Tonight on Masterclass, more facts from experts, hooray?

Masterclass Challenge looks like fun tonight with the contestants apparently needing to recreate fast food favourites but in a healthy fashion?

Also past contestant Alison visits for a chat with the contestants about her own experience on the show and afterwards.

Everyone files into the big gym / Weigh-in room / Masterclass room with a smile on their face for Hayley, who looks to be decked out in surgical scrubs on the top half of her body. It’s not a good top, Hayley. If it’s yours, throw it out!

Shannan asks the contestants who’s had back pain. Which he asked last week, didn’t he? Someone go check Mythor’s recap and… oh.
Shannan says that the main reason for sore lower back is a core that isn’t strong enough. Your core is basically around your stomach, muscles for your hips and upper body.
Your core is important for everything that involves the upper body – play golf? Need a strong core! Pick up kids? Need a strong core! Everyone can benefit from having a strong core.

First Michelle’s going to work out who’s using their core properly and who is not.
Shannan hands out some string and they have to wrap it around their body. Before they tie it up though they need to think about standing tall, good posture, lifting and seperating your rib cage, shoulders drawn back and down, long neck, chin pulled in. Think of when someone gives you a tickle, you brace your abs. Or trying to squeeze on your favourite jeans and they’re a bit tight you pull it in a little. And then tie a knot in the piece of string, right around the centre of your belly.
Soon as you do that you can relax and slouch a little and then they all feel the string pulling on them. They’re going to use this today to encourage good posture.

Shannan asks who’s doing well with their crunches lately. Nobody jumps at the chance to be Shannan’s guinea pig but Jarna and Lisa look back at Phoebe who sheepishly moves forward.
What they’re going to do is have her lie down on her back, knees up into the air, feet planted on the ground.
First stage of the exercise is to put her hands on her quads then slide her hands up to her knees. Level two is to get all the way to having her wrists on her knees.
Level three is even more of a struggle, getting her elbows to touch her thights while she has her arms crossed over her chest. Level four is elbows up to knees.
Level five, cradle your head in your hands and try to do a full situp. Phoebe gears up for it but can’t quite manage it.
Shannan tells everyone that if they can get to level three, they’re above average!

Michelle’s exercise will be to strengthen your obliques. Your obliques are down the side of your body, from the side and down to your pelvis. Those’re the external obliques. Then you have your internal obliques running straight across your stomach and underneath the externals.
Then you also have your transverse abdominal muscle which Michelle describes as looking like a corset or belt. It attaches to your spine and goes right the way around your body.
Michelle picks Shannan to be her guinea pig.

Shannan’s flat on his back with his arms out straight to the side, palms down to keep the upper body stable. He has his knees up in the air and then raises his feet up to form a right angle with the floor.
Then he slowly lowers his knees to one side while breathing in, then puts them back up to vertical while breathing out. As you get stronger you can go further with your knees to each side but what you want to feel is like you’re wringing out a dishcloth.

Next up is “side planks”. Shannan’s propped up on one shoulder on his side and… seriously, this is just too hard to describe. Definitely need to watch the video to get the benefits from this, guys.
One thing’s certain – Shannan and Michelle are probably the only ones who could really demonstrate that move. It looks quite taxing!

Heart disease accounts for one in three deaths in Australia, Hayley says. It’s our number one killer. And obesity puts you on a fast track to heart disease. But you’re not doomed! You can do something about it. They’ve already started cutting down their risk factors, but they need to keep it up. And Dr Norman Swan is back to confuse us all some more!
Dr Swan asks the women which is the bigger killer in women, breast cancer or heart disease?

And despite Hayley just telling them that heart disease is our number one killer, many of the girls still go for breast cancer. Jarna seems the only one who thinks heart disease.
Heart disease is more deadly. By a factor of five in women. Women are five times more likely to die of a stroke or heart attack than they are of breast cancer.
Dr Swan says you can be frightened of breast cancer and it’s understandable why. But you ought to be a lot more frightened of heart disease.
Hey, what happened to being alert but not alarmed?

Risk factors for heart disease? Family history, diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure. Dr Swan says the biggest risk of all is smoking.

Wayne’s had some of his own risk factors. His Dad had high blood pressure/hypertension, which is his family history stuff. They were painting the house one day and his Dad looked up the stairs and just collapsed right in front of them.
Wayne was 21 at the time, his Dad was 51 at the time.
Wayne knows he was heading down the same path with high blood pressure as well. His wife has been growing increasingly worried and Wayne was starting to get pains in the chest and so on. But he’s been feeling more and more comfortable since coming on the show.

Classic signs of heart attack, which everyone needs to know:
– Tightness across your chest, a vicelike grip
– pain in the center of your chest which goes up into your neck and down into your arm

Not everyone gets these symptoms, especially women. But Dr Swan says any funny feelings you get after exercise or that come out of the blue related to your chest, neck or arm, you need to get them sorted out.
So what do you if you think you’re having a heart attack? You don’t wait. You go to an Emergency Room by ambulance. And he says nobody will ever criticise you for doing so and you will be treated seriously.

Dr Swan asks what the symptoms of a brain attack like a stroke?
Loss of feeling, slurred speech. He says if you’re with someone who you think is having a stroke you ask them to give a big toothy smile. If the smile is uneven with a droop on one side, that’s a bad sign. Ask them to hold up their arms and if one starts drifting down that’s a sign. Slurred speech is also a sign.
There’s an online tool you can use, apparently, to assess your risk of having a stroke. It takes various important factors into account but he doesn’t give us the URL!
Not that I could check as my internets are currently broken…

Wayne came in with a risk of 20% of heart related problems and now has a risk factor of 9% so he’s halved his chances.
Lisa’s has come down to 7% and while they’ve only talked about those two, the other’s have had similar improvements.

Dr Swan says then that it’s time for Wayne to have his blood pressure taken and he says that there’s something called White Coat Hypertension where the BP goes up just because you’re at the doctor’s… so doing it in a TV studio in front of a national audience must spike it more!

Hayley asks if otherwise healthy people who eat right and so on could still have troubles? Dr Swan says people who tend to drop off like that tend to have family history of such things but there’s treatment you can take to reduce your risks further.

Wayne’s BP is a healthy 119/76.

Dr Swan says he doesn’t care who wins The Biggest Loser, he wants to see them all in 2 years time and have them say that their risk factors and weight are lower than they’ve ever been. And then they really will be The Biggest Loser!

Phil loves the kitchen parts of Masterclass.

Janella asks them all what they think the usual excuse is for not cooking for themselves or exercise and one of the Pink Ladies says Lack Of Time!
So today Janella is going to show them how to make the best use of the time that they have. Which Jarna is already doing, apparently.
On Sunday’s Jarna makes a “one pot” of something which is then what she eats all week.
Janella says that the problem is often portion control. So they’re going to cook a big batch of food and then split it up into portion sizes and freeze them.

Janella then asks them what they think is the fastest growing section in the supermarket? Chris asks if it’s the fresh vegetables? Janella laughs and says that’s a hopeful answer, you can hear Michelle laugh at that too.
Fastest growing section? Frozen prepackaged ready meals. It said on the packet that it was beef curry, apparently. It’s a 375g meal, which isn’t that big a meal, but there’s almost 600 calories in there. Apparently 568 calories qualifies as “almost 600!”

But Janella’s going to show them how to make their own beef curry with 350 calories in it and with lots more vegetables. Ew!
Janella’s got some lean chuck steak. 610 grams of lean chuck steak, which she then further trims the fat from and she says you could then feed that to your dog. Lucky dog!
Before they probably ate a lot of meat because it’s easy to cook (since when?! I hate cooking meat!) but now they’re having more chicken and fish.

Chris asks something intelligent for a change, wondering if you could use kangaroo instead and Janella says absolutely, you could even have chicken in there instead, fish or even legumes or soy substitutes. Any protein will do just fine.

Janella puts about half a tablespoon of oil in a pot, which is very very hot because she wants the meat to go brown, crunchy and caramelised. Yum!

Then they’re going to make their own curry! Cool!
Tumeric, two teaspoons.
Ground black pepper, one teaspoon.
Cumin, one tablespoon.
Coreander, seeds, pounded up. Not sure how much. Looks about a teaspoon.

