Ryan Benson, winner of the first season The Biggest Loser , revealed in a new bombshell interview that he felt “exploited” by the weight-loss reality series , which he contends set himself and other contestants “up to fail.”
In 2005, Benson took home $250,000 after winning the series’ inaugural season with a stunning loss of 122 pounds. Benson entered the show at 330 pounds and left weighing 208. But the 56-year-old recently explained that his weight loss wasn’t the victory it initially seemed to be.
“Within three days after the show, I had gained 25 to 30 pounds back just in water weight alone,” Benson told People .
When he entered the series, the then-36-year-old was, by his own admission, “hyper-competitive” and willing to succeed at any cost. Benson undertook extreme measures both at his discretion and the urging of producers.
“That competitive side really got into me,” he admitted. “I did a master cleanse where you just drink fresh squeezed lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup mixed together, and eat nothing, for 10 days while working out a lot.”
During the show’s final week, when contestants were sent home to independently continue their weight loss journey ahead of the finale, Benson’s tactics turned even more drastic. “For the last 24 hours [of filming], I didn’t put anything in my body and just went to the gym and had a rubber suit on to sweat and then went to the sauna.”
“They were setting us up to fail. I just wanted to win,” Benson noted.
Of those efforts, Benson explained that there would be unbelievable food spreads constantly left out on the set even as the contestants were putting in “six to eight hour” days “working out like professional athletes.”
He recalled that producers would leave plates of calorie-heavy, ultra-processed food “out everywhere” across the set. “There was a part of me that thinks that they wanted to catch people on camera, just gorging themselves on this food and kind of almost making it funny,” Benson posited. “I don't know what they expected, but there were times that I felt like, ‘Yeah, they want us to fail.’ We were definitely exploited.”
Benson worked himself so hard that by the end of the series he had blood in his urine. “Doctors tested our urine the day of our last weigh-in, and they told me there was blood in mine because I was so dehydrated,” he recalled. “My wife was so mad at me, she said ‘Nothing is worth this.’”
Benson gained back 25 pounds within three days of leaving the series. In a short time, he once again weighed over 300 pounds. Since then, Benson has lost about 35 pounds.
“You feel guilty for going through this and not living up to what you did on the show even 20 years later,” he admitted. “I mean, anyone who's overweight and struggles with weight in their life, you have issues that you carry with you. But then facing it in a very public way and feeling what I did there… it kind of magnified the issues I already had as far as weight and health issues.”
Benson is hardly the first Biggest Loser alum to voice alarm over the show’s tactics. In 2021, Jillian Michaels —who served as a trainer on the series for 12 seasons—took issue with how “the producers gamified weight loss.”
"Nobody should have been eliminated. It was weight loss on a ticking clock,” Michaels told People . " The Biggest Loser needed a mental health professional. I think there was some random guy they could talk to if they needed, but these [contestants] needed deep work. When you have someone that weighs 400 pounds, that's not just an individual who likes pizza. There's a whole lot going on there emotionally."
In 2016, The New York Times reported that season-eight winner Danny Cahill regained more than 100 pounds in the seven years after his victory. Cahill lost 240 pounds, going from 430 to 190. “In fact, most of that season’s 16 contestants have regained much if not all the weight they lost so arduously,” the outlet noted. “Some are even heavier now.”
When asked if he would do anything today, Benson said he would still do the show but only with the understanding that its form would be drastically different.
“If I was in the same position as I was then, I would probably do it again. It would have to have a whole different spin,” he said. “They’d have to take a more holistic approach, focusing on both mental and physical health as opposed to just the number on the scale.”
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