Whatever Happened To Jillian Michaels After The Biggest Loser?

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"The Biggest Loser" star Jillian Michaels was bullied as a child, teased relentlessly by her classmates. She told Parade that it was particularly bad in 8th grade. "I was sitting at lunch and got surrounded by a bunch of kids who let me have it about how ugly I was — my unibrow, the size of my nose, the fat rolling over my jeans," she recalled. "It was pure hell." She switched schools.

In 9th grade, her mother enrolled her in martial arts classes. That experience kicked off a lifelong interest in fitness and weight loss, and the girl who was once bullied at lunch grew up to scream in the faces of people on television as they ate. Michaels joined the cast of "The Biggest Loser" from the show's very first season, serving as one of two trainers meant to motivate a group of people with obesity into losing weight. She instantly became famous thanks to her unique brand of motivation, which involved getting right in someone's face and insulting them while they exercise.

While the show was incredibly popular at its height, it has come under increasing scrutiny for the way its contestants were made to lose weight. Michaels stepped away from the show before it was cancelled, choosing to build a fitness empire on her own thanks to the launching pad the show gave her. Here's what Michaels has been up to since she left "The Biggest Loser."

Jillian Michaels stepped away from "The Biggest Loser" after the show's 15th season, which aired between 2013 and 2014. Early in the season, the show was rocked by controversy when Michaels was found to have been giving caffeine pills to contestants on her team. If you'd ever found yourself wondering whatever happened to "American Idol" contestant Ruben Studdard, you would've had your answer had you watched that season. The singer was brought on as a contestant, but he was eliminated early in the season. When producers stepped in to scold Michaels for passing pills to the cast, the situation resulted in Studdard returning to the competition.

Michaels maintained that she did nothing wrong. "A caffeine supplement is significantly healthier than unlimited amounts of coffee," she said, per E! News. She also endorsed a viewer's tweet that suggested the controversy was manufactured for a reason to bring Studdard back.

Studdard didn't make it to the finale, but Rachel Frederickson did. When Frederickson, who ended up winning the season, showed how much weight she lost over the course of the show, both the audience and Michaels were shocked. At one point during the finale, the camera cut to the trainer in the audience, and she appeared to be rattled by the drastic change in Frederickson's physique. Michaels told People that she disagreed with the way production had approached the competition, deciding, "Moving forward, I need to be able to have an impact on the outcome of what I do." She also didn't like that the show leaned into the shouty bits of her on-screen persona. She stated, "Millions of people have this warped negative perception of me."

After leaving "The Biggest Loser," Jillian Michaels jumped into another fitness-based competition show. She hosted and judged "Sweat INC." for Spike TV, appearing alongside fellow trainers Obi Obadike and Randy Hetrick. Whereas contestants on "The Biggest Loser" typically started out with little-to-no exercise experience, "Sweat INC." was a show where trainers themselves competed to prove that their exercise regimens and products were the best.

Appearing on Sway's Sirius XM radio show "Shade 45," Michaels explained that the show was actually about entrepreneurship, not just fitness. "We're looking for the next fitness phenomenon, but the big picture really is, it's about an American with a dream. What are you willing to sacrifice? How far are you willing to go? What does it take to be successful?"

Michaels also called out a number of other fitness trends they hoped their competitors could match, like Shake Weights, Thigh Masters, and Jane Fonda workout tapes. She ultimately concluded, "Do they work? No! But they're huge! They're gazillion-dollar businesses." Michaels stuck with "Sweat INC." until the Season 1 finale, but the winner — a kickboxing-based workout business called Focusmaster — failed to give Orange Theory a run for its money. The series was not picked up for a second season.

Jillian Michaels came out as a lesbian while she was on "The Biggest Loser," and after she left the show she had more time to devote to her family. At the time, that included partner Heidi Rhoades and their two children, one of whom was adopted and the other of whom was the result of Michaels getting pregnant.

In 2016, Michaels finally launched a television show that wasn't focused around fitness. Instead, "Just Jillian" followed her family life, showing the couple as just normal people going about their lives. "I think what's interesting about our family is that we're just like any other family," Michaels told E! News, pointing out that same-sex families aren't always represented on television. "We have the same issues, we deal with the same stuff, we have a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun, I'm a lot of fun, I'm a good time," she insisted.

Rhoades, on the other hand, didn't seem into the experience. She told the same outlet, "I'm not that excited about it." The show only lasted one season, and in 2018, Rhoades and Michaels went their separate ways. 