They’re going to make a paste out of it. Adding some fresh garlic to it and ginger and some lemon juice and lemon zest and this is really not looking like curry!
Until Janella starts grinding it up in the mortar and pestle, then it gets that lovely curry colour to it.

The meat in the pot has shrunk a little and the juices have come out of it. Janella adds the curry to it after shifting the meat to one side in the pot so the curry can sit on the base of the pan and cook off a bit.

Then Janella gets some pumpkin. Butternut pumpkin. Which she’s leaving the skin on! Cup and a half of it, apparently the skin is high in fibre.
Personally I’m less concerned by the skin than I am by the pumpkin. Not a fan!

Also adding some cauliflower, delicious!
She cuts the “florets” off and chops up the stem section and adds it all to the pot. Michelle says there’s a huge amount of nutrients, it’s one of the best vegetables you can eat. Sweet! I’ve got an excuse to eat even more of it!

Then they add some beef stock to the pot, along with some tomato paste. It’s a litre of stock and a tablespoon of tomato paste.
Give it all a good stir then leave it to simmer for about an hour and a half and you’ll know it’s ready because the vegetables will be soft.

Fortunately, Janella’s prepared one earlier!
Previously you could recognise most of the vegetables, now you can’t even see the cauliflower as it’s broken down into the mix. Apparently that’s a good way to hide cauliflower, if you’re some kind of freak who doesn’t like such things…
Janella adds some peas to the pot and then grabs some mint to put in, too. Mint? In curry? Okay!
Janella explains how to chop herbs – don’t bash at them, slice gently so you don’t lose the flavour into the board.

Then it’s time to serve up. Have your bowl ready to eat from but also have your freezing containers ready so you can make the servings as even as possible. Michelle says it’s a great idea because if you eat your meal and the rest is still in the pot, it’s tempting to go back to the pot.
Yep, I can confirm that. Totally confirm it. Do it all the time!

Jarna puts the containers into the fridge first, then later you move them to the freezer once they’ve cooled down. That’s a useful tip as I frequently do that with my curries. Thanks, Janella!

Jarna gets to have the first taste. She says to David that it tastes really good. Not sure if she’s mocking him because he’d be jealous or because he hates curry? Hard to tell.

Underneath another kalosh after another ad break is a fast food that really started it all, Janella says.
It’s a hamburger!
Janella says hamburgers can be healthy but this one isn’t. There’s a white, refined bread bun, which has a couple hundred calories all by itself. Big beef patty and mayo and so on. All adds up to over 600 calories.

So Janella’s going to show them how to make a healthy alternative.
Somehow that equates to making salmon patties. With green salad.
Yeah, I’d totally go for that over a delicious hamburger…

Phil gets to be Janella’s next assistant. Lisa says Phil’s been saying from the start he’s a terrible cook, but he’s been learning slowly. And this will certainly help his wife which Lisa thinks is great!
They’re using salmon and sweet potatoes. So Janella’s showing Phil how to peel a sweet potato and then chop it up. Everyone’s giggling at Phil’s efforts.
Janella says he’d not made a salad before a few weeks ago and Phil says he’s much better at that now. Janella asks him if he can make a curry now and Phil says his wife will be able to because he wrote it all down!

Phil then gets to peel an onion and learn how to dice it afterwards while everyone continues giggling at Phil’s earnest attempts to learn.
Then he gets to grate zucchini. Grating zucchini is about the only good bit about zucchini…
Janella says to squeeze out the zucchini juice which you can add to the curry or something else. Don’t just throw it out though.
Cut up your celery. Nothing fancy, just chop chop chop.

Lots and lots of steps to this, hope the instructions on the website are a bit more clear for people, good luck writing all this down otherwise!

Phil then gets to smoosh the sweet potato into everything in the pan. Then it’s time to add the dried out salmon to the pan.
And Janella does something she thinks will gross people out – she’s leaving the bones in the salmon because they’re a great source of calcium, apparently. And allegedly they will just melt.

Each patty they make will be about 90 calories each, so you could have 4 of them and it’s still only 360 calories.
Then she adds a whole egg! Gasp! But she says this isn’t so much for while you’re still a Biggest Loser, it’s for when you get home. And eggs are good for you!

