Reykjavík Grapevine - 03.06.2016, Qupperneq 14

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ca. 45 min.
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39
“One of the best
restaurants in Iceland.
Fresh lobster, amazing
cod fish!!”
The Best
Intentions
One Man’s Experience
On ‘The Biggest Loser’
Words
PAUL FONTAINE
Photo
ART BICNICK
Thor Viðar Jónsson was a contestant
on the first season of Iceland’s ver-
sion of ‘The Biggest Loser’, a reality
show that pits contestants against
each other to see who can lose the
most weight. While Thor feels the
people who produce the show in Ice-
land believe they’re helping people,
he has serious questions about their
methods.
What piqued your interest in taking
part in the show in the first place?
When I moved back to Iceland in 2011,
I made the decision to have gastric
bypass surgery. It was shortly after
my surgery that I saw an ad for ‘The
Biggest Loser’. And I thought: “You
know what? Let’s give this a go.”
Had you seen the American version?
I had, yes. The American version
gave the impression of what I’d call
“weight loss porn.” It’s people look-
ing down on the contestants, and
then seeing them emerge as skinny,
happy people. So I weighed the con-
sequences and I thought to myself,
“Iceland’s a small country. The people
that are going to run this show aren’t
going to be evil.” In the interviews,
the people were incredibly nice. I felt
pretty confident—like I had nothing
to lose, except weight.
What was the daily routine like?
Wake up at six, go to the gym, do a
cardio workout for an hour. Then
home to eat, and then nine to eleven
you go back for a filmed contest. If
there’s no filming that day, you work
out again at ten, eat at noon, then
go for the trainer workout, which is
filmed. That’s the hard one—they
push you to your limits and film you
falling over and crying. They get you
to that point because you’ve already
had two workouts that day and it’s
early afternoon. You’re so exhausted
that your emotions come up.
What was the turning point for you?
It first dawned on me that this might
be unhealthy because of the way my
body reacted. About three months af-
terwards, I noticed that even though
my diet had improved and I was mov-
ing more, my weight was climbing.
About a year after the show, I had
regained fifty kilos. Who knows how
much muscle mass I’d lost—they
weren’t really thrilled with weight-
lifting on the show, because muscle
equals weight, and the point of the
show is to lose weight.
So why did the weight come back?
Well, the thing about dieting with in-
tense cardio workouts is your metab-
olism slows—you burn 350 to 500 cal-
ories less per day, after the show. So
for someone who goes into the show
burning maybe 1,500 calories per day,
when they come out they could be
down to 1,000. So you’re not only in a
worse off position because your me-
tabolism has slowed, but your body is
thinking the whole time that it’s in
starvation mode. As a result, my body
wants to get back to 170 kilos, and my
metabolism’s been destroyed a bit. If
you lose weight slowly, like two kilos
a month, you’re probably going to be
in good shape. To bring your metabo-
lism up, you need to lift weights—to
build up the “furnace” of your body to
consume more “fuel.”
And lifting weights was discouraged on
‘The Biggest Loser’.
Yes. And 95% of the time, diets just
don’t work. It’s a depressing fact, but
it’s true. For the vast majority of the
obese, the most successful method of
weight loss is the gastric bypass.
So even with the best of intentions in
place, with everyone running the show
believing they’re helping others, this
needs to end?
It needs to end. I just want this show
to stop in Iceland, and everywhere,
really. Because the science has come
out on it, and it just doesn’t work.
Thor will soon be undergoing gastric
bypass surgery.
INTERVIEW
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 7 — 2016
14
Speaking of tourists,
you may have seen a
few stories on other
media outlets claim-
ing that Iceland doesn’t want any
more tourists. Ignore these people.
Yes, tourism is growing faster than
we can build hotels, but sooner or later
we’ll figure out that we don’t neces-
sarily need to build every single hotel
in the 101 postal code of downtown
Reykjavík. Soon, hotels, guesthouses
and B&Bs will start popping up with
greater frequency in other parts of the
country. An economic plan based on
constant and continuous growth and
expansion can only succeed, right?
Right?
Related to the growing tourism in-
dustry, new data on Iceland’s work-
force has brought to light that about
10% of Iceland’s workers are employed
within the tourism industry in some
capacity. This might not sound like a
lot of people, but even in Iceland’s en-
trepreneurial heyday, nothing close to
10% of the population were working in
finance. As such, there is still a grow-
ing need for more foreign workers to
come to Iceland, specifically for tour-
ism-related jobs. Please do not contact
us about how to get a job in Iceland,
though. Unless it’s to work for us.
Speaking of which, it should be em-
phasised that having a job in Iceland
is supposed to mean getting a fair
wage and having freedom of move-
ment—something not everyone work-
ing in Iceland has, apparently, as new
research from Gallup shows that there
are some 400 slave labourers in Ice-
land, proportionally higher than any
other Nordic country and most other
Western European countries. A great
deal of these slaves are being used in
construction, accommodation, and
even manufacturing.
Words Paul Fontaine
NEWS IN
BRIEF
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