Health & Fitness
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
so how do the tv shows get the crazy weight loss numbers???
I was watching (I'm embarrassed to admit) Fat Chef the other night. It was the 5-week weigh in and the girl was down from 287 to 251.
How do they do that? I know it's not healthy, but the numbers are astonishing. She had lost 36 pounds in 5 weeks and she appeared to have all her limbs. The only way I could see losing that much that fast is through amputation or something.. 
So what's their secret? I guarantee it's not healthy weight loss, I'm just very curious about how they do it. Any ideas?
2012 Races:
Mar 24: Great Human Race 5K. April 28: 5K for Fitness
Re: so how do the tv shows get the crazy weight loss numbers???
When you have a lot of weight to lose it comes off pretty fast, especially when someone overweight starts moving more and exercising. A person of healthy weight but might want to lose 5 or ten pounds, it's not going to come off in a week, unless they do something drastic.
Also, it's tv. They wouldn't have a show if the weightloss wasn't dramatic. The Biggest Loser contestents workout like 6 or more hours a day. That's not realistic for most people, so the weight will come off slower.
On the Biggest Loser, they've been talking this year about their "daily calorie burn" they have to meet. It's something like 5000-6000 calories. They'll exercise late into the night to get it. To keep it in perspective, riders in the Tour De France burn 5000-7000 calories, and their bodies are very efficient at cycling. (TdF numbers pulled from a quick Google search and my memory.)
I recall from a past season that the men eat 2000 calories and the women 1200 unless there is a medical need for them to deviate. An example might be a diabetic that cannot let their blood sugar get too low.
As a pp said, the more you have to lose, the faster it comes off.
Southeastern Cycling
My Nest Bio and Cycling Advice
Watching an ep right now, and a relatively short woman, weighing 198 - so def overweight but not as dramatically as others - is expected to eat 1500 calories a day and burn 1200 calories on top of her BMR. I burn about that when I run 12 miles. And she's supposed to eat much less than I do and run 12 miles A DAY (equivalent) and keep working.
Yeah, that's totally reasonable. Ugh.
I am a runner, knitter, scientist, DE-IVF veteran, and stage III colon cancer survivor.
Not that I think these shows are reasonable, but I eat about 1500 cal per day and can burn around 1000cal in 45min on my elliptical - I'm 235. It's do-able...I don't do it every day, but I could if I really wanted to...I'm content with my rate of weight loss, though. Burning 5000-6000/day like the PP said about Biggest Loser - THAT is impossible!
Yes and very unsustainable. No wonder so many of them fail once they get home. Most of these people seem to transfer their food obsession to an exercise obsession, probably from 8 hours of working out a day.
Asking someone with no fitness base, who is used to eating 5000 calories a day and who already has a very physical job to burn 1200 additional calories daily and slash their intake is just a surefire way to make a person burn out.
I'm curious how you burn 1000 calories in 45 minutes on an elliptical? My understanding is that the rate of burn is pretty much maximum for running, and that's around 100 cals/mile. And a for 10 minute mile, 45 minutes would be 450 cals - an extra 550 calories in burn would be welcome, but I would have no idea how to make that happen, much less on a machine!
I am a runner, knitter, scientist, DE-IVF veteran, and stage III colon cancer survivor.
Well I've eased into it a bit slower, but I was well over 300lbs and I don't even want to think about how many cals/day I was consuming.
I know that my elliptical's output is probably higher than reality, but when I put my info into a calories-burned calculator online it still gave me 950ish calories at my current weight, so it was probably more when I was bigger, but I only recently found the online calculator. I don't have a bodybugg or anything, so I don't know how close to accurate it is...just stating the info I have available to me.
I'm hoping to get a body bugg or something similar for my b-day this summer. I'll report back when I figure out what my actual burn is...but I hope to also be 40lbs smaller by then too
I am a runner, knitter, scientist, DE-IVF veteran, and stage III colon cancer survivor.