Episode 144: Welcome back to Real Health Radio. Today’s guest interview is with Kai Hibbard.
Kai Hibbard is a licensed social worker, author of the novel “Losing It”, body acceptance activist, and motivational speaker. When not providing individual and couples therapy, or publicly combating mass media hypocrisy and body shaming, she uses her voice to give presentations promoting body positivity and to shed light on the issues close to her heart.
Kai was first cast into the spotlight through her participation in, and subsequent denunciation of the weight loss game show The Biggest Loser. Going through the program, she realized the negative impact the show had, not only on her own life, but on society in general. Vowing to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Kai has fought, often as the lone voice, against unrealistic and damaging message in the media regarding our bodies in general.
Drawing on experiences from her own journey as well as her education in psychology and social work; Kai explores living healthy and happy with her body in a society that inundates people with the message that she shouldn’t. Through well-researched and empirically backed discourse, she encourages people to think independently and critically about the messages they are being sent in the media. She urges people to be comfortable in their own skin, embrace who they are, and own the space they take up in the world with both the good and the bad that follows, knowing this to be the best first step towards a happier, healthier existence.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 144 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/144.
A couple times a year, I take on clients. Client work is the core of my business and how I spend the vast majority of my time, and after working with clients for the last decade, I feel confident in saying I’m very good at what I do. Yes, I help clients with various symptoms, but actually it’s much bigger than just removing symptoms. These are struggles that these individuals are obsessed with and are defined by. Their problem has become how they identify and think about themselves. My clients have often worked with multiple practitioners and are on the verge of giving up, and it really isn’t uncommon for me to be the fourth or the fifth or the sixth person they’ve come to.
Where I see myself being different to others is by combining science and compassion. I’m evidence-based in what I do and have a strong grounding in physiology and why the body is functioning how it is, but at the same time I’m compassionate and I listen to the mental and emotional side of the client’s experience and know that these aspects are of equal importance to health as the physical side of things.
One of the aspects I like most about the work that I do is how positive the process is. People believe that they’re going to have to give up so much, that it will be painful in so many ways, but they’ll convince themselves that it’s better for their long-term health. But what they find is that the change actually adds to their quality of life. They enjoy the change and their new life. Their physical, mental, and emotional health improves now, not in some distant, far-off time in the future.
After working together, my clients regain what they thought was impossible: having their period again, conceiving, feeling energised, purposeful, and alive, and walking by a mirror without the dread of seeing their own reflection.
I put out so much free material. The podcast is free, the blog posts are free. While the free material I put out, I stand behind, it is much more general. You have to discern what is and isn’t relevant for you. But when we’re working together, I’m the one who can sort through this and show you what is important, what is the low-hanging fruit, and what are the levers that’ll make the most difference.
If you want this kind of precision in helping you with your recovery for better health, now is your chance to work with me. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read more about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat.
Welcome to Real Health Radio, health advice that’s more than just about how you look. And here’s your host, Chris Sandel.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. This week on the show it is another guest interview, and my guest this week is Kai Hibbard. Kai is a licensed social worker, author of the novel Losing It, body acceptance activist, and motivational speaker. When not providing individual and couples therapy or publicly combatting mass media hypocrisy and body shaming, she uses her voice to give presentations promoting body positivity and to shed light on the issues close to her heart.
Kai was first case into the spotlight through her participation in and subsequent denunciation of the weight loss game show The Biggest Loser. Going through the programme, she realised the negative impact the show had not only on her own life, but on society in general. Vowing to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, Kai has fought, often as the lone voice, against unrealistic and damaging messages in the media regarding our bodies in general.
Drawing on experience from her own journey as well as her education in psychology and social work, Kai explores living healthy and happy with her body in a society that inundates people with the message that she shouldn’t. Through well-researched, empirically backed discourse, she encourages people to think independently and critically about the messages they are being sent in the media. She urges people to be comfortable in their own skin, embrace who they are, and own the space that they take up in the world with both the good and the bad that follows, knowing this is the best step towards a happier, healthier existence.
I’ve been aware of Kai for many years. I think I must’ve seen an article that she was previously featured in talking about her experience on The Biggest Loser. I then found her page on Facebook and have followed her ever since. And considering I’m saying I found her page on Facebook as opposed to on Instagram, that’s probably an indication of the length of time I’ve been following her.
This conversation is really me getting to find out about her experience on The Biggest Loser, what led up to this, what happened while she was on the show, and then what’s happened subsequently, considering in her first interview after the show was over, she started to denounce it. It is fantastic that The Biggest Loser has finally been pulled from the TV in the US, but disappointing that it went on for 17 seasons and in many places around the world it is still on air. Hopefully this gives an insight into what a horror show it really is and was and the damage that it creates to the contestants’ physical, mental, and emotional health.
With that intro out of the way, here is my conversation with Kai Hibbard.
Hey, Kai. Welcome to the show. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me tonight.
Kai Hibbard: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
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Chris Sandel: You were a contestant on the third series of The Biggest Loser back in 2006. You’ve subsequently become incredibly critical of the show. I definitely want to talk about your experience or maybe your ordeal on the show, but to start with, leading up to the show and appearing on the show in your pre-The Biggest Loser life, starting with you as a child, what was your relationship with food like?
Kai Hibbard: I don’t even know if I would’ve said that I had a relationship with food as a child. It’s funny; it’s something that I didn’t think about or explore until I was much older. I do know, with the benefit of hindsight, like most people, that my relationship with food became warped when I was about in the fourth grade.
My mother actually suffered from exercise anorexia and then standard anorexia. She was a very tiny woman for most of my life, about 4’11”, and really, really struggled with eating disorder and mental health issues. About fourth grade, she recruited me, I guess, to join Weightwatchers with her. From that point on, my connection with my body and my connection with eating turned into that yo-yo dieting cycle that a lot of women and a lot of men, I’m learning, too, can relate to.
00:07:45
Chris Sandel: With what you described with your mother there, did you know she had issues around food? Or was it around that fourth grade that that became apparent to you? How did you think about her body and her relationship with food?
Kai Hibbard: It’s funny, I don’t think I ever really analysed or thought about my mother’s relationship with food. I realised that my mother was sick. I didn’t understand what it was rooted in or how it was connected with how she ate.
Right before fourth grade, we lived in Hawaii. I’m from a military family. I’m a military brat, and then I served myself, and now I’m married to military. At that point in time we were stationed in Hawaii, and my mother I remember was so thin and so weak that there were periods of time when she was bundled up in layers and coats and sweatshirts in Hawaii to stay warm. She barely had the energy to lift her head up off the couch sometimes. Some of that was her depression, but a lot of it was malnourishment.
But what I really remember about food and a relationship with exercise and health and all of that is honestly the cyclical dieting my father had to do to make weights almost every year for his PT test and his PT standards to stay in the military. That really affected me more, I think.
Chris Sandel: How did you think about your body, especially starting to go to Weightwatchers and throughout childhood?
Kai Hibbard: As an elementary school kid up until the Weightwatchers point, and honestly up until we PCS’d – that’s permanent change of station when you’re in the military; it’s a move – from Hawaii to New Jersey, I don’t think I really thought about my body much at all other than what I could do. I was an active kid. I liked to swim, I liked to boogie board. Living in Hawaii was great. It was a playground, almost, all the time, especially if you like being outdoors.
When we moved to New Jersey, that was the point in time when I started Weightwatchers with my mother. Also, it was a very, very different environment as far as going into the upper grades in elementary school and then starting junior high, and especially as a woman – at that point as a girl – there’s things you start to notice about your body or how you look in comparison to other people, and it’s not something I really experienced in Hawaii.
I’m ‘hapa’, as they say in Hawaii, or I’m mixed. My mom is Chamorro. She’s from Guam. My dad is this big giant white guy. In the Polynesian community and the military community also that we were in in Hawaii, my size wasn’t really an issue. I was built – pardon my language – kind of like a little brick shithouse. It was great. [laughs] I loved being strong. I loved taking up space. It was part of my personality. It was part of who I was. Also, being a military brat, when you move a lot, you have to stake out a claim and you have to stake out your space and who you are if you ever expect to survive all those transitions.
Then when I got to New Jersey, the idea of attractiveness and acceptableness was completely different. That’s when I started to get the messages from everyone around me that my body and my size were not acceptable and there was something ‘wrong’ with me. As I got older, we PCS’d again to North Carolina. New Jersey was a really difficult experience for me, living there. There were also a lot of wonderful things, but there were a lot of difficult things about my body and my shape and learning how to diet. I found my diary from that time period, and almost every page details what I weighed. It’s the saddest thing.
When I got to North Carolina, I experienced a complete shift in what the people in that geographic area felt was attractive versus where I was in New Jersey, so suddenly I had this attention that I wasn’t used to. A thing that really clicked in my brain at 15 that I think helped me survive, even though I clearly didn’t internalise it deeply enough or I never would’ve gone on The Biggest Loser, was that at 15 years old I went from a georgical location where I was told repeatedly how I was wrong and how I was unattractive, and all we did was move locations and suddenly I was being told how attractive I was and how desirable I was.
That helped me, at least at that point in time, to understand that not a single damn thing had changed about me, but what had changed was the people I was surrounded with. At that point in time I realised that if somebody tells me I am attractive, if somebody tells me I am unattractive, it says absolutely nothing about who I am and everything about who they are.
00:12:25
Chris Sandel: With the Weightwatchers, did that start you on a constant stream of diets? What did your dieting history look like after that point?
Kai Hibbard: I think it was off and on. I can’t even remember how long I did the Weightwatchers thing. Probably up until the point where it bored me and I was no longer interested in restriction because my body didn’t really respond to restriction. I’m not genetically predisposed to be 4’11” and tiny, tiny like my mother was.
I didn’t think about it again until probably later on in high school. I was a cheerleader. People who know me find that endlessly hilarious, but I was. I remember that they had to alter a skirt for me in order for it to fit. Once again, I felt like I didn’t fit in. I could do the same things all the other girls were doing athletically, but they didn’t have a uniform that would fit me. Never mind the fact that the uniforms were probably from 1972 and the cheerleaders were required to sell candy to raise money so the football players had new uniforms every year. Let’s not even get into that patriarchal construct
But I remember the shame that I felt. God love one of the other girls on the team’s mom, who was willing to sew and alter a uniform for me just so I could be a cheerleader. That probably put it into high gear again.
Then I remember the following year, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to do cheerleading again. I tried bunches of different things. I always did. I floated from thing to thing based on what interested me. They had changed coaches that year, and I remember when I went to go try out for the squad again, I was told by this new coach that I should consider a different sport because I ‘didn’t look like what a cheerleader should look like’. So that was the end of my illustrious career in cheerleading.
Chris Sandel: So you took that advice and moved on.
Kai Hibbard: Yeah, but that had more to do with not wanting to deal with that woman as a coach than it did with feeling like there was something wrong with my body.
It was an off and on thing for me. It wasn’t anything that was obsessive for me until I was on The Biggest Loser, and then it became dangerously obsessive.
00:14:45
Chris Sandel: You mentioned about your mum having anorexia and exercise anorexia. What happened in terms of your exercise habits both in your childhood and more in those teenage years? Did you pick up her obsessive exercise habits?
Kai Hibbard: No, I didn’t pick up her obsessive exercise habits. Definitely not when I was a teenager. I tried different sports, I tried different things. I’m not the most co-ordinated human being in the world. If you’d ever seen me dance, you’d know that.
However, when I left home and I went to college in Hawaii for the first part of my undergrad degree, I supported myself by getting my aerobics instructor certification. I continued to do that when I transferred to Alaska to work on my undergrad degree. I had really unhealthy habits in that I would not eat all day long and I was working two jobs, including the aerobics job, and then I was running the aerobics programme, which meant that if anybody had missed their class or their shift, I picked up their class. There would be days that I was teaching three aerobics classes a day. I was also taking 21 credits. I wouldn’t eat all day, and then I would come home and eat anything I could find in the house, pass out, and do it again the next day.
