Slimpossible Video

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Slimpossible Season 4 Contestants

I watched the unveiling of the Slimpossible Season 4 contestants. There were 10 men and 11 women. I commend the organisers for making the show livelier. This was one of the things I thought needed to be done. They used to be so serious! This time, the contestants had short video clips introducing themselves and in the unveiling show, they came onto the catwalk dancing  and generally making fun.
The contestants seem younger than in previous years, and quite heavy. One guy was even 176 kilos (388 pounds), but he seemed rather tall, so maybe he was not as far from his ideal weight as some of the others who weighed less.

The “weigh” he was Camp America commandant loses more than 50 pounds with help from friends Army Sgt. 1st Class Danny Carreras, Sgt. 1st Class Guillermo Santiago and Master Sgt. Orlando Negron of Headquarters and Headquarters Company of 525th Military Police Battalion, walk as part of a daily exercise routine to promote health and lose weight. – JTF Guantanamo photo by Army Spc. David McLean (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At the auditions, there was a lady of 20 who weighed 100 or 101 kilos. She was with her mother who weighed, 97 kilos. No, it’s not genetics, it’s bad eating habits taught by mother to daughter.

This season also had a Doctor who weighed 120kg (264 pounds). At 41, he was the oldest competitor. His wife won last season of Slimpossible. I did not watch the final episode of the last season, but I later saw or heard comments that the husband of the lady who had won was quite big himself. So he showed up this year and became one of the competitors. I felt this was inappropriate. After winning the competition last year, could the wife not simply apply the things she learnt during the competition in her own home and help the husband lose weight? And doesn’t a doctor know how to lose weight? But maybe he is not a medical doctor.

Also at the auditions, there was a guy in his thirties, I think, who weighed 127 kg. He said he had had three heart attacks due to his weight. He also said that ‘surprisingly’ his weight kept going up. Surprisingly? The show host, Lilian Muli-Kanene,  said the guy had not been cleared by the medical team to take part in Slimpossible 4.

Losing weight really is not a complex thing.  In fact, when you weigh 127 kg (and you are not commensurately tall or muscular) you only really need to do only one thing. Yes, ONE: change your eating habits. Eat less of certain things and replace them with better things.

If you are not grossly overweight, then you can add exercise to improve your fitness and health and also to lose weight faster. Now, of course there are those who say that there are psychological factors behind eating habits and so on. If that is so, then get the relevant help and start eating properly.

Anyway, I am happy that the Slimpossible has been made more lively.
I am happy that men have now been included in the competition, so that weight loss is not made to look like it’s something for women only.
I am happy that there is a Kenyan TV show encouraging weight loss.

Some stats:

Lightest female: 101.6 kg (224 lb)
Heaviest female: 158.2 kg (348 lb)
Average weight, females: 126.9 kg (279 lb)

Lightest male: 110.3 kg (243 lb)
Heaviest male: 176 kg (387 lb)
Average weight, males: 132.9 kg (292 lb)

Related articles

• Meet Kirsty, a shadow of herself (stuff.co.nz)
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• A bit about myself 🙂 (pain4gainke.wordpress.com)

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026 – Slimpossible Season 3 – Week 13

I got to watch another episode of Slimpossible Season 3, that I talked about here. There were a number of interesting things in this episode.

First, this time, there was no recorded weight gain. In fact, all the contestants lost weight. In the previous two episodes, there had been cases of no weight loss or even some of weight gain! A friend of mine had argued that the weight increase may have been due to muscle gain, but I really doubted that for three reasons:

• First, gaining muscle is not something so simple, that an overweight person who has only recently started exercising can do. If it was, many more people would be muscular.
• Secondly, from the exercises we are shown the contestants doing and from the diet tips we have been shown, muscle gain was highly unlikely, especially a lady gaining half a kilo of muscle in a week.
• Third, one of the contestants said she got injured and had presumably slackened in their exercising, and had therefore gained weight.

This week, the ladies the ladies all lost weight, and the show host made mention of that. I think one of them had lost as much as 2.5 kilos in a week. I later wondered if the weighing scale at the studio had been tampered with, to save the image of the show.

Secondly, when this season started, the host had said the competition was to last 12 weeks. This is now the 13th week, and there was no mention of a finale. I wondered if the extension was done to allow the contestants to actually lose weight, this being a weight loss programme and all. Maybe the counting was interrupted by the London Olympics.

The third thing was that there were some ladies from previous seasons who were invited to Friday’s show. They weighed in as well, and one of them allegedly weighed 65 kilos. My wife and I really doubted this figure, based on our visual assessment of the lady in question and a comparison with people we know who weigh around 65 kilos.