Jillian Michaels started 2016 with the launch of her short-lived show "Just Jillian," but she ended that year in a different mode entirely. She'd published several cookbooks and workout guides during her time on "The Biggest Loser," but in 2016 she released "Yeah BABY!: The Modern Mama's Guide to Mastering Pregnancy, Having a Healthy Baby, and Bouncing Back Better Than Ever." The book was part memoir and part self-help book, detailing her own experience with pregnancy even as she advised other women how to get through such a significant life event.

Speaking with Baby Chick, Michaels reflected that she was disappointed in the amount of misinformation out there for expectant mothers. As she had been on television, she was also fixated on the idea of losing the weight after your pregnancy, advising that expectant mothers should work out while they're pregnant. "Studies show us that exercise will facilitate an easier labor on mommy and baby because the baby is actually used to what we perceive as a 'state of stress' during exercise," she reasoned, "and so, theoretically we're told that it's easier."

Thankfully, Michaels also told new and expectant moms to remember to be kind to themselves. "The hard part of learning to find that balance is realizing it's not going to be perfect," she said. "You can't make everything perfect, but it will be enough."

Never one to hold her tongue, Jillian Michaels managed to say something so controversial in 2019 that it launched two separate celebrity feuds. What could be so provocative, you ask? The furor kicked off when she spoke with Women's Health (via People) about the keto diet. "It's a bad plan for a million reasons," she said. Michaels insisted that what really happens to your body when you eat keto is that you're starving yourself, since the whole point of the diet is that you're depriving your body of key nutrients.

That didn't sit well with "Today" star Al Roker, the weatherman who has been candid about his own weight loss journey. He took to X to call out Michaels, pointing out that she had also promoted unsafe methods of losing weight on "The Biggest Loser." He wrote, "So @JillianMichaels says #Keto is a bad idea. This from a woman who promoted on camera bullying, deprivation, manipulation and more weekly in the name of weight loss. Now those sound like bad ideas."

Michaels told People that she was surprised by Roker's reaction, noting that she'd appeared on "Today" many times and had good interactions with him. "I know that he does keto, and I get it, but you would think that I told him that there was no God," she complained. "It was really intense."

Jillian Michaels' opinion about keto didn't just anger Al Roker; it also reignited longstanding drama between Michaels and Bravo host Andy Cohen. She initially appeared on his talk show "Watch What Happens Live" back in 2013, but it seems that behind the scenes, Michaels and Cohen didn't get along. He later claimed in a YouTube video, "She was so mean to my staff! She was yelling at them like they were on 'The Biggest Loser.'" Cohen said he had no idea why she was so upset after taping, joking, "We rewatched the episode like it was the freaking Zapruder film ... we never figured it out."

They butted heads a few years later, when Michaels insulted Cohen's signature "Real Housewives" franchise in an interview with Life & Style, telling the magazine, "It's like it was created by someone that hates women! I mean, the guy hates them. He's an a–hole." Cohen responded to The Hollywood Reporter, turning the focus back on Michaels. "I love women," he said. "By the way, this is the woman who screamed at people for a living on 'The Biggest Loser.' She should stay in her own lane."

That brings us to the keto kerfuffle. When Michaels and Roker went at each other, Cohen named Michaels the "Jackhole of the Day" on "WWHL." He joked (via Us Weekly), "Don't feel bad, keto diet. A lot of people think Jillian Michaels is a bad idea." 

At the start of 2020, Jillian Michaels added Lizzo to her list of celebrity nemeses. Michaels had begun a rather rightward slide in her politics, so she took an opportunity to criticize award-winning musician Lizzo for giving acceptance speeches that celebrated body positivity in the face of an onslaught of fat-shaming. "Why are we celebrating her body? Why does it matter? Why aren't we celebrating her music? 'Cause it isn't gonna be awesome if she gets diabetes," Michaels joked on the BuzzFeed News show "AM2DM."

Critics called Michaels out for fat-shaming, but she doubled down on her remarks. "I meant it, meant every word," she told "Inside Edition." Michaels added, "I don't celebrate anyone being overweight." If you can believe it, she then tripled down, telling "The Carlos Watson Show" a whole year later that she probably should've gone about things a little differently. "I would like to separate her from the issue, if at all possible," she said. Still, she added, "That is literally the only place that I will tell you that I went wrong, if the conversation is about celebrating obesity. Obesity is just unhealthy. That's it."

In a video posted to Instagram, Lizzo appeared to address the drama when she encouraged self-love. "This is my life. I have done nothing wrong. I forgive myself for thinking I was wrong in the first place," she wrote. "I deserve to be happy."

Though 2021 found Jillian Michaels still tripling down on her offensive comments about Lizzo's weight, Michaels also revealed that year that she had come to have some misgivings about the time she'd spent on "The Biggest Loser." In an interview with "Today," Michaels said she didn't like the way the show had involved eliminations, cutting competitors if they hadn't lost a significant enough amount of weight each week. "The producers gamified weight loss," she confessed. "It was weight loss on a ticking clock."