Chris Sandel: Sounds fairly full-on.
Kai Hibbard: Yeah. Moderation was not my thing at all.
00:16:15
Chris Sandel: Then how did The Biggest Loser come about and you appearing on that show?
Kai Hibbard: The Biggest Loser came about because I was in my twenties and I did a dumb thing and I decided to do a dumb thing very publicly. [laughs] I decided to go on a reality TV programme I had never viewed. I understand that that’s a mind-blowing thing to say, and anybody who hears that is like, “You did what?” Yeah. I never watched a single episode of the show before I went on. Ugh.
At the time, I had just finished up my two undergrad degrees. I had received a full scholarship to law school and I had quit all of my jobs because I’d saved up enough money and I was killing time till I left Alaska for the East Coast to start law school. Because I had the eating habits that I had and I was taking really bad care of myself, I gained a lot of weight very quickly.
It wasn’t anything honestly that was super on my radar; it was one of those things that I was like, well, this is a change that’s occurring in my body that’ll right itself once I’m on a schedule and acting like myself again – completely ignoring the fact that the ‘schedule’ I had was deprivation all day and then binging at night and over-exercising.
I also lived with one of my best friends at the time, who was a fitness competitor. And if you know anything about fitness competitions –
Chris Sandel: Yep.
Kai Hibbard: Yeah, so I don’t even have to detail that. She had seen the show, and she called me upstairs to her half of the house that we were living in. She had just finished watching the finale of Season 2 and was like, “They’re asking for videos. You would be great. The weight will fall right off of you because you’re used to exercising so much. You should try this,” blah, blah, blah. And instead of being like “You’re an idiot and that’s rude and insulting,” I was like, “Yes, that sounds like a great plan. I should totally do that because it would be a great story to tell my kids.”
Then I promptly forgot about it, and after going out a couple months later – actually, not even a couple months. I think the finale of that show was in December. I was going out for New Year’s Eve with a group of girlfriends, and not being able to find any clothing that fit and felt comfortable and attractive kind of soured the night for me. Because I was caught in a diet culture warped mindset of the fact that the problem was my body, not the choices available to me, I promptly got up the next morning, hungover, made a videotape, sent it off to The Biggest Loser, and found myself on the show four months later.
Chris Sandel: What was in the videotape? Do you remember what was recorded as part of that?
Kai Hibbard: Yeah, it was literally me hungover in my living room, bitching about New Year’s and dancing. No lie. Dancing. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: From there, you then find yourself on The Biggest Loser? Or there’s a stage where you might be going on it? How does it all work? I’m going to admit up front, I know of the show; I have never watched it.
Kai Hibbard: I want to give you a gold star for that. That’s fantastic. [laughs] My season was different than some of the other seasons in that it was the 50 states. That was their gimmick. Out of the 50 states, only 14 of the states actually stayed on this big thing they called ‘The Ranch’, and everybody else went home and they were competing at home. The normal season of the show apparently is you just have 15 competitors from all over the country, or 14 competitors, and they stay on the ranch or in the house or whatever.
When I was flown to LA by The Biggest Loser, I left with the idea of “I’ll see you in a couple weeks. I don’t know what this is, but I’m sure I’m coming home.” There’s I believe a two-week period where they put you through a bunch of tests and psychological evaluations and interviews. Somehow I got chosen and I ended up one of the 14 people that stayed and ended up on the show.
00:20:25
Chris Sandel: What happens then when you’re at the ranch, and how does it all start?
Kai Hibbard: For my season, anyway – I can’t speak to anybody else’s experiences or anybody else’s seasons, but for mine, when you were selected at that point you were literally cut off and isolated from the rest of the world. They took our cell phones, they took our computers, they took anything that let us communicate with the outside world.
Also, they had put us up in a hotel before and had told us to pack and all of that, and I was upset – I’m chuckling because I had been in this hotel for so long, I’d sent my clothes to be laundered, and not all of the had come back. I was mad panicked because here I was, this girl from Alaska, in the middle of California heat, and my underwear was literally missing. I was like, this is going to be a problem. I don’t know if these people know about chafing, but it’s a thing. [laughs] That needs to be handled.
Anyway, the other issue I was concerned about was I hadn’t called my parents at all to let them know what was going on or where I was. I was like, “Hey, production, is somebody going to let my parents know?” And they literally at that point said, “Shut up, quit speaking.” Because they hadn’t put the cameras on us yet, so they didn’t want us talking with one another or building relationships or anything dramatic or show-worthy happening until they could control it.
So when I asked if somebody would contact my family, I basically got told to shut up and don’t worry, they’d handle it. It wasn’t till much later that I found out that my parents really had no idea where I was for three weeks. That was kind of disappointing.
00:22:00
In addition, there were things like when we were finally able to get mail, it was opened and redacted. It was a very isolating, strange experience.
Chris Sandel: Wow. With the intention of trying to create tension and strain within you guys?
Kai Hibbard: Yeah, of course. Absolutely, because it’s reality TV and they have to create a narrative. If there’s no drama, everybody’s bored. Nobody wants to watch that. Nobody wants to watch happy people. That’s not a show that would be well rated in the States. I believe there’s somewhere in Europe that they’ve got a show that’s just a train going across the countryside and everybody loves it. That wouldn’t float here. It would not fly because it wouldn’t make money or have ratings in the States. We create drama over here. It might be evident by our political process. But anyway.
When they’re giving you interviews, they ask you questions about things like “I’m not saying this happened, but if your housemate had said … how would you feel?” Just to make you start questioning in the back of your head, “Wait, what? Did someone say that about me? Did that really happen?”
As far as isolating you from the outside world, I think there were a couple different motivations for that. I believe there were some people who were attached to the production that genuinely believed that they were doing a good thing and that by isolating us from our support system outside, they were actually isolating us from ‘negative influences’ on our bad behaviour that added to our issues of – and I hate this word because it stigmatises body size as though it were a sickness, but our ‘issues of obesity’, as they like to call it.