They squish the patties out and then Janella says to roll them into wholemeal flour. A tiny tiny bit of wholemeal flour. Alternatively you could use rice flour or chick pea flour, there’s lots of flour options.
Or you could even just leave them in balls, put them in a muffin pan and bake them at 180 degrees for about 15 minutes until they’re brown.
Caitlin asks if you could just cook them without coating them at all and she says yes.
So why coat them? Because if you don’t have a nonstick pan they’ll stick to the pan without flour or you’ll have to use too much oil in the pan.

Phil’s struggling to get the patties nice and even but Janella comes to his rescue.

Unlike the curry, you can freeze the salmon patties without cooking them, just stick them straight in the freezer and cook them later. They’ll keep for up to 2 months. Pull them out of the freezer and they’ll take about an hour to defrost.
Phil is told to put them in the freezer and has no idea where the freezer she means is, causing more giggles from the peanut gallery.

The green salad beside the patties is some english spinach and red onions.

Then it’s time for a taste test. Phil says you can taste the salmon and then tries to remember what else was in it. Yeah, salmon tends to ruin the flavour of everything, huh Phil?

Another ad break and now it’s time for Alison’s visit, woohoo!
Shannan says to the contestants that one of the saddest stories many of them have told him was that they were letting life pass them by, wouldn’t go out with their friends and they weren’t experiencing anything.
The most serious case of this that Shannan saw was a couple of seasons ago. Her life revolved around doing absolutely everything for her kids and nothing for herself. But her transformation was one of the biggest he’s ever seen.
Put your hands together for Season 3 runner-up Alison Braun!

Shannan asks how she is and then checks himself and says why would he even ask that, have a look at her!

Alison arrived on the show at 121.7kg. Yet she was a shadow of the person she is today.
Then they drop down the big poster of Alison as she was. Shannan tells everyone to pay particular attention to the eyes. Look deeper than just the weight.
Alison says she still struggles when she sees the picture. It gets better as time goes on. Now she feels like a completely different person.

Alison says that what you can’t see on the poster is behind her, she had a huge hump on her bottom. Shannan apparently told her once that she had the biggest bottom he’d ever seen! Alison’s giggling and says it was and Shannan says he’s a trainer! He’s allowed to tell her the truth.
Then he spins her around and shows off her current backside with a wolfwhistle. Alison says they’re size 10 jeans!

At the start Alison was in Shannan’s team and she was very quiet back then. Alison was missing her kids and family and she thinks she could have disappeared in the first couple of weeks and nobody would have known.
Alison was feeling a lot of guilt because she’d pretty much up and left her family which was a tough thing for her to do.
On the second day she sat up in bed and was so overwhelmed by the other 15 personalities but for the moment she was completely alone. She’d been a mum since she was 18 and for the first time as an adult she was by herself and she had no idea who she really was. She had no dreams or passions or desires. She was a wife and a mother and that was it.

Alison missed all her kids’ birthdays in the house. One time she got a phone call home and her littlest answered the phone and so she talked to her a bit and then Isabella asked if she wanted to talk to Sissy now? Alison said yes and Isabella said, “Her name is Bethany..” Alison was shattered because she thought her kids thought she’d forgotten their names!
Alison always told her kids they could do or be anything they want to do or be but she finally realised she wasn’t doing any of that herself!
Alison says that the kids don’t learn so much from what their mums say, they learn from what their mums do. They learn from watching them. You have to have your own dreams, passions, respect for your body. Else how will they learn that stuff?

Alison eventually got down to 66.5kg at the end of the show. And Alison tells Shannan she’s actually smaller now! 63kg. Alison says you don’t just get to the finale and that’s it, you keep going!

Lisa asks how you fit everything in, cooking and exercising and what not. Alison says she made sure to train first thing in the morning. She put her foot down and said one hour a day is not too much to ask of her family since she does everything else for them!
Caitlin asks if she had any bingeing experiences when she got home?! Looking for excuses already?
Alison says she fell for the chocolate again. She remembers once thinking she would have a full block of chocolate and your body doesn’t cope so well with it anymore and she felt sick for days afterwards!

