
worth.
I'm here to remind you that youalready have it.
(34:41):
You don't need to get your lifeback.
You just need to stop givingaway to the wrong approach.
The documentary kind of ends ona bittersweet note.
The contestants saying theywish someone had taught them how
to live, not just how to lose.
That's the mission now.
That's the work.
That's what I do every singleday.
I teach people how to live wellso the weight part takes care
of itself.
(35:02):
Because transformation isn't a12-week contest, it's a lifetime
conversation between you andyour choices.
So here's the truth that I wantyou to walk away with.
You've heard me say it before.
You don't need another diet,you don't need another trainer,
you don't need anotherpunishment plan, you need a
decision.
One good choice today, anothertomorrow.
(35:24):
And the belief that consistencybeats intensity every single
time.
If the biggest loser showed uswhat happens when you try to
force change, this documentaryshows what happens when you
finally stop.
And that right there is theproof that what I've been saying
all along is the only thingthat works.
Stop dieting and startchoosing.
(35:47):
So if the biggest loser taughtyou to hate yourself thin, this
documentary is your permissionto stop.
Stop punishing yourself forwhat you weigh.
Stop confusing suffering withsuccess.
And sure as shit, stop lettingthe scale define your value.
That showed glorified pain andcalled it progress.
(36:07):
Netflix just confirmed whatI've been saying for years.
It doesn't work.
And it never will.
And it never did.
Because real transformationdoesn't come from starvation or
sweat.
It comes from awareness andfrom ownership and from learning
how to make better choicesevery single day.
Not for a season, but for life.
(36:28):
The contestants on that showdidn't fail because they lacked
effort.
God, they worked their assesoff.
They failed because they lackedunderstanding.
They were taught rules and notreasons.
They were taught control andnot choice.
And when the cameras turnedoff, they were left with nothing
to sustain them.
So here's your chance to do itdifferently.
(36:48):
Your moment is stop dieting,stop outsourcing your willpower,
and start building a life youcan actually live in.
So if you're ready to stopdieting and start choosing, go
to my website,jonathanressler.com, and get my
free weekly tips.
They're free.
I'm not going to sell you shit.
They take less than a minute toread, but they're real
strategies for real life thatactually stick.
(37:09):
And if you want the completeblueprint for lasting change,
get my book, Shut Up and Chooseon Amazon.
We're an Amazon bestseller soldthousands and thousands of
copies.
But I warn you, it's not a dietbook.
It's a transformation plan foryour entire life.
It's about how to think, eat,move, and live differently so
that you never have to dietagain.
Because you don't need a cameracrew.
(37:30):
You don't need a crash plan.
You just need a decision.
One small, smart choice today.
So if you want undeniable proofthat the diet industry is
scamming you and teaching youall the wrong things, then I
urge you to watch thatdocumentary.
It's called Fit for TV, thereality of the biggest loser.
And if you're truly ready tostart your transformation, if
(37:50):
you're ready to shut off thenoise and diet industry
nonsense, then the answer issimple.
Shut up and choose.
Annoucer (37:59):
You've been listening to Shut Up and Choose.
Jonathan's passion is to sharehis journey of shedding 130
pounds in less than a yearwithout any of the usual
gimmicks.
No diets, no pills, and we'lllet you in on a little secret.
No fucking gym.
And guess what?
(38:20):
You can do it too! We hope youenjoyed the show.
We had a fucking blast.
If you did, make sure to like,rate, and review.
We'll be back soon, but in themeantime, find Jonathan on
Instagram at JonathanWrestlerBoca Ratan.
Until next time, shut up andchoose.
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