Biggest Loser Season 1 Winner Ryan Benson Recalls Feeling the Show ‘Set Us Up to Fail’: ‘We Were Exploited’

“Doctors tested our urine… and they told me there was blood in mine because I was so dehydrated,” Benson tells about his time on the show.

When Ryan Benson stepped on the scale during the live finale of the first season of The Biggest Loser in 2005, he was elated. He weighed in at 208 pounds, which meant he’d lost a whopping 122 pounds over just 24 weeks, the most of all the contestants that season.

Down from a 330-pound starting weight, Benson took home $250,000 in prize money and was crowned victor, or the “biggest loser”, of the hit show’s inaugural season.

The glory, and extreme weight loss, didn’t last. 

“Within three days after the show, I had gained 25 to 30 pounds back just in water weight alone,” Benson tells PEOPLE exclusively in an interview that explores his journey on the show, the controversial approach he took to losing weight at the time, and the perspective he’s gleaned over the years.

Twenty years ago, Benson, 56, now SVP of Global Content Delivery at Lionsgate, was an aspiring actor in Los Angeles looking for his next big gig when a friend told him about the new weight loss reality show.

“It was appealing to think, ‘I get to take two or three months off work and just focus on losing weight’,” he says.

Walking into the first day of filming, Benson admits he didn’t know what to expect. “I think since I was in the first season the producers and the trainers and everyone involved with the show were kind of learning as they went,” he says. “[Trainers] Bob [Harper] and Jillian [Michaels] weren’t big celebrities, they weren’t household names. They were there every day working out with us.”

Thirty-six years old and admittedly hyper-competitive at the time, Benson recalls taking drastic measures, both at the show’s urging as well as on his own, to do what it took to win.

“For the last 24 hours, I didn’t put anything in my body and just went to the gym and had a rubber suit on to sweat and then went to the sauna,” Benson says, referring to a period when contestants were sent home to finish up the final weeks of weight loss on their own before weighing in at the live finale. “They were setting us up to fail. I just wanted to win.”

While still on the Biggest Loser campus, Benson says he and his 11 fellow contestants endured a brutal regimen and were “working out like professional athletes.”

“We would do an hour of cardio before breakfast after a good weight workout and then maybe go for a long hike followed by more cardio and then maybe more weights… anywhere from six to eight hours a day,” he recalls. “It hurt to do anything when you’d wake up in the morning. It was definitely tough for me. I was lucky I never got hurt or injured myself.”

While the physical process took extreme endurance and dramatic weight-loss expectations tested the contestants’ resolve, Benson recalls the experience could seem especially cruel by the “temptations” the show put in place. 

“In the first season, they had food out everywhere,” he says, of the platters of calorie-heavy fast-food or sweets left out to tempt the contestants to cheat on their diets. “There was a part of me that thinks that they wanted to catch people on camera, just gorging themselves on this food and kind of almost making it funny…I don’t know what they expected, but there were times that I felt like, ‘Yeah, they want us to fail.’ We were definitely exploited.”

Benson says that while he joined the show to lose weight, he acknowledges it quickly became about winning for him. “That competitive side really got into me,” he says. As he shed pounds and delighted in the amazed “oohs and ahhs” from the audience during the weigh-ins, Benson decided to kick his weight loss into high gear before the finale. 

“I did a master cleanse where you just drink fresh squeezed lemon juice, cayenne pepper and maple syrup mixed together, and eat nothing, for 10 days while working out a lot,” Benson recalls.

At one point during the show, blood appeared in his urine, he says. “Doctors tested our urine the day of our last weigh-in, and they told me there was blood in mine because I was so dehydrated,” Benson recalls. “My wife was so mad at me, she said ‘Nothing is worth this’.”

The extreme approach helped him take home the win, but it was unsustainable. He gained about 25 pounds back within three days, and eventually he was back to square one, and well over 300 pounds. “It’s no secret that I gained back all the weight,” says Benson, who has since lost about 35 pounds.

Reflecting on the aftermath of the show, Benson says the part he has “struggled with the most” is the feeling of embarrassment for not keeping the weight off after his televised win.

“You feel guilty for going through this and not living up to what you did on the show even 20 years later,” he says. “I mean, anyone who’s overweight and struggles with weight in their life, you have issues that you carry with you. But then facing it in a very public way and feeling what I did there…  it kind of magnified the issues I already had as far as weight and health issues.”

Benson appreciates that The Biggest Loser evolved over the subsequent sixteen seasons, until being canceled in 2016. (The show went on to have an eighteenth season in 2020). At its peak, the show averaged at least eight million nightly viewers and was a huge hit for NBC.

Over time, the tactic of constant food “temptations” was dropped, and he thinks the show did end up inspiring people. “I can see why the show took grief in the beginning – they were just kind of doing something that would get views. Then to their good luck, it did become inspirational,” he says.

And in a way, the show is emblematic of a different time, both in the world and in Benson’s own life. Now a dad to three teenage children being raised with a more holistic approach to body image, Benson is relieved to know that they are growing up in an age of body acceptance.

“My kids are in a generation that is way more accepting of all body types and the whole realm of the human condition,” he says. “They’re so much more accepting than my generation was when I was young.”

Benson has even watched his season with his kids. “Seeing it through their eyes is very fun,” he says, with a laugh.

Would his 36-year-old self go on a weight-loss show again? Maybe, he says, assuming production took a more nuanced approach. “If I was in the same position as I was then, I would probably do it again,” Benson says. “It would have to have a whole different spin. They’d have to take a more holistic approach, focusing on both mental and physical health as opposed to just the number on the scale.”