Tonight on The Biggest Loser is Masterclass night once again!

Some practical and fun tips on keeping fit (frisbee!) some cous-cous for breakfast and past contestant Sean Holbrook comes in for a chat. Yay Sean-y!

You don’t need to do a formal sport, Michelle says. You can so all kinds of fun things, like skipping!
Yes please Michelle, do some skipping. I would like to see that.
Jigglejigglejiggle. She does some fancy skipping and once she’s done she says it can get your heart rate up a lot higher than just walking, her own heart rate is really going nuts after that short session.
So’s mine!

Phoebe’s called up as the first demonstrator skipper. She’s not done it since primary school she says but she still manages to do a crossover!
Heart rate got to 150bpm in about 10 seconds.
Rick’s second demonstrator. He’s never skipped before. Ever. And you can tell by his badly uncoordinated efforts!

It’s great for strength, coordination, cardio fitness, flexibility and balance. It’s a great way to train but you can up the fun factor by adding more people to the mix. Get a bigger rope!
Lisa’s the first to try skipping between the big rope. She manages to get in there eventually and then back out again.
Phoebe’s next to try and she does well, then Caitlin hops in as well and does a couple of jumps, then Michelle hops in too but they don’t manage too many more jumps with three of them in there.

Next activity, frisbee! Michelle always takes one to picