The Alarming Reason Why ‘Biggest Loser Contestants Re-Gain Weight  

There’s no show on television that more accurately depicts how difficult it can be to lose weight—or how amazing it feels to eventually, after much hard work, drop down to a healthy size—than The Biggest Loser. But what happens after filming wraps?

According to a new report in the New York Times, TBL cameras are falling short of catching just how tough it is for contestants to keep the weight off. That hidden struggle is what inspired Kevin Hall, Ph.D., a metabolism expert at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institute of Health, to track the show’s Season 8 contestants for six years. And what his team found is alarming.

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In those six years, the contestants’ bodies were actually working against them, says Hall. As they dropped those initial pounds on the show, their metabolisms drastically slowed (a natural, expected occurrence), but never sped back up afterwards. In fact, their metabolisms became even slower, making it harder for these contestants to burn calories while their bodies were at rest. This required them to eat less to maintain that new weight, compared to other people their size. 

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Danny Cahill, who was crowned the winner after losing an astonishing 239 pounds, regained over 100 pounds after his season wrapped. Now, six years later, he has to eat 800 calories less per day than a typical man his size just to maintain his current weight of 295 pounds. Amanda Arlauskas, another contestant on the show, gained 13 pounds since the finale (she started at 250, then shrunk to 163), but now burns 591.1 fewer cals per day than the average woman her size. (Start your body transformation with these workouts from Women's Health's Look Better Naked DVD.)

Another unexpected drawback: The contestants’ levels of leptin, a hormone that controls hunger, plummeted during the competition and never completely recovered post-show, reports the Times. A lack of leptin boosts your desire to eat, which helps explain why most of the contestants said they struggle even more now with hunger, cravings, and binges. Many gained all of their weight back, and some even surpassed their "before" weight on The Biggest Loser.

RELATED: 8 Surprising Ways You're Slowing Your Metabolism 

"Studies have shown that dieting on and off can wreak havoc on the metabolism," says Keri Gans, R.D., author of The Small Change Diet. “These contestants lose so much weight so quickly that, from a nutrition standpoint, I would never recommend it,” she says.

So what’s the key to losing weight, keeping it off, and avoiding these scary dips in metabolism and leptin? Gans says she suspects the answer lies in taking your time. “Losing weight should be a change in lifestyle. It has to be a slow, gradual process of losing one to two pounds a week."

While that sounds like nothing compared to what the Biggest Loser contestants do, getting healthy isn't about losing weight quickly—it’s about keeping it off in the long term.

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