Shannan thanks her for coming and off she goes!

After another ad break the contestants file into the lounge room where a table with some kloshes is set up, trainers and Hayley behind them.
Janella’s shown them they don’t need to eat unhealthily to eat fast, you just need to have the right ingredients on hand.
Under the lids is a popular takeaway meal, one for each couple. Meals they would have eaten regularly before they came on the show. Today their challenge is to make a healthy alternative to one of these dishes each.

Caitlin and Daina pick fish and chips.
Wayne and Phoebe get a delicious looking hamburger.
Shannon and Chris uncover a steak, baked potatoes, mushrooms and a lot of cream. Hayley looks physically ill just describing it!
Rick and Joe get a “big breakfast”. Hash browns, sausages, eggs, etc.
Teneale and Elise get creamy pasta.
Jarna and Lisa pick… pizza! It doesn’t look like those Dominos pizzas Shannan’s touting, that’s for sure.
That leaves Phil and David with a roast chicken with skin, vegetables and lots of gravy. Mmmmmmm.

Now they’re off to the supermarket with $15 and they can spend 15 minutes finding ingredients to make a healthy alternative to their meals.
Once they’re done shopping they return to Camp Biggest Loser and cook up their meals and then Hayley, Shannan and Michelle will judge the results.

No idea what shopping center they’re at. Do you? Tell us in the comments!

Phil and David are still going to make some chicken, but a healthy no skin grilled chicken. And then some healthy veggies on the side.

Lisa and Jarna, who had the pizza, so they’re still making a pizza but a healthier one. Bit of ham, ricotta cheese, some prawns for protein, bit of thin bread.

Caitlin and Daina go for some pan fried white bassa? I guess that’s a fish still? And sweet potato and parsnip chips.

Rick and Joe decide to make an egg white omelette.

Teneale and Lisa choose some wholemeal pasta, tomato based sauce and have chicken as the major protein.

Chris and Shannon go with a small piece of steak and some carrots.

Wayne and Phoebe go with a soy-linseed bun, hollowed out, kangaroo steak and a bunch of veggies to make it a bit more exciting.

Now they’re all back at Camp and have 60 minutes to prepare their meals.
Cue frantic montage of people make food.
Also cue me wondering if there’s still hot cross buns left outside…

Phil and David are using a bamboo steamer which Phil says he’s not seen before and he thinks it looks like a Bali hut so that’s what he’ll call it, but he’s totally going to get one when he goes home because he loves the thing.
David’s got Phil chopping up the vegetables which he thinks some will think is crazy but he does a good job.

Shannon does a pretty green vegetable bow around the carrots. How delightful!
Chris says if it was up to him it’d be just a steak, some mashed potatoes and some veggies slapped on the plate.
It does look very fancy and Shannon said some of the other contestants said they’d pay for that in a restaurant.

Wayne’s sure he and Phoebe will be winning because their burger looks spectacular!

Caitlin and Daina are up first. 1100 calories in their fish and chips fastfood they’ve had to replace with their healthy option.
The fish isn’t battered so what have they got on it instead to make it taste okay? Ha! Shannan admits fish is foul!
The girls have put parsley, garlic, ginger and lemon on the fish. The “chips” were boiled up in a pot first then cooked in the oven and then fried off quickly in a pan to brown them up.
Michelle asks if they used any oil and they said just in the pan for the fish and Michelle says she’d definitely eat that.

Shannan’s favourite fish is bassa, apparently. Michelle knew that, too. Ooh!
Shannan’s really impressed by the flavour in the fish and Michelle says well done to the girls.

Rick and Joe had to replace a big breakfast that totalled over 1000 calories.
Their replacement is an egg white omelette with chicken, capsicum, shallots and onion inside. It doesn’t look very appetising, and that’s not just my dislike of omelette’s talking. There’s a side of mushrooms and capsicums and garlic.
Michelle and Shannan say they’ve got the omelette right though.
Was about 125g of chicken, cooked it’d be about 100g so 150 calories. 5 egg whites, 75 calories. So all up it’d be under 300 calories which has Shannan and Michelle very impressed!
Michelle’s still talking about how awesome they’ve done while Shannan is busy tucking in.
Hayley says they’re being great role models for other young men in the country. Yes! Thank you! Finally people being actual role models and not boofhead footy players being given the label for no damn reason!