So I think there were people attached to the production that thought it was for your own good, and there were other people attached to the production that just basically didn’t want to miss anything that was camera-worthy. They didn’t want you to speak to anybody at home unless they could catch it on camera in case you learned something ground-breaking about what was going on at home or you were going to have an emotional moment.
One of the other very serious concerns when I was on the show – again, I don’t know what it was like in later seasons – they were always perpetually afraid you were going to give away show secrets, like you were going to talk about how much weight you’d loss or who’d won what challenge or who had been sent home, stuff like that. So even when we were allowed to call home off camera – and that took over a month before we were allowed to do that – they were five-minute calls and you had to be watched by a production assistant the whole time.
Chris Sandel: So basically you were in jail.
Kai Hibbard: I mean, yeah. When I think back on it, I’m like, it was the world’s most beautiful prison. It’s funny because people love to talk about stuff that they don’t understand or haven’t researched on the internet. It’s fun. I’ve had so many people come to me like, “You’d never cut it in boot camp.” What makes me laugh about that is that after this whole experience, I joined the Army. I’ve been through boot camp.
So I can compare the two experiences, and they’re both hard in their own way, but The Biggest Loser is like boot camp, but it’s designed to make you paranoid and hate everybody around you and hate yourself, whereas the ostensible goal of real boot camp in the Army was to break you down so that they could build you back up again and unite you as a team. There was absolutely no ‘building you back up again’ period with The Biggest Loser. That’s the starkest difference between the two. So I love it when people like to talk smack at me about how I wouldn’t make it through boot camp.
00:25:40
Chris Sandel: So what happened as part of the show starting, and what did your days or weeks look like as part of that?
Kai Hibbard: Hmm. How do I explain a day or a week there? How do you explain a place where you come to believe that a cup of black coffee is a meal? And then you come to believe that three hours of cardio is being lazy. That’s how my days and my weeks looked.
I can tell you what an average weigh-in day looked like. When you went to weigh in, on the TV show – I know you haven’t seen it, but there’s this giant fake scale that you get on. It’s a big hoopla, and that’s what the whole audience at home sees. What they don’t realise is that we’d weighed in either the morning or the day before actually filming this. You weigh in on a big cattle scale, and you’re not allowed to see what the cattle scale says.
Usually the 24 hours prior to this weigh-in after your weeks of filming and interviews and countless hours of exercise and food deprivation and then all the drama that comes from being exhausted and hungry and stuck in a house with a bunch of people you barely know and producers stirring up drama between you during interviews, about 24 hours before the weigh-in, you would usually be encouraged by your trainer to start dehydrating.
You would cut your water intake either to very little or to nothing at all. You would not eat at all. And then on the morning of a weigh-in – we were out in the middle of the California desert, so it was very, very hot, and our gym was a temporary structure built just for the show. It wasn’t a real gym and it didn’t have any air conditioning or anything like that. You would get up, put on Spandex shorts and a sports bra, a tank top, leggings, and then sweatpants and then a t-shirt, a long-sleeved shirt, a hoodie, a hat, zip everything up. Talking about it now, I’m like, yeah, you were not quite right. But at the time it seemed completely rational.
So you would put on all this stuff and you would head down to the non-air conditioned gym. You would close up all the windows in the gym and then you would work out for two to three hours, as long as you could stand it, without drinking any water. It was sweating as much as humanly possible. Then you would go back up to the main house and strip down to whatever you could to weigh in.
That got levels of bizarreness – I’m still sitting here staring off into space thinking about this. You got so obsessed with what that scale was going to say and what might cause you to not lose enough weight on it that there were women literally when we were menstruating that would refuse to wear tampons because it might add weight to their weigh-in. Yeah.
So then you would get on the scale. They wouldn’t show your weight. They’d look at it, and as soon as you got off, you just pounded as much water as you could get into you because you were desperately dehydrated.
00:29:00
Chris Sandel: On average, how much exercise were you doing a day?
Kai Hibbard: It would depend. They had a thing called dark days, and those were days when cameras weren’t at the ranch watching you. On those days, you would think there would be less exercise, but there was actually more because as the competition ramped up and you got more and more near the end and more and more – I know ‘brainwashed’ seems like a really severe word to use for it, but brainwashed is accurate – you just ramped up your exercise more and more.
Then there would be days when there was filming and you’d get interrupted almost constantly for interviews or having to drive somewhere and be at a location or do a challenge, and it was harder to get workouts in on those days. It would average anywhere between three and eight hours a day.
Chris Sandel: Wow. Were there rest days?
Kai Hibbard: I’m trying to think if I had a single rest day while I was there.
Chris Sandel: God.
Kai Hibbard: No. The closest thing we would have to a rest day would be a rest few hours, and that’s when they would have a dark day and we would talk production into taking us to go see a movie. And the only reason people would agree to rest during that movie is because everybody was there, so you could see your competition. Because you’re so paranoid at this point that if you didn’t see somebody, you were absolutely certain that they were somewhere else working harder than you, and you’d better get up and start working too. But if we were all there in that movie theatre, then we all knew everybody was sitting down at once, so it was okay to relax.
But those got completely ruined when at one point during one of those trips, somebody stood up to use the restroom and when they turned around, they realised there was another fellow contestant literally in the back of the theatre doing squats. So we just stopped after that.
00:31:00
Chris Sandel: Were there psychologists or therapists or counsellors or anyone on the show there, checking in?
Kai Hibbard: No. Again, I can’t speak to any other seasons. Some other contestants on other seasons say that there were. The only interactions I had with I guess a mental health expert – I believe the person was a PsyD – was when they did the psychological evaluations at the beginning to cast you.
My personal opinion is that these evaluations weren’t necessarily to make sure you were stable enough to endure it; it was just to make sure that you were possibly going to be enough drama so that you were good for TV, but you weren’t going to be so much drama that you would actively stab a housemate. I don’t think there was anything in there really to protect the contestants’ wellbeing.