Michaels also acknowledged that there should have been a mental health component to the show, too. "When you have someone that weighs 400 pounds, that's not just an individual who likes pizza," she said. "There's a whole lot going on there emotionally." It seems that Michaels hasn't learned what many of us have — that we need to change the way we talk about food.

Along those lines, Michaels defended her practice of screaming in faces while people exercise. "You need them to feel the pain of the way they've been living," she said, ignoring the fact that fat people tend to be painfully aware of what thinner people think about them anyway, even without being shamed for it on national television.

Even as Jillian Michaels' professional career took a turn into the provocative, her personal life seems to have settled into something lovely. In 2022, she revealed to People that she and fiancée DeShanna Marie Minuto had eloped, marrying in a Miami courthouse before jetting off to Africa for a ceremony. She told the outlet that she'd told her new wife on the altar, "Finding you ... my person ... and eloping in Africa together has been one of the most magical and transformative chapters of my life."

Michaels had been gushing about Minuto in the press for quite a while. The year before their surprise wedding, Michaels had told People that Minuto had stuck by her through tough times. "It's easy to stay together when everything is going great, but when real life sets in and things get messy, challenging, scary, and even downright ugly — that's when the truth reveals itself," Michaels reflected. "And this woman has revealed herself to be strong beyond measure ... I am so grateful to officially call her mine."

Jillian Michaels, it seems, is a big fan of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s plan to Make America Healthy Again. In 2024, "The Biggest Loser" alum voted for Donald Trump and then praised him for making RFK Jr. the secretary of health and human services. RFK Jr., who has dealt with a wide range of health issues over the years, has made a number of questionable claims regarding wellness over the years — to say the least — but Michaels believed him to be the best man for the job. Since being appointed, Kennedy has largely gutted funding for vaccines; Michaels has promoted thoroughly-discredited conspiracies about vaccines causing autism, so we imagine she's happy with that politician's work.

Michaels has been chronicling her right-wing beliefs on a YouTube talk show called "Her Take," a panel show that seems meant to provide a conservative alternative to "The View." In the show's first episode, Michaels outsourced her vision for the show to ChatGPT, reading a statement written by AI to tell people what she wanted the show to be. "You've got real conversations that happen here. Different voices collide, clash, and sometimes even connect," ChatGPT said. "There are no scripts, except for this one."

Michaels now expounds on controversial topics each week, in episodes titled things like, "Grooming Gangs EXPOSED, Birthright Citizenship Debate, Gen Z Embraces Socialism."

It seems August 2025 was a messy month for Jillian Michaels. In addition to causing a firestorm thanks to a controversial appearance on CNN — more on that in a moment — Michaels also had to contend with the fallout from a Netflix docuseries called "Fit For TV: The Reality of 'The Biggest Loser.'" The show dove deep into the long-running reality show's production, speaking with former contestants, producers, and Michaels' former on-screen training partner Bob Harper. Many contestants alleged that the show was unhealthy and abusive, taking issue with the way they were berated on national television and mocked for their bodies.

Michaels did not participate in the filming of the documentary, but she wound up being one of its biggest headlines anyway. Harper spoke at length about the heart attack he suffered in 2017, and he revealed that while many of his former "Biggest Loser" friends had reached out to wish him well, there was someone he hadn't heard from. "We weren't besties, but we were partners on a television show for a very long time," he said (via People). "[Her silence] spoke volumes ... I would not expect Jillian Michaels to do anything other than what she wants to do."

In August 2025, Jillian Michaels appeared on CNN to comment on a segment about President Donald Trump's directive that the Smithsonian review their exhibits to strip out anything that could be considered too "woke." To the surprise of the panel, which included Representative Ritchie Torres, Michaels was on the president's side.

"You cannot tie imperialism and racism and slavery to just one race," Michaels protested (via BuzzFeed), insisting that every single Smithsonian exhibit concludes by saying, "White people bad." She rounded on Torres, who is Black, and added, "Do you realize that only less than 2% of white Americans owned slaves? ... Do you know who was the first race to try to end slavery? ... Every single thing, it's like, oh no, no, no, that's because white people bad. And that's just not the truth!"

The panel was flabbergasted by Michaels going on national television to defend white people's actions during slavery, but on "Her Take," Michaels insisted that's not what she was doing, blaming CNN for trying to create controversy. "When I got pulled into that conversation, I was so g****** sick of hearing how all white ... I'm like, you know, not all of us suck! ... Yes, white people did horrible things, but we're not the only people to do horrible things!" In classic Jillian Michaels style, she doubled down on her stance, digging her heels in as far as they could go.