BLOGS
Last night, Celebrity Fit Club returned for a new season of Boot Camp and while there's a part of me that still misses Ant and the lazy people not showing up to work out because of their insanely busy schedules of local Best Buy appearances, there's another part of me that really appreciates that this format allows Harvey to go nuts and torture people. Have you seen that obstacle course? That looks actually challenging... and muddy!
This season even has a halfway decent group of celebs, i.e. a better-than-usual random assortment of the pseudo-famous. There's Gilmore Girls star/Skid Row singer Sebastian Bach, Shar "I got screwed over by K-Fed" Jackson, Project Runway's first winner, Bad Girls Club's Queen of Popping Off Tanisha, Whitney's ex-husband, the overweight girl from those High School Musical movie, and former Baywatch babe Nicole Eggert. Lastly, there's K-Fed, who's at least double the size his old backup-dancin' self (now his kids know who stole all of their Cheetos and McNuggets). It's an odd mix to be sure, but so far it works. There doesn't seem to be any crazy, unstable or drugged-up people who will need to be removed from the show, so that's a bonus (depending on how you look at it).
Here are my quick first impressions of the cast: Jay McCarroll (the PR winner) totally impressed me with his ability to scale a tower like Spider-Man despite being built more like The Thing. Tanisha, well, she's stubborn, but I love that she still finds time to comment on the attractiveness of all the men and make sexual innuendos. Bobby Brown: this man needs a nutritionist to explain to him that fried chicken is not a diet food. HSM girl (KayCee Stroh) was fine and seems determined to get skinny, which is good for her, but the only reason that I even remotely know her is because of her curves. Sebastian Bach was so adorable when he saw the drummer from Def Leppard, I just wanted to give him a big old hug. Shar Jackson really wants to be known as something other than K-Fed's ex, but "coincidentally" landed on the same season as him, so that's not going to work out well for her. Nicole Eggert is too skinny to be on this show. K-Fed needs to just man up and not be such a wuss all the time. I'm so going to look forward to Harvey beating the hell out of him all season. In fact, if they could get Jillian Michaels to make a special appearance just to berate him and force him to carry her around piggyback style, that'd be even better.
And that brings me to my biggest problem with this show: The Biggest Loser has skewed my perspective of obesity so much that when these people step on the scale and barely weigh over 200 pounds, it doesn't seem like they're fat at all. In fact, Nicole Eggert weighed in at what is a Biggest Loser final goal weight. So why can't she just go to the gym for a week and eat some carrots and do that Kim Kardashian cleanse thing instead of being on this show? Even K-Fed, who looks like a white version of Grimace, isn't that far into the 200s. The "little" guys on The Biggest Loser are like 300 pounds at minimum. When Harvey told most of them that their goal was to lose about 30 pounds in nine weeks, my jaw kind of dropped. That's like three weeks on BL's campus with Bob and Jill. So I'm not going to expect any double-digit weight losses in the next few weeks; it'll take me time to adjust to these numbers.
But aside from that, which says more about BL's success and about how all those shows on Discovery Health keep finding increasingly larger people than about Fit Club itself, the show is pretty entertaining. And to be fair, it'd be difficult to find enough actual (or even close to actual) celebrities in the 500-pound range to populate a show like this, despite the prayers of the editors at places like TMZ and Star magazine.
Anyway, let us know what you thought of the season premiere and don't miss our fabulous interview with Tanisha.
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i think with kevin and shar being on CFC together they will learn the decipline on working together as a parent and he will actually see how his behavior in the past affected the mother of his child and not only hearing it. being that shar havent seen kevin for 5 years now is her chance to pick up herself brush it off and open up and let kevin know verbally how she felt and in what way he hurt her. she is a beautiful person. i hope this opportunity makes kevin grow up and be more sincere towards other peoples feelings and not his own.
You can't really compare the weight loss numbers to those on BL anyway since on the Biggest Loser you actually live on campus. You are living and breathing weight loss every day, and there is the constant threat of being voted off if you don't lose enough weight. These celebs, on the other hand, go home between tapings and continue to live their lives. And even if they don't lose a single pound (I'm looking at you, Countess Vaughan!) you still get to stay on the show through to the end and get a little career bump--which is really all most of them are looking for anyway. Nicole Eggert could totally lose that little bit of weight on her own, but there wouldn't be cameras around to film it, so what would be the point? Hell, Heidi Montag would gain fifty pounds just so she could be on this show and feel famous for a sec.
Starting at a lower weight than typical Biggest Loser contestants means their weekly weight loss goals are smaller. It would be unrealistic to expect them to lose a great deal of weight. In fact, losing 30 pounds in 9 weeks is unrealistic. People are more likely to lose weight and keep it off if they lose slowly, more in the range of 2 pounds a week. But people see shows like Biggest Loser and Boot Camp and think they can lose a huge amount of weight in no time flat. Kirstie Alley was on Oprah last year and seemed to think she could lose almost 100 pounds in three months.
Great post! I love TWP.
You are so right, how in the world can you have a weightloss show where people actually lose 30 pounds! That is like real life, not TV weightloss at all!! We had better get some good celebrity melt-downs in place of the double digit numbers.
And lets face it, we really are just tuning in for the freudenschade of watching has been celebrities who have problems like us, like being overweight!!
Rob, you are totally right, all joking and spectacle aside, slow weight loss within the routine of your own everyday life will actually result in long term weightloss. Quick dramatic out of the ordinary weightloss routines won't.
I like this show a lot, and this looks like a good crop of "celebrities," even though I haven't heard of most of them. Even K-Fed is growing on me after his dead weight epiphany. We'll see if he keeps it up.
I don't watch The Biggest Loser, but I think the shows speak to different sets of people. I don't weigh 400 pounds and I never will, and most of us never will. I can't really relate to what's happening on TBL. But most of us know what it's like to need to lose 20 or 30 pounds in a more or less real-life atmosphere, and this show is a little more realistic in that respect. It's not completely realisitic, obviously, but a little bit more.
I may lose my TWOP card because I really didn't know who most of this crop of celebs are. I do think they will be interesting and as was mentioned upthread, most of these folks aren't about losing weight, they are about getting on camera. I do think there are a couple of emotional tantrums waiting to happen and I am predicting the Nicole Eggert will be one of them.
That perspective skewing is one of the biggest things wrong with The Biggest Loser - you get people who are overweight and need to exercise and change their eating habits to improve their health, and they think their lack of double-digit weight loss in a week is a sign of their failure, and stop trying.
Thirty pounds in nine weeks is still more than recommended in a safe and healthy manner, by twice (give or take). It's still unrealistic for the average person - but at least it's a lot more accessible a goal than the double-digits.
I agree, Kelly, and I'm also not sure that TBL isn't doing damage in other ways. Obesity is a serious epidemic, but you don't have to weigh 300 or 400 pounds to be considered obese and for the extra weight to have serious health consequences. TBL could give people an impression of, "Oh, well I'm not THAT fat, so I don't have to do anything about being a measly 30 pounds overweight."
with ‘we leave it to you to decide’.