Debbie Lounds

A new season of “The Biggest Loser” began on NBC last night and with it came a shiny new gym, shiny new trainers, shiny new stakes and a shiny new premise. But first, it started in a dusty old desert.

If you’re not familiar with “The Biggest Loser,” it’s a competition reality show in which obese contestants compete to lose weight and win big money. And this season, Ann Arbor’s own Debbie Lounds is competing in it.

In last night's season premiere, the 15 contestants were loaded into a van and were left in the middle of a desert near Death Valley. While they questioned whether or not they should be worried, a large Humvee drove up and delivered host Alison Sweeney. Thankfully, she arrived to dispel the mystery of why they had numbers on their shirts. I’m hoping she did this for our benefit and that contestants didn’t really think it was a nifty coincidence.

But it was all part of the shiny new premise: The contestants are teamed up by age grou. Three groups, including the 50-plus group that, at 60 years old, Debbie was placed in.

There was more new stuff: They were not just playing for $100,000, they were now playing for $250,000!

And even if a contestant were eliminated, they would get a second chance. At the end of the season, each contestant would compete in marathon, all 26.2 miles, ending in the same desert where they were standing.

But wait! There’s more! More trainers, that is. Stepping in for Jillian Michaels, who is apparently making enough money on her own endeavors that she no longer has to harangue overweight people in person, are two new trainers, including tennis pro Anna Kournikova.

Thankfully, our military wasn’t too busy to deliver the trainers via CH-46 helicopter.

We got our first wheezy glimpse of just how out of shape the contestants are when they were forced to run (mainly walk) one mile in a group. The prize for the groups who crossed first was their choice of trainer. Surprisingly, almost everyone wanted mainstay Bob Harper, except for young Ramon, who said he wouldn’t mind be trained by the blonde Kournikova.

Unfortunately, as would be the case throughout the two-hour premiere, things did not go well for the older group, who turtled their way to the finish line. And while this didn’t have anywhere near the same result as the old fable, it did provide a TV-friendly moment of music-swelling inspiration when Kournikova ran out to help her team get to the finish line. She was quickly followed by the other contestants, which led to talk about how even though it was competition, they were all there to support one another.

The middle agers won the race and went with Bob Harper. The younger group chose Dolvett Quince, leaving the older group with Kournikova.

As is par for the course, the next day the contestants were put through a grueling workout in which the trainers acted ridiculously cruel to prove that they mean business. This worked well for professional trainer Quince, who came off as a drill instructor. But Kournikova came off as trying too hard. And I couldn’t help but feel that when Kournikova denied Debbie water during the workout, that maybe she shouldn’t be a trainer.

In the end, the older group had lost the least amount of weight and were forced to vote a member off their team. As they sat together to discuss who would go, a strange thing happened.

It seemed like Debbie set herself up to get kicked off. First, she told another member of her team, a woman who had lost her home to Hurricane Katrina and her husband to cancer, that her crying was “annoying.”

She then said the magic words: “I’m not saying I want to go home, but...” and then went on to say that she had a lot of support back home.

Nothing will get you kicked off a reality show faster than talking about how you don’t need to be there. Maybe Debbie didn’t realize this; maybe she really didn’t want to be there. Who knows. But she was dismissed, and she looked very happy in the footage of her back home.

But another question remains in the wake of the premiere: Is it fair to make older contestants compete like this against people less than half their age? Sure, it’s brought up a couple of times during the show that older contestants have come on and “burnt the house down.” But really, the weight lost by the two younger groups was significantly higher than that of the older group.

It’s called a metabolism, and it slows down with age. Couldn’t this, and other factors, contribute to a very unfair advantage? I’m a fitness nut, not a scientist, so please feel free to correct me in the comments.