Former Biggest Loser contestant Kai Hibbard has dealt the show some damaging blows in recent weeks, claiming producers encourage contestants to go to dangerous measures to achieve the incredible weight loss results the show is known for.

Hibbard, 31, weighed 262 pounds when she signed on for the third season of The Biggest Loser in 2006. She shed a jaw-dropping 118 pounds in her 12 weeks on the show. Among Hibbard’s accusations are that contestants actually had more than a week to lose weight between what the show depicted as “weekly” weigh-ins, and that behind the scenes she and her peers used radical, unhealthy tactics to shrink their bodies. For Hibbard, that meant intentionally dehydrating herself, counting coffee as a meal, and exercising in multiple layers of clothing in 100-degree temperatures.

Just as alarming as her allegations, though, was Hibbard’s revelation that participating in The Biggest Loser left her with an eating disorder.

“I was fat before The Biggest Loser, but eating and food were not my sole focus in life,” Hibbard wrote on her blog in June.

After going to extreme lengths to drop pounds during Loser, Hibbard found she was unable to shake the disordered behaviors, and in an interview with ABC News, she said her hair began falling out in clumps, her period stopped, and she could sleep only three hours a night. In addition, Hibbard said her post-Loser life was plagued by unrelenting body anxiety.

“I found myself loathing what I looked like the more weight that I dropped,” Hibbard recently told The Early Show.

Hibbard’s experience reflects what many people who take to get-thin-quick schemes likely find themselves up against. Her tale of being obsessed and perpetually unsatisfied with her weight reminds me a lot of my own unintentional stumble into a full-fledged eating disorder. I believed, like so many do, that I could adopt hyper-vigilant, disordered behaviors regarding diet and exercise, without consequence. I would have an eating disorder on my own terms — just until I lost enough weight. Then everything would be normal again.

The problem was that enough never came, even when, like Hibbard’s, my body began breaking beneath my demands. I had lost all of the weight I’d originally set out to lose — and much more — but the more I lost, the less satisfied I became, and the more I fixated on continuing to lose.

This is an eating disorder, and this is the insidious way it operates, quietly overtaking you until, all at once, it has you in its (often literal) death grip. This is what you don’t know about when you start out, innocently wanting only to be a better version of yourself. This is testament that disordered eating is not a light switch. Disguised as a diet or not, a harmless, quick fix for losing weight does not exist, just an easy way back to normal after you’ve crossed the line into an eating disorder does not exist.

The Biggest Loser does not represent realistic “healthy” weight loss, and while the show casts itself in an inspirational, motivational light, it actually does a disservice to viewers by perpetuating the false idea that weight can be lost in a healthy manner so rapidly. Health professionals continue to echo the importance of moderation in long-term, healthy weight loss, yet, be it through The Biggest Loser or the latest miracle diet or exercise gadget, we continue to buy that we can “melt away pounds” quickly and easily. And our credulousness pays: According to The Early Show, The Biggest Loser — along with its spinoff cookbooks and workout DVDs — garnered an estimated $100 million in just the past year.

Tell me what you think about The Biggest Loser. Do you watch it? Are you surprised by the show’s truthfulness and ethics being called into question?