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‘Losing It With Jillian’ Premiers Tonight

Posted by: Natasia Rose on June 1, 2010.

: Image by rockymountainhigh via Flickr

06/01/2010- by Natasia Langfelder

‘Losing It With Jillian’ premiers tonight on NBC. The show stars America’s favorite bisexual Biggest Loser trainer, Jillian Michaels going one-on-one with families in Middle America to help them get discover the emotional root of their poor eating habits and help them get their lives back on track.

Michaels spoke to the LA Times about her newest venture and how it differs from the Biggest Loser.

“It’s really about looking at the root of unhappiness in people’s lives,” Michaels said as she took a patio seat on a recent Sunday morning outside the Los Angeles-area stables that Buzz calls home. “It’s about rebooting your life. This is almost like a ‘behind-the-scenes of ‘Biggest Loser.’”

She’s selling or donating the luxe items she no longer needs or uses. She said that spending time with families across America as they struggle to make ends meet was humbling.

“I look at stuff like this now, and I’m disgusted by it,” she said, waving at the posh black sports car that she rolled up in.

For another, the families on “Losing It” have triggered painful childhood issues for Michaels. A latchkey kid raised in an L.A. suburb, she was just hitting her teen years when her parents’ divorce turned nasty. She turned to food to soothe herself: Standing about 2 inches shorter than she is now (5-foot-2), and about 60 pounds heavier, she was an aimless youth looking for trouble and finding it until she was “saved” by martial arts and fitness.

“I have all these unresolved issues, and this show just kicks it all up,” said Michaels, 36. “I’m like, ‘I gotta go back into therapy after this.’ I don’t think I have cried so much in my entire life. You’ll see it. by the criticism because she has spent a career telling women that they should resist media images of beauty and fight to become the healthiest, fittest person they can be.
Every week I am just hysterical, crying.”

Her new show was originally conceived as taking “The Biggest Loser” to Middle America. But she quickly realized that the chosen families were quite well versed in what they should eat and what they should do for fitness. They just weren’t doing it.

“That’s when we realized the show wasn’t about calories and crunches,” she said. “And that’s when it became a life-makeover show.”

That is not to say there won’t be yelling and torturous gym sessions. Viewers will finally get to see “the method behind those crazy moments” that make for great TV but are actually, she says, just a fraction of her interaction with “Biggest Loser.”

The gym, she says, is merely her tool to crack people open. Exhaust someone physically and mentally and it’s that much easier to get them to address emotional issues.

Once she’s identified the problem — “the ‘why’ of it all, what’s holding you back, why are you turning to food, why aren’t you accomplishing what you want to accomplish, what is it that you do want to accomplish” – the rest, she said, becomes easy.

“If you have a ‘why’ to live for,” she added. “You can tolerate any ‘how.’”