That’s the thing, Jillian Michaels profits off of a twisted and inaccurate view of what it means to be healthy. By attacking the issue with a brick instead of a precision instrument she drives right past the point that body type doesn’t equal body health. Instead of taking on a nuanced, scientific point of view on healthy diet and exercise, she barrels into reinforcing unhealthy dieting and exercising practices that destroy peoples bodies and keep her in business.
Google “The Biggest Loser” followed by the words “unhealthy” or “dangerous” and it’s easy to find some resources about how messed up the people she’s been professionally in bed with truly are. She is complicit in harming not just the contestants of the shows, but also millions of plus-size and overweight people worldwide who take her expertise in the field and project a code of ethics or morality onto her that Jillian Michaels herself clearly does not adhere to.
“Over the following six years, the combined effects of these hormonal changes conspired to make the contestants regain much, if not all, of the weight they’d lost. But the truly shocking part was that their leptin and metabolism levels never rebounded to what they had been before the show. In fact, the more weight a contestant lost, the worse his or her slow metabolism became. This explains why weight regain was inevitable, even though they were eating less food than ever.”
Jillian Michaels is in the business of looking thin for a sick society no matter what the cost. She has never, ever been a proponent of good health or exercising in a manner that doesn’t break your body and make long-term weight loss literally impossible.
The fact that she is also abusing her privilege as a white woman, and seizing headlines over calling out a fat black woman is, well, pretty much par for the course when compared with her ethical standards across her prolific career.
