By Buzz Byrne

You can only keep the game show out of the reality show for so long. Tonight was a temptation challenge where the obese contestants are forced to sit in a room for four minutes with every imaginable bad food choice. Think: if you had to make a meal out of the food at a 7-11. Whoever consumed the most calories would win a prize of a three pound pass at the next weigh-in.

Whoever ate the most got rewarded. Yeah, so much for the good natured positivity of the show, time to watch some tubbos get their feedbags on. Red team didn’t give in to any temptation. Black team got next to zero screen time- they’re still the bastard stepchildren of this show. But Blue team went crazy.

Apparently they decided ahead of time that if there was an eating/reward challenge then Neil was going to take one for the team. He gorged himself on fries and M&Ms, stuffing as much down his gullet in the allotted time to the tune of 1700 calories. Way to go!

But then things fell apart. On TOP CHEF, when one of the contestants can’t cook an egg it’s mildly amusing, and while they may suffer a few professional barbs about it there is really no harm. When someone is morbidly obese and they can’t control themselves in a room full of food to such an extant that they engage a frightening cognitive dissonance…well, at that point you are watching a slow motion snuff film. This is what happened to the Blue team.


Patty convinced herself that Neil made some gesture saying he didn’t eat the food (he didn’t and then later she changed the story to imply the team was not following through). She happily skipped down the hall to the food room, knowing she was going to stuff herself silly and try and find that tiny bit of comfort and fill that huge fissure in her psyche with food. She was in a fog, high before the drugs hit her system. Somehow she ate 1930 calories in four minutes.

She won the three pound pass and Neil was up 1700 calories for nothing. When confronted with the truth she crumbled. “I have problems.” She cried. No kidding. Anybody addressing those issues? If you call making grownups race a kindergarten student and a fourth and third grader in a 100 meter foot race the first steps to repairing self esteem, then yes, it was addressed because that was the next reward challenge.

This reward was for a phone call home. In three separate races, one player from each team had to compete. In the first heat against the fourth grader no one beat the kid. In the second heat against the third grader, Red team Phil beat the little boy. In the third heat against the kindergarten student…no one beat the kid. Red won the overall challenge. Again. They win every challenge and lose every weigh-in.


At the weigh-in we finally caught up with the Black team. They did not put up very good numbers. Weight losses were 9,3,4,3,3 and 2 pounds. They are clearly getting healthier and exchanging body fat for new muscle mass but the numbers determine who goes to the elimination round. Blue did not fare much better with 3,2,2,3,5 (this 5 was Patty’s so there was an additional 3 coming off for a total of 8) and finally poor Neil, who ate all that extra food, had lost only 3. Red, however, finally won a weigh-in in dramatic fashion, crushing the other teams with 6,4,6 and 9 pounds lost. They lost highest percentage of weight of the three teams and they forced Blue to the elimination round. Patty, the one who won the three pound pass, lost the most amount of weight on her team so she had immunity.

Blue went cutthroat with the elimination, turning on the man who had picked each person to join him. Yep, 62 year old Jerry was ousted by the young-ins. Of course he went on to lose 88 pounds total, on the show and off. As always, nice job Jerry. Keep up the good work.

Now if NBC could cut some of the time fat from the show. Two hours for all this. Nonsense! I could be watching HOUSE right now.