Ahem.

Wayne and Phoebe had the hamburger which was over 850 calories to replace.
They’ve hollowed out their soy linseed roll which then makes it act like a helmet, Wayne says, to hold the burger in place!
Shannan says by hollowing it out it’s cut the calories count from 200 down to about 120.
They’ve used 100g of kangaroo meat for the meat patty, which Phoebe says is about 150 calories? Michelle says actually it’s closer to white fish in that it’s about 1 calorie per 1 gram of meat. And it’s super high in protein!
Hayley says she can’t even tell that it’s kangaroo meat, probably because it’s got all the other flavours of a hamburger so it just tastes like a hamburger you’d eat at a BBQ!

Shannon and Chris start walking in just before an ad break, looking a little goofy…
After the ad break they present their lovely looking dish.
They have a steak with mashed cauliflower and onion and garlic smooshed through.
They also have… a dew? djou? I have no idea how you spell it. Sue me!
Michelle loves a good cauliflower mash because it’s much healthier than potato and really high in nutrition.
Around 400 calories all told. Nothing processed or starchy.
Hayley declares it her favourite so far!

Lisa and Jarna come in with their healthy alternative to the family size pizza. Each piece of the original pizza contains over 200 calories!
They have a prawn and pine nut pizza instead. Prawns have a bit less than 15 calories per prawn. Low fat ricotta. Thin bread, toasted up before they put the toppings on. So you’re still going to get that crisp sensation, Shannan says, so you’re not feeling like you’re missing out on anything.
Hayley says she LOVES her pizzas. She’s had every kind of pizza imaginable, delivered or picked up. Everything! She says sorry to Michelle, who’s looking quite horrified! Hayley says she’s never had prawns on a pizza before because it’s always kind of scared her off.

Phil and David come in next. Hayley points out the star pattern with some of the vegetables and Phil says it’s like a starfish and the chicken is on a “life raft” of asparagus. Ew!
They steamed the chicken in the bamboo steamer which Michelle says is great because it keeps the chicken nice and moist.
They also steamed all the vegetables with the chicken too.
Michelle says she’d like to see a few more green, leafy vegetables, as she’s a fan.
About 340 calories, Shannan says. Lots less salt and fat than the roasted chicken and vegetables, and it’s all got a lot less overcooking which helps maintain the nutrient levels.
Hayley quizzes them about the topping on the chicken which is apparently rosemary and garlic and onion and some low calorie gravy.

Elise and Teneale come in next with their pasta dish.
They’ve used a tomato based sauce with garlic and basil and onion and chili to balance out the flavours. Shannan says it looks to be a good combination and Hayley says she’s been looking for a healthy way to eat pasta for ages, she’s been scared of it!
Shannan asks them if they used wholemeal pasta and the girls confirmed they did because it’s higher in fibre and lower in calories. It’s around 380 calories, they’ve estimated.
Hayley asks Shannan and Michelle if the wholemeal pasta is much better than usual pasta? Shannan says if you have to eat pasta it’s much better to eat the wholemeal kind.
We don’t see any of them actually eat any of the girl’s dish though. Aww!

Hayley says they’ve all done well on the whole, but there can only be one winner so congratulations to Rick and Joe!
Seriously? ‘Kay.
Shannan says they were all really impressed by the dishes the contestants came up with. Special mention for the burger because Shannan loves a good burger and it was a great alternative.
And the coach’s encouragement award goes to Phil and David for their first meal cooked in 40 years!

So Rick and Joe hang onto the Masterclass shield for another week!

Masterclass is done and dusted for another week, now it’s back to the competition!

Sunday night a secret is revealed? It sounds like some kind of strategy shenanigans.
And Chris and Shannan do some pretty serious sparring in the training room.

And big surprise, more people fall below the Yellow Line at Weigh-In. Come on, that’s a given guys, don’t need footage of that…

And since my internets are still not back up I guess I won’t be posting this just yet… but if you’re reading this now then I have posted it. What a twist!