I do know that the other time that this PsyD came to the ranch was one contestant was really, really struggling, and they only brought this guy to come out and speak to us because this contestant had to demand it for days that he needed to speak with somebody. I remember briefly speaking with the man and saying, “Look, I feel like Alice through the Looking Glass here. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m not sure this is healthy.” And the response was basically patting me on the head and “You’re lucky you’re here. It’s saving your life,” and then I didn’t see that guy again.
I believe that some of the other contestants on my season might have seen that guy after they were eliminated, but I was one of the lucky – or unlucky, I guess, depending on how you look at it – contestants to make it to the final four. When I was ‘eliminated’, we were all whisked off the ranch at the same time, so there was no debriefing with the PsyD at all. It was just like, “If you need him, you know where to find him.” I was like, “But I don’t actually”, and they just left the room.
00:33:00
Chris Sandel: What about on the food front? What did that look like? I’m kind of horrified to ask.
Kai Hibbard: On the food front. At the time I was connected with the show, there actually was I believe a registered dietitian attached to the show. From what I’ve learned in retrospect, the 36 contestants who were competing at home actually had access to this person and this person helped them design diets and talk to them about nutrients and proper ways to eat and stuff like that. If you were an actual contestant on the ranch, while I believe we had one or two interactions with this person, production would constantly intervene and tell you that the only person you were to listen to was your trainer – which, again, in retrospect, I’m like, why am I listening to this fitness competitor for nutrition information? What?
For instance, I can remember one of the guys at least being told to eat more calories by the registered dietitian, and then the guy’s trainer coming right behind that and a member of production going, “Hey, if you do that, you’re not going to lose weight fast enough and you’re going to be kicked off. And if you get kicked off the ranch, you’re risking your shot at saving your life.”
The other thing is we were told to keep food diaries, food logs, and the trainers blatantly told us to lie on them.
Chris Sandel: To lie and say you were eating more than you really were?
Kai Hibbard: Yes. It’s funny, every time I’ve said anything like this in a previous interview or in a magazine interview, it’s always rebutted by one of the trainers or somebody associated with the show. What’s really funny to me is I’ve been making this claim for over a decade since I left that show, and one of the trainers on there, Bob Harper, was like, “I’d never do that.” And then he literally came out with a diet book that recommended ‘jumpstarting’ with 800 calories a day. I was like, well, there you go. Who was lying for over a decade, me or you?
Chris Sandel: You mentioned before about going to the movies didn’t really work because everyone was wanting to watch if someone else was fitting in exercise. In terms of the eating, were you guys at the ranch all eating together? And did that have the same impact on you seeing that other people were eating less or just eating a salad, and that spurred you on to eat less as well?
Kai Hibbard: No, oddly enough. It’s funny; what you’re describing, that whole phenomenon, I’ve experienced that more off the ranch with social circles of other women when you go to lunch and everybody seems to be paranoid, playing this ‘who can eat less?’ competition. “I’m going to order a salad with dressing.” “Oh, I want mine without dressing.” “I’ll take that same salad but without the avocado.” It turns into this weird ‘who can starve themselves the most and order to achieve some false vision of virtuousness’. I experienced that more with social circles with other women than I did on the show.
On the show, honestly, where the eating came in, for me anyway, was I pretty much just ate whatever was around. I’m not much of a cook. I’ve never been much of a cook. I’m still not much of a cook if you ask my son. So if other people were preparing meals, I was that person that was looking over like “So what you got there? What’s that?”
Chris Sandel: “You going to eat all of that?” [laughs]
Kai Hibbard: Exactly. [laughs] But also, to be honest, there were so many sponsors associated with the show that were food things that we were basically eating what was stocked in the kitchen. At that point in time, as opposed to the whole move to ‘clean eating’ – and I hate that phrase.
Chris Sandel: Same.
Kai Hibbard: I get into so many online arguments about it. I’m fun that way. But you know how that’s the shtick now when you’re talking about diet culture and weight loss culture. Back then, that wasn’t a thing. It was all processed foods. It was so long ago that the fridge literally had diet Mountain Dew and spray butter and processed fat-free cheese in it. There was a lot of that. And protein shakes. I had so many protein shakes. I was probably like 80% protein shake and coffee at some point in time during that whole experience.
00:37:40
Chris Sandel: How closely is what was seen in the show versus what was actually going on?
Kai Hibbard: They’re not in any way, shape, or form. No. [laughs] No. For instance, one of the things that I’ve spoken about before is the show presents it that weigh-ins happen every week, and that’s a lie. That’s a total lie. Weigh-ins sometimes were just five days apart and sometimes they would be three weeks apart, depending on filming schedules.
Let’s see, what other things were complete lies? Well, one of the other things that was a pretty big lie is the show has all these different – well, it used to. I don’t know. I never saw it before my season and I never saw it after my season. But during my season, they would pop up these health tips on screen or whatever, recommending you should do blah, blah, blah, ‘the contestants do blah, blah, blah’. It was things that when I saw it when I was watching the show air, I was like, we never ate that. We never did that. That’s not a thing I did at all.
So no, what you saw on TV did not match what we were doing to our bodies at all, which is why – well, one of the reasons that I felt obligated to be a whistle-blower immediately after my family staged an intervention and I got through the whole process of the finale.
I was doing speaking engagements in my local community where I would go when people asked me to speak and talking to people, and I remember conversations, especially with younger women – I was only in my twenties at the time – telling me that they didn’t understand what was wrong with them because they couldn’t do what I did on TV. I remember the crushing guilt and being like, “I wasn’t doing what you saw me doing on TV.” It was too much for my moral compass. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, much to my own detriment if you ask NBC. But I pulled through it okay. I sleep well at night, thank goodness.
00:40:00
Chris Sandel: You mentioned there about your family staging an intervention. What was going on with your health, or what changes happened with your health as part of being at the ranch and doing all the exercise and not eating very much food, etc.?
