The Biggest Loser, still more men vs women
Ah, the Matt haters should have loved last night’s episode of The Biggest Loser. Matt may have well shot himself in the foot. But first, you might think that with Matt’s strategy of gaining weight, I can’t say much of the inherent unfairness of the men’s versus women’s approach (covered here, here, here, and here).
If you look at the actual men’s versus women’s performance last night, sure, the women would have won 4.02% to 1.95%. But let’s look at this another way. Last night there were no teams, and it was all about individual performance. Normally, everyone would have been trying hard to lose weight. But Matt won immunity (couldn’t be voted off), and so he came up with this strategy to actually gain weight, presumably to give himself an advantage next week. More later on why this may have been really stupid.
So, in fairness, let’s look at how the men might have faired had Matt not chosen to gain weight (he actually gained 12 lbs). The women lost 4.02% of their weight for the week, but Jeff and Seth as a pair lost 5.23% of their weight! Given their large double-digit weight losses, Matt would have just needed to lose 4 lbs in order for the combined men’s team to beat the women.
Given this, I’m giving this week to the men, which makes it 7 wins for the men and 2 wins for the women.
Okay, so more about why Matt’s move may have been really stupid. First of all, here’s the current standings in terms of overall percentage weight loss:
Suzy 25.11%
Andrea 18.64%
Matt 21.53%
Jeff 27.03%
Seth 24.74%
Now Matt’s thought was clearly to try and avoid being one of the people with the lowest weekly percentage weight loss next week (rather than overall weight loss percentage), since the two lowest for the week are the ones “nominated” to be voted off.
But the winner of the competition is going to be the one with the highest overall percentage. Matt may well have missed something really important…Jeff is going to be hard to catch now. In weeks 2 and 3, Jeff had some slow weeks. But in the last 6 weeks, he has lost 10+ lbs every week. What I think has happened is that Jeff has lost enough weight (and been trained sufficiently long), that he is now able to keep up with Matt as far as the workouts. And that, coupled with a head start (both in terms of percentage weight loss and slightly higher weight) should make him very hard to catch.
So Matt may well avoid being booted out next week (or not…next week’s promos were a bit of a tease), but he may well have screwed up his chances to actually win.
One final comment. Last week, I said that Suzy wouldn’t be able to catch up to the guys:
For Suzy to even catch Matt, she’d have to lose about 10 lbs while he stayed the same.
Who would have thought she’d lose 10 and Matt would gain 12?! But Suzy’s 10 lb loss last week put her ahead of both Matt and Seth. Go Suzy!