Outside Magazine

On a chilly morning last October, Jim DeBattista, 47, came trundling across the finish line of a one-mile run looking gassed. DeBattista, a youth football coach from Philadelphia, is a contestant on The Biggest Loser, the infamous weight-loss game show that rebooted on January 28 after being abruptly canceled in 2016. The mile run is one of many fitness challenges contestants tackle, and DeBattista is dead last. There is good news, though. His time has improved the most among all the players since their last mile run two months earlier, from 20 minutes to around 13, which has helped move him a little closer to the show’s $100,000 grand prize. When he hears the results, he gives a little fist pump. DeBattista may have lost the race, but he wins the day. 

I’ve come to check out the new Biggest Loser, which purports to have been “re-imagined for today’s audiences” by taking “a holistic, 360-degree look at wellness,” according to a press statement circulated a few months before its premiere. That could just be marketing boilerplate, but it’s in sync with a fast-changing fitness industry that has recently been retooling itself to be more inclusive, less abusive, and more focused on whole health than looks and performance. Or so its proprietors would have you believe. 

The episodes were being filmed just a few miles from my home in Santa Fe, on a 2,400-acre recreation complex called Glorieta Adventure Camps. The run ends on a grassy campus at the center of the facility. Nearby is a large man-made lake surrounded by clusters of outbuildings. Piñon- and juniper-studded hills laced with hiking trails rise in all directions under a cloudless sky. As the contestants race toward the finish line, the show’s two new trainers—Steve Cook, 33, a former bodybuilder from Utah, and Erica Lugo, 33, a single mom who runs EricaFitLove, an online personal-training business—pace them, shouting encouragement.