Jillian Michaels Defends ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Claims She Has ‘Data’ to Prove Show Wasn’t ‘Unhealthy’

Jillian Michaels is standing behind her work on The Biggest Loser.

“If you say it’s unrealistic, I totally agree. But if you say it’s unhealthy, I’d disagree, and I have the data to back it up,” Michaels, 51, defended the long-running weight loss series in an interview published with a news outlet on Monday, October 13.

Michaels served as a trainer on The Biggest Loser from 2004 to 2014. The competition show challenged contestants to lose weight through diet and exercise, awarding a prize of $250,000 to the person who sheds the most pounds.

Michaels departed the show following Season 15 in 2014, after the season’s winner Rachel Frederickson’s sparked widespread concern with her extreme weight loss. Many deemed the transformation as dangerously unhealthy, with Michaels herself admitting she was “stunned” by her appearance as she acknowledged Frederickson “lost too much weight.”

“I was deeply disturbed when she walked out on the stage that day, and I never went back,” Jillian says, referring to Frederickson’s dramatic transformation. “There was just a limit in regard to what the platform could bear as times change and evolve, and in regard to my control of my image on the platform.”

The celebrity personal trainer’s comments come more than a month after Netflix dropped a documentary series titled Fit for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser last month, which took a deeper look into the reality TV series. The three-episode docuseries highlighted the competition show’s alleged failings and featured interviews with its trainers, producers and contestants of the show. Michaels did not participate in the project.

After the docuseries’ release, Michaels refuted claims the program made, including that she went against the show’s health guidelines and provided her contestants caffeine supplements against medical advice. She alleged that Dr. Robert Huizenga, the show’s medical advisor, and trainer Bob Harper lied about approving the use of caffeine, providing email correspondence from 2009 that she said supported her claims.

In the screenshots, Michaels claimed producers helped coordinate providing caffeine supplements to contestants.

“Here is an email chain with @bobharper – the Biggest Loser’s producers – @drhuizenga’s guy, Sandy Krum, who stayed on set with us and distributed the fat burners about which ‘fat burners’ / caffeine pills to purchase the contestants,” she wrote. “This is one email of many that shows: Dr. Huizenga did approve caffeine pills on many seasons of Biggest Loser. Bob Harper not only knew about the caffeine pills the ‘stackers fat burner’ were actually his suggestion. I wanted to use my brand instead because they were cleaner and had no more than 200mg of caffeine (equivalent to a strong cup of coffee). Caffeine was NEVER banned on The Biggest Loser.”