‘The Biggest Loser’: Are contestants united like never before?

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If these people can lose weight, you don’t have any excuse.

That’s the message as Season 7 of ‘The Biggest Loser: Couples’ gets underway with the heaviest group of contestants ever. As the show kicked off, Jillian and Bob -- who have seen everything, it would seem -- were left slack-jawed as they used a security camera to spy on the clueless contestants trying to work out in the gym on their own.

Did you see the silver team on the ‘balance beams?’ Egads.

Jillian put it this way: ‘For the first time in the history of ‘The Biggest Loser’ I looked at the contestants and thought ‘Wow, these guys are big.’ ‘

There’s Aubrey, who said her weight has taken its toll on her marriage: She won’t let her husband see her body.

There’s Mike, who’s tried every diet he can find, and even had his jaw wired shut at one point, and currently weighs 430 pounds. He’s also become a role model for his son, Ron, who at 18 is the youngest contestant ever on the show. He weighs 388 pounds.

There’s Carla, at 379 pounds the heaviest woman ever on the show. (Bob said of her and some of the other women: ‘These are the kind of numbers I normally see on the men.’)

And then there’s the newly engaged Nicole, who broke down while weighing in at 269 pounds and said she’s tired of pretending that everything is fine: ‘I’ve been faking it for so long ... now that I’ve met the man of my dreams, I don’t want to fake it anymore.’

Given all that, does it make this season’s twist even more diabolical? Or downright cruel? What do you think?

The show started out with 11 couples, including the oldest contestants ever on the show, Jerry and Estella, grandparents who are both 63. As trainers Bob and Jillian began dividing up the contestants into teams, Jillian chose the two senior citizens first.

In an interview last year just as this season’s show began shooting, Jillian said she chose the pair to prove a point: ‘It’s time to redefine the culture of aging in America,’ she said. She added that she wants to show viewers that age isn’t an insurmoutable hurdle when it comes to weight loss.

Jerry and Estella would prove Jillian right before the night was over.

But not before Jerry passed out and had to be taken to the hospital.

His eyes rolled back in his head, the blood drained from his face and he slumped over. When he came to he didn’t even realize he was lying on the ground.

The effect on the other contestants seemed palpable. Perhaps it’s too soon to say for sure, but it seemed like it united the group like never before: They all realized that, at the end of the day, this wasn’t a game and that any of them could have been in Jerry’s place. Said one contestant: ‘When Jerry fell, that was the moment I thought to myself: ‘We are all sick.’ ‘

Well, we’ll see how long it lasts.

The weigh-ins were amazing, as usual for first week weigh-ins, when contestants drop weight like mad. Nearly all logged in double-digit losses. Dan, who at 454 pounds is the largest contestant ever on the show, lost 30 pounds. He remarked that he’d dieted many times before and that it would take him months to lose 30 pounds. This time, he said, ‘hard work and doing it the right way -- I did it in one week.’ Ron lost 32 pounds, the most ever lost in a single weigh-in in ‘Biggest Loser’ history.

But first place went to the gray-haired set, proving Jillian’s point. Estella lost 17 pounds and Jerry, who returned to ‘The Biggest Loser’ ranch after being cleared by doctors, lost 25 pounds.

And now, we get to the heartbreaking twist.

Typically, only one contestant would be sent home after the first weigh-in. But this time, someone with a pebble for a heart decided that nine contestants would go home. Estella and Jerry were safe from elimination because of their stellar weigh-ins. And the black team was safe after winning this week’s challenge.

But the remaining nine teams each had to send a teammate home. There was a twist to the twist, of course: Dismissed teammates could earn their way back onto the show in 30 days -- if, and only if, the teammate who remained continued to lose enough weight to avoid elimination and stay at the ranch.

That set the stage for some awfully hard conversations. And contestants making promises on both sides to win their partners back. Honestly, it was hard to watch.

But what do you think? Yes, this is a game, and the contestants all knew that before signing on. But does this twist go too far?

--Rene Lynch