Jillian Michael's poor leadership dooms her Biggest Loser team

Episode One of every Biggest Loser season follows the same basic script. Once the contestants are chosen, they show up at the gym for a grueling workout. For some reason, the trainers put these people who have barely walked in years on a treadmill for two hours at speeds they cannot maintain. I think the producers just love to see obese people falling off the end of a treadmill.

One of these days there will be serious consequences to this behavior. We already have seen people pulled off to the hospital with cardiac events torn ligaments, fractured joints. Last night we saw two of Jillian's team sitting outside, after being thrown out for being lazy, with iced up knees.

Jillian came back last night with a vengeance after a two year hiatus. The problem was that it was all about her. She seems far less interested in helping her contestants than proving how tough she was. She yelled and screamed at her team, then threw them out of the gym when they proved incapable of living up to her demands.

The other two trainers even remarked on the utter chaos of the gym under her leadership. Bob and Dolvett worked their team up carefully. They also had some people throwing up but nobody complained. And the net result? Even with a five pound advantage on the scales, Jillian's team lost the weigh-in and one of her members had to leave the ranch. Unfortunately it was the one with the most heart-wrenching story.

But this is not my biggest complaint about  her last night's performance. She was so hard on her team, berating and belittling them, that one of them quit. To me, that was not a failure of the contestant, that was a failure in leadership.

Biggest Loser ties up their videos pretty well so I can't insert one but you can catch the episode here.