Fourth, I noted that this time there were no diet tips for viewers at home. In at least one previous episode, they showed a sample allegedly healthy breakfast which included tea with added sugar. There was no mention of restricting the amount of added sugar. Maybe it should have been no surprise that the contestants were gaining weight.

Fifth, as the programme was ending on Friday, they listed what the competition winners would get. There was no mention of the prize money that had been publicised earlier on and that was there in at least the previous season.

Interesting.

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011 – Slimpossible Season 3

I was pleased to catch the unveiling of the final seventeen contestants of Season 3 of Citizen TV’s Slimpossible. Not surprisingly, the ladies were weighty! Sadly, a few were quite young – one was even 18! There was a 120kg mother of two and another mother of six who said she had been told that unless she lost weight, she would not live more than two years more. She weighed 142kg.

At some point, I wanted to know approximately how much weight was being borne by whatever the ladies were siting on. I had been writing down their weights as they stepped on the weighing scale on the studio. So I calculated their average weight, and it came to 108kg. Let’s contemplate that for a few moments. 108kg. Per person. And this was an average, meaning that for the one who weighed 90.5 kilos, others had to carry her share of the 17 or so kilos between her and the average. At the point I finished my initial calculation, there were 14 ladies who had weighed in. Two more came in, weighing 105 and 111 kilos respectively, so the average weight stayed neatly the same.

Then came Naomi. You could see that she was too wide for her height. I actually thought, these are the people who change survey results. The figures were going to be altered. Mathematical figures, that is. Well, hopefully the bodies of the contestants as well, but not right away. Naomi said she had been trying to lose weight because of various problems. She was asked, like the ladies before her, to step on the weighing scale. The figures on the screen counted. 96, 99, 103, 107… It finally stopped at a whopping 158 kilos. Let us put that in some perspective. The sixteen ladies before, averaged 108kilos. Sixteen ladies, remember. Naomi came in, and, mathematically speaking, it is like she gave 3 kilos to each of the sixteen ladies  before her, telling them “Here, 108 kilos is not enough, take 3 more,” and then remained with 3 kilos for herself. She single-handedly changed the average weight of the group of seventeen to 111kilos. Good thing she was here to lose weight. I expect to see more of her around. Well, less and less of her. Ok, both more and less of her.

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010 Miss World

About 10 days ago, I stumbled on Miss World Kenya 2012 Kenya airing on TV. By this episode, the number of girls competing was down to 14. One had turned 20 the week of (or before) before the recording. I guess the others were roughly in the same age range. The show was mainly set in some place where the girls were facing three judges, and a presenter interviewed the girls and talked to the audience about the past week, I think. At apropriate times, we were shown clips of the events being discussed. I found it interesting that when the subject was bikini modelling, the bikini shots were not shown. The decision makers must have decided to lean on the conservative side. It was also interesting to watch the line of girls stand smiling in apparently practised poses while one of them was being interviewed in front.

What sort of annoyed me was things that apparently were considered offences. One of the contestants, I think it was the one who had just turned 20, was put on probation with an admonition to lose weight. I do not know what the story had been with her weight, but I doubt that she was the heaviest of the group, and in fact, she was reasonably slender in my view.
In one of the clips, we were shown the girls in a bus. One of them was asked what cause she would take up if she became Miss World. She said she would help orphans and I think cancer patients. The judges now asked her if she was aware that one of the contestants was an orphan. The girl said yes, she was aware. The judge said the girl should have been more sensitive, and the poor girl got evicted for that! Does the fact that there is an orphan around mean you should not say you want to help orphans?

During the show, Ajuma, who was captioned as a supermodel, appeared to help the girls learn something or the other. Note that she is a supermodel. One of the girls, Nickitar Omondi (yes, they spelt it that way)  was asked something about Face of Africa or something and she answered something to the effect that she would go for it. One of the judges, Dr Amritpal Kapur (in the next episode they called her Dr Amrit something-else), later told Miss Omondi, with apparent vindictiveness, that she had said before the judges that she was using Miss World as a stepping stone to modelling. The judge said this as if it was a bad thing. The judge declared that Miss Omondi would not make a mockery of the comppetition, and that she was thereby evicted.
Huh? Is there something wrong with wanting to become a model (like Ajuma who was brought in as a coach)? Should the girls limit their ambitions to Miss World? Had the girls been told this before? Again, I did not have background information, but I felt that was unfair.

I again stumbled on the final episode, and at least in that one, I liked the girl who was crowned. She was quite girl-next-door and still pretty.

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