So an open letter was penned this weekend from a number of health care professional groups including psychiatrists, nurses (irony one of the contestants is a nurse)....
I replied to it and the article was even posted online in one of the newspapers, so far overwhelmingly people have blasted the original one as being out of touch with what people have seen on the Icelandic version. Here is my reply and link to the article below, by all means click on it to help boost its visibility on the website so more people see it.
Quote:
pology for responding in English, my written Icelandic is not very good.
I just wanted to address some of the comments made here regarding Biggest Loser Iceland. Firstly the US show is quite different from the version in Iceland, it was done firstly by the producers to focus on health and do it sensibly. As you can see after the 1st week weigh in the numbers have been reasonable towards people who live, eat and workout 7 days a week.
There was nothing even close to an „extreme diet“ which I would question where you get this idea? We had plenty of food, and were not using caloric restrictive diets that left us hungry or unsatisfied, absolutely the opposite, we had great food and ate very well as well as learned a great deal about our issue with food.
Severe exercise is also dubious to suggest. We did have one intense workout a day, along side 3 others which were no where at that level of intensity. I can say from experience that what I experience is FAR from extreme, but no question it was a lot more than normal people are used to. You could compare it to an army boot camp experience, which I assume is not considered extreme and unsafe.
In regards to the trainers being tough on the contestants, well obviously at times people in our situation need a kick in the butt. The overwhelming majority of the time our trainers, the crew and producers were an incredibly positive force in our daily struggle to deal with our emotions, our physical exertion and of course our food.
You see only a tiny bit of what happens daily on BL Iceland, maybe 1-2% of what happens, and there was nothing but overwhelming love, respect and support from everyone involved in making this show.
You may have a good argument to be made with the US version, considering what we have been hearing about unhealthy and frankly dirty tricks to give contestants those „wow“ numbers we see, but I can assure you that this was never the case with the Icelandic version.
It seems clear that you are badly misinformed on what we 12 contestants went through, this whole experience so far has been a focus on health first, and long term success.
Bkv,
Þór Viðar.
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http://www.dv.is/frettir/2014/2/23/b...ryni-fagadila/