Weight Maven

Each time it’s on, I get hooked watching The Biggest Loser on NBC. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure: it’s a bit of a train-wreck (it’s a pretty abusive way to lose weight IMO — reminds me of exercise bulimia), but the personal stories always grab me. Who doesn’t like to see the 400-lb, laid-off dad with two kids wind up losing tons of weight, get a car, and $250K?

But as I watched the finale earlier this week, I was struck by the thought that this season’s contestants didn’t seem to be as ripped as in past seasons. A few days later, I was home nursing a mouth full of novocaine, and came across a Biggest Loser recap. I decided to see how this past season compared to past seasons. So off I went to the Biggest Loser entry on Wikipedia and fired up Excel.

A note about the data. Wikipedia had the percentage weight lost for each and every contestant who weighed in at their season’s finale (a handful didn’t). Somewhat arbitrarily, I decided to exclude participants who had only been on the ranch for one or two weeks.

I don’t think this materially affected the results. I mostly did it because it seemed to allow a better comparison between seasons (some of which had contestants who were booted off episode 1, possibly to reappear later). I also theorized that people booted off the first or second week hadn’t been on the ranch long enough to have a real Biggest Loser “experience” — whatever that might be!

Biggest Loser weight loss by season

My theory re this past season? As it turns out, aside from the first season, the average percentage weight loss has been somewhat constant from season to season (click image for larger version):

Percentage weight loss by season

The first season seems to be an understandable outlier; there may have been other differences, but the main one seems to be that season one started a month later than the subsequent fall seasons.

So my theory about this season’s contestants doesn’t hold up. Ah, but then it got a bit more interesting … it turned out there was something interesting in the data!

Biggest Loser: Men vs Women

Since this show has started, I’ve thought it was unfair to the women. With few exceptions, the men have come to the show greatly outweighing the women. This plus their generally higher percentage of muscle mass has to give men a real advantage even when you look at percentage of weight lost rather than number of pounds lost.

This is certainly reflected looking at the overall winners. Of the 10 seasons in the US, only 3 have been won by women. And one of those 3 was in season 6 … a season that had twice as many women as men (8 to 4) after the third week.

Similarly, in 10 seasons, only 2 women have won the at-home competition (the highest percentage weight loss by a non-finalist per season). Again, one of these was in season 6.

And the envelope please: Here’s the percentage of weight lost by the men versus the women for each season (click image for larger version):

Percentage weight loss by season, men vs women

Aside from the first season (where one of the men only lost 16% of his weight) and the sixth (where women outnumbered men 2 to 1), the men averaged more percentage weight loss per season than the women.

Note: a woman won in seasons 5, 6, & 7.

Sux to be a woman … on The Biggest Loser?

Of course, this doesn’t show why this happened. Me, I think it has to do with a specific, physical advantage for the men. The weeks at the ranch helps these guys get to be physically fit enough that when they get home, they can be a beast and maintain a level of fitness to keep the weight coming off while they are working out at home.

But maybe it’s something else. Maybe the women aren’t trying as hard, or maybe they are more prone to emotional overeating or maybe it’s that they don’t know high school wrestling tricks to drop weight. Whatever it is, 8 of 10 seasons worth of data show that women on The Biggest Loser just aren’t losing as much percentage of weight as the men!

Of course, it wouldn’t be fair to not also point out that there are benefits for the women. The contestants certainly know the bigger guys are the real competition. So on any given week, if one of the big guys has a bad week and is up for elimination, he’s typically voted off in a flash, giving some typically under-performing woman another week on the ranch. And some of them (sorry Elizabeth!) wind up coasting on their lack of performance practically to the finale.

Enough already. Maybe I’ll give up The Biggest Loser along with Diet Coke in 2011. Will I? Ah, who am I kidding … I’ll probably watch. Just wish it were more fair to the girls!!