Kai Hibbard: It got way worse, actually. You haven’t seen the show, so the premise of the show is you’re on the ranch for a certain amount of time, and then once they whittle it down to the final three or four contestants, you go home for the at-home portion of the show. You’re supposed to continue the best you can at home, and then you come back for the finale and it’s the big surprise, like who did the best – oof, and ‘the best’ is such a subjective thing.
Chris Sandel: Do you still have the trainer when you’re at home, or that all disappears?
Kai Hibbard: No, that all disappears. The trainer that was on my season called me I think once, maybe. But there’s nobody really monitoring you. It’s so funny, because the show goes back and forth based on what they’re trying to defend.
I want to say it was Season 15 or something, but they had a winner who lost so much weight – and as a side note, I think the BMI is a bullshit measurement of anything, but just for the sake of this conversation – they tried to justify the show and its methods by using the BMI, like ‘these people were in an unhealthy range in the BMI and now they’re in the healthy range for the Body Mass Index’. So they had a winner that went from being what is considered upper regions of unhealthy on the Body Mass Index to lower regions of unhealthy on the Body Mass Index.
When that happened, they did interviews with the trainers, who were like, “When they go home, we don’t know what they’re doing. It’s not our responsibility.” And then at the same time, there’s a big disclaimer, literally in the credits of every show, that’s like ‘Don’t try this at home. Our contestants are heavily monitored at all times by psychologists and doctors’. I’m always like, which is it, guys? Which is it?
So, no. I like to say that they would’ve been happier if had gone home and done cocaine or something, because I wasn’t monitored at all and they really, really wanted a female winner my season, and they were fairly hard pressing for it. There wasn’t anything to stop anybody from doing outrageous things to accelerate weight loss.
People get annoyed, but I like to say if I could’ve cut one of my limbs off and showed up at the finale and weighed in that way, if the nation wouldn’t have noticed it, the show would’ve given it the thumbs up because I would’ve won. That’s how little monitoring we had at that point in time.
At the point that I went home is honestly when my family staged an intervention. I met a guy who was my boyfriend at the time and is now my husband, and he was in Alaska and I was on the East Coast because I was preparing to get ready to go to law school and start what I thought was going to be my real life, but I had to fly back to Alaska occasionally to shoot for the show, because the big shtick and the gimmick was 50 states, and they loved the whole Alaska appeal.
One of my trips flying back, I got off the plane and he took one look at me – at that point, my hair had started to fall out in big chunks. I tried to hide it with a baseball cap, but it was impossible. You know how people try to hide things like that. I was covered in bruises. I had black circles under my eyes. I was only able to sleep about three hours at night at a time. That was it. I completely stopped menstruating. My body stopped.
I’m trying to remember the exact sequence of events, but I was so malnourished and grinding myself to death that there was one night I woke up in the middle of the night and I had such severe leg cramps in both my legs that they literally threw me out of his bed and I ended up on the floor, and the pain was so bad that I started vomiting.
Chris Sandel: God.
Kai Hibbard: Yeah. At that point in time, he was like, “Okay, cool. I’m done.” He contacted my parents, he contacted my best friend at the time and her husband, and they all sat me down and they were like, “All right, listen up. You’re going to die, so, no.”
At that point they babysat me, basically, from that point until the finale, and I still did incredibly dangerous things at my finale to take weight off. That was after even an intervention, when they’d got me to start seeing a therapist and they cut my workouts from about eight hours a day down to three hours a day.
I can remember my now-husband sitting with me and just waiting until I finished an entire meal. I remember crying, just crying. The meal was something ridiculous like half a cup of oatmeal and some egg whites, and I just sobbed because he was ‘making me’ eat the whole thing. He’s so patient, and he was like, “Yeah.” He’s a very funny man, too. He’s very patient, and he was also like, “Crying is just going to mean it’s cold when you eat it.” [laughs] “So you might want to just keep eating. Stop crying.”
Anyway, they really got me through, but I was still so warped that I still wasn’t healthy. I wasn’t healthy until years later, almost, when I’d say that I was on a path to recovery. And then even at one point I was on a really good path to recovery and I got pregnant with my son, and that messed with my head again very badly, and I ended up back in intensive therapy because I had such a hard time with the very healthy weight gain that came from being pregnant.
00:46:00
Chris Sandel: When they did the intervention, were you reluctant to be getting that kind of help? Were you reluctant to be reducing everything?
Kai Hibbard: Oh yeah, I was very, very resistant to it. I’m not a competitive person, which is a really strange thing to say, but what I am is a pleaser. I cannot stand the idea of letting anybody down, and I was prime bait for the spiel I kept getting over and over from production: “200,000 other people auditioned, and we chose you, and don’t you dare waste this opportunity. You are so lucky, and 200,000 other people wish they could be you.” The whole idea of not fully doing every single thing, whether it was healthy or not, to try and achieve winning this felt disrespectful to all of those other people that wanted this opportunity. That really worked on my head, and that’s what I had the hardest time letting go of.
00:47:15
Chris Sandel: You came second in the show.
Kai Hibbard: I did.
Chris Sandel: How did you feel about that? I’m getting the impression maybe you were disappointed about it – or maybe there were so many other issues going on by that stage that it was just past that point?
Kai Hibbard: By the time the finale rolled around, I knew I was going to come in second. First of all, the statistical odds of being able to beat a man who was really my only competition out of the final four contestants, who started off so much heavier than I did and with a bigger percentage than I did, it would’ve been near impossible. When they finally weighed me in and I went to my final doctor’s office thing, they did a scan called a DEXA scan that shows adipose tissue versus muscle mass and bone mass, and the doctor told me that I would’ve had to have lost bone mass and additional lean tissue in order to win. So there was no way.
Chris Sandel: You needed to get osteoporosis to win.
Kai Hibbard: Yes. Or like I referenced earlier, literally cut off a limb. There was no way I was going to win. I’d already come to that conclusion before I got there. So that was fine.
The blowback from some people about not winning was a little difficult, the whole ‘you let people down’ and all of that. But honestly, there was a lot of relief with it because had I won, I would’ve been immediately whisked away to go do the rounds of the press and all of that stuff, and I was really locked into – and I still was, even with not winning – but you’re locked into this contract where you basically aren’t allowed to tell the truth.
Also, you see interviews that you supposedly gave pop up in magazines and you’re like, I never said that. There was one interview I read later on in some magazine that quoted me as saying ‘I finally broke down my fat walls’. I was like, what the hell does that even mean? That’s not even something I would ever say. What?
So there was a sense of relief in the sense that I wasn’t still caught up in the big machine. The first interview I was asked to give after the entire thing, I told the whole truth. And then I was sent a scary email about how NBC and The Biggest Loser were going to sue me for a million dollars. Luckily for me, all I had was student loan debt, so I was like ‘Good luck!’ and I kept telling the truth.
Chris Sandel: Was there some kind of nondisclosure agreement?
Kai Hibbard: There was. There was a very ridiculous contract and nondisclosure agreement that I had an attorney look at at one point, and he literally laughed out loud at it and was like, “Yeah, I don’t think that this would hold up in court. However, they have over 100 attorneys and you can’t afford me, so you’re out of luck.”
00:50:20
Chris Sandel: Once the show was over, was there any aftercare? I’m expecting the answer is going to be no, but what happens once it’s over?
Kai Hibbard: Once it’s over they forget you’re alive unless you can be profitable for them. That’s it. That’s the best explanation I can give. Unless in some way they believe that they can still continue to profit from you, you no longer exist. Or unless, of course, you threaten their bottom line by telling the entire world that it was unhealthy and unsafe. Then they remember you because they send you letters to try to scare you to be quiet.
Chris Sandel: You mentioned speaking out about it. How shortly after the show was it that you started to voice your criticism?
Kai Hibbard: The very first interview that anybody came to me for was Time Magazine, and I believe it was five or six months after my finale. Time Magazine contacted me and they were like, “Would you be willing to…?” and I was like, “Yes, I would.” That was the very first one. Nobody between December and then had contacted me at all. They’d all gone through the press through NBC. I believe somebody had tried to contact me. I don’t remember who it was, but press through The Biggest Loser, their representative called me and was like, “You are not to give any interviews without asking us first.” I was like, “Yeah, okay then.” Click.
I also kind of went into hiding in recovery. I was very, very ill immediately after the finale. I ended up in the hospital. My immune system crashed and I ended up with all kinds of things wrong, including thrush. So that was fun.
00:52:00
Chris Sandel: What was the reaction when you did start to speak out? You mentioned obviously the producers and the shows weren’t pleased, but what was the reaction of the public?
Kai Hibbard: They responded as though I killed Santa Claus every time I did an interview. [laughs] Because I ruined this wonderful thing for people, is how it was perceived. They literally acted like I slaughtered their dreams in front of them. I got hate mail, I got death threats. I got the usual fun array of things that come on the internet.
But I also got gratitude. I got amazing private messages and letters and conversations from people who were like, “Thank you so much. I thought there was something wrong with me. I had resorted to things like not eating or vomiting my food to try and emulate the results that I saw on that show, and I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t do it.”
I don’t think that I’m bitter about this, but I think the ones that confound me the most when I think back about it are the fellow contestants that would give interviews after I had, disputing everything that I had to say. That always confounded me because I was like, but you know I’m telling the truth. You were there.
But as time went on, that changed a lot. I ended up being contacted by lots and lots of contestants. I mean, I was Season 3, and that show didn’t die until what, 18? Season 18 I think it was finally killed, thank goodness. But I got contacted by so many contestants behind the scenes that were like, “Thank you, thank you, thank you. This was my experience.” I’d like to say that it got better in seasons after mine, but boy, some of the horror stories – it did not get better for a long time. It in fact got worse.
Chris Sandel: So as the seasons went on, more and more contestants started to speak out as well?
Kai Hibbard: Not until – I want to say it was maybe 2015, finally.
Chris Sandel: So quite a long – you’re talking about basically a decade.
Kai Hibbard: Oh yeah, for at least a decade I was the lone contestant out there talking about the truth, telling the truth about what the experience was like. Then finally, after a decade, others started coming forward.
Then what really sealed the deal is the National Institute of Health here had done a research study on some of the contestants from Season 6, I believe.
Chris Sandel: Was this the article that Gina Kolata wrote for some publication? I think it was like Season 8 contestants, and it showed all their basal metabolic rate was screwed up. Is that the one?
Kai Hibbard: That’s the one. And when that finally broke, anybody that called me, I was like, “I told you!” I had a big, big bowl of schadenfreude for breakfast that morning when I had to watch trainers from the show react to that data. It was amazing. I felt really, really vindicated when those results came out. That was the beginning of the end for the show. I was like, I’ve been telling you this for years. Beyond the horrible treatment that we all experienced, data does not support dieting at all. At all. That was awesome. That’s when the whole thing started to crumble, and it was fantastic.
00:55:55
Chris Sandel: Tell me more about your recovery and what’s happened after the show in terms of – you mentioned about law school at some point. Did you go back and finish the law school?
Kai Hibbard: Much to my parents’ chagrin, I turned down a full scholarship to law school to pay to get my master’s in social work. I think sometimes occasionally I can hear my father still screaming in the Maine woods where they lived in horror over that decision – all the way up until I gave them a grandchild, and then all was forgiven. They were pretty happy campers. [laughs]
So no, instead I joined the Army, like I stated, for a little while. I did that mostly because I wanted to serve my country. Like I said, I come from a family that serves. My grandfather from Guam served in the Navy. He was a prisoner of war and he served in World War II. My father served in the United States Coast Guard. I served in the Army, and my husband served in the United States Air Force and in the United States Coast Guard, and he’s now in the United States Navy.
So I served and then I paid back my student loans, which was another reason that I wanted to serve – thank goodness – and I was discharged because I broke my pelvis. I was injured. Then I found out three and a half years ago that I have rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia, so I’m living with a chronic illness right now and I’m working as a social worker in clinical practice. I do therapy. I am somebody’s therapist.
Chris Sandel: In what area?
Kai Hibbard: Right now I work with the court system. I work with parents who are getting divorced and children who are coping with it and helping them with co-parenting and helping people adjust to life being divorced.
Chris Sandel: Do you think your time on the show and that experience pushed you into wanting to do social work or do something different?
Kai Hibbard: I think that honestly, I was a born social worker. It’s who I am. It’s why after the whole experience, I immediately started yelling ‘this isn’t right!’ at the top of my lungs. Social justice, as much as it’s mocked in some circles in the States, is who I am at my core.
I think after going through that experience and learning that I have been inculcated in diet culture my entire life and then also learning what it’s like to live in the United States as a Chamorro woman with Chamorro heritage who looks white and the privilege that comes with that, and then the layers of marginalisation that come with being a fat woman and a woman of colour and a bisexual woman – it made sense for me. It made sense for me more than being an attorney did.
And to be quite honest, during my undergrad I worked for a couple of attorneys, and none of them were happy. And after that whole experience, I put a high, high amount of preference in being happy.
00:59:15
Chris Sandel: Did you get into Health at Every Size and looking at weight bias and weight stigma as part of your recovery? Is that how you got into that?
Kai Hibbard: Yes. The more I studied social work in my master’s degree and the more I looked at layers of marginalisation and intersectionality and the actual data and statistics about what fat people, in the States, at least, face – we’re discriminated against academically, we’re discriminated against economically, we’re discriminated against when we go to the doctor – I experienced it myself trying to get my diagnosis for rheumatoid arthritis. It took me two years because doctors kept wanting to diagnose me as ‘fat’ as opposed to listening to me. “Oh, your joints hurt and they’re red and swollen because you’re too big for your joints.” Um, nope, pretty sure that’s not it, guys. But it took two years to fight that bias and stigma.
So I think that my experience on the show and then the education that came afterwards that helped pull me out of that whole diet culture mindset and really look at the reality of what needed to be changed, and coming around to “I don’t want to change my body, I want to change the world” – that’s always who I’ve been, and that just makes more sense in social work. One of the tenets of our profession is to always be involved in activism.
Chris Sandel: Am I also correct that you’ve done some peer-reviewed research to do with weight?
Kai Hibbard: I have. I have two peer-reviewed academic articles published because I had the distinct privilege of being contacted by Dr. Moore, who was at Mercer University at the time and is now at Alliant University in California, who asked me if I would be willing to be on his research team. So yes, I have two peer-reviewed academic articles published. I’m hoping that those come in handy if and when I decide to pursue getting some more fancy letters after my name.
I also have a book out on Amazon, which is a fictionalised reimagining of my time on weight loss reality TV. It’s a fictionalised version of everything that I went through.
Chris Sandel: When you say fictionalised, is that just a way to get out of the nondisclosure and it’s fairly true?
Kai Hibbard: If it were, I wouldn’t say that. [laughs] But you’ll just have to read it and let me know what you think. It’s called Losing It.
01:02:00
Chris Sandel: This has been wonderful. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you wanted to go through?
Kai Hibbard: Not that I can think of, except that – I’m trying to think of the best way to do this, because I know I’m going to butcher everything. I also have ADHD, so shiny objects. [laughs]
What I wanted to do was give a list of people on social media and podcasts and resources – other than your own, obviously, clearly, which is a fantastic resource – that helped me, and books that helped me, and peer-reviewed articles, and people. I think it’s really, really important, especially in looking at Health at Every Size and fat acceptance and fighting oppression based on weight bias, to turn to the voices that are out there speaking.
Sometimes the people that garner the most publicity or get the most opportunities for a platform are not necessarily the people that have the greatest information, myself included. I love getting out there and being able to speak, and I keep trying to inform myself, but often, unfortunately, we turn to people whose first vocation is modelling, for instance, and we look at them to be the beacon of information for this, and that’s not necessarily where we need to go.
Off the top of my head, and apologising for anybody that I forget, I want to say that there are fabulous people out there to look for, especially on social media, that are excellent resources. Virgie Tovar, Melissa Toler, Roxane Gay, Your Fat Friend is the name on social media. I know I’m forgetting a bunch of wonderful people. Lindy West, Ijeoma Oluo. Clearly, Lindo Bacon. Hello.
But that’s the best I’m going to be able to do off the top of my head. Look for them. They’re out there, and these are the voices that you need to hear that will help you when you’re trying to get through everything that’s being thrown at you – especially this time of year. January is the worst for diet culture.
Chris Sandel: I’ve had Virgie on the show before. I also recently had Jess Baker on, and we talked a bit about this as well. She’s got a fantastic selection of resources of different Instagram accounts to follow, different books, etc.
Kai Hibbard: Yes. I forgot to mention Jess Baker. Yes, absolutely, another fabulous, fabulous one.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I’m always up for more resources. Are there books you want to mention as well?
Kai Hibbard: Yeah, Harriet Brown’s Body of Truth was life-changing for me. On a personal level, that one was life-changing for me. And clearly any of the people that I just mentioned, all of their books. Go buy all of their books. And buy my book. But my book, if you’re in recovery, please be aware – even though there isn’t a content warning on it – it is detailing the whole experience, and it may be triggering, and it is filled with the horrors of diet culture that are associated with that show. So be aware before you pick it up.
Chris Sandel: Cool. This has been wonderful. If there’s any other resources or anything that you think of afterwards, I can put them all in the show notes.
Kai Hibbard: Oh, wonderful.
Chris Sandel: If people want to find out more about you or more about your book, where should they be going?
Kai Hibbard: The book is on Amazon and it is Losing It by Kai Hibbard. You can just look it up. Also, you can find me usually at kaihibbard.com. If you message me on there, I’ll get back to you. But as far as updating content all that often, this isn’t my whole life. My social work and my kid and my family are my whole life. I’m trying to look for that balance, because as I said before, moderation is not my best. I’m still working on that. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Kai, thank you so much for your time and for coming on the show today.
Kai Hibbard: Thank you for having me. This was fantastic.
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