No white flour. No white sugar. No butter. Those are the three really basic rules of eating at the Biggest Loser ranch, where contestants must prepare their own meals. “There’s no chef whipping up spa cuisine,” said Ed Brantley to the New York Times, in a story featuring the Biggest Loser diet.
Biggest Loser's Ed and Vicky (center) try healthy recipes prepared by fellow contestants.
If you watch the show regularly, you know that what the contestants eat isn’t as much a part of the storyline as is the drama unfolding on the ranch. This story really shows what it’s like for the contestants to immediately go from eating anything they want at home, primarily greasy and sweet foods, to extreme workouts and a healthy, clean diet. “The food that you’re used to, you can’t have, and the food you can have, you do not want,” Vicky Vilcan of Biggest Loser 6 told the Times.
The story also points out that an underlying cause of obesity in America is our habit of dining out. It’s in that setting that we cannot control the fat or calories in our food, where preparing meals at home gives us complete control. Since 1965, women have gone from spending 13 hours per week cooking meals to the meager 30 minutes per day now, and in that time the number of overweight women has more than doubled, to 65 percent. Biggest Loser cookbooks author Devin Alexander pointed out that “Twenty minutes in the kitchen will save you three hours on the StairMaster.”