There’s still a lot of chatter around Rachel Frederickson, the 24 year-old Biggest Loser winner who showed up for her final weigh in at just 105 pounds at 5’5″ tall. Rachel had lost a total of 155 pounds from her high of 260. Since leaving the ranch three months ago, Rachel lost an additional 45 pounds, leaving her very thin and giving her the advantage to win the competition and the $250,000 prize money. Rachel lost the highest percentage of her body weight among the contestants, 59.5%, which is the highest percentage loss in the show’s 15 season history. Rachel is also the first contestant to be underweight at the time of her weigh-in.
Trainer Jillian Michaels has refused to comment on Rachel’s transformation, tweeting that she and Bob Harper are “not comfortable commenting on Rachel’s journey because we weren’t her trainers and weren’t given an opportunity to work with her at any point.”
Bob wasn’t able to resist saying something a day later. He taped an appearance on The Rachael Ray show, which will air next week. He said “What people don’t understand is, when contestants leave to go home … they’re in charge of themselves. So, I had not seen her until that night, and so when she walked out, I was just like of like, ‘whoa.’ And I’ve been on the show since the beginning, forever. … I was stunned. That would be the word. I mean, we’ve never had a contestant come in at 105 pounds.”
As many outlets noted, Bob and Jillian’s faces kind of said it all:
Rachel on was The Today Show Wednesday, where the anchors never asked her about the controversy over her weight loss. To be fair, Rachel was not in the studio at the time as her flight had been canceled. She was being interviewed remotely.
People Magazine recently published the detail that Rachel admitted that she exercised up to four times a day once she left the show, saying she took “maybe three, four classes a day” at the gym like Zumba and spinning. She must have spent all day at the gym. Rachel wanted to win Biggest Loser and she did. Many of you commented that this is a competition, and Rachel won by extreme measures. Whether it’s healthy or not to lose that much weight that fast is something the media continues to debate, but she did what she thought she had to in order to win. If these shows like Extreme Weight Loss and Biggest Loser showed realistic, gradual weight loss they just wouldn’t have as much drama would they?
Here’s the video of Rachel’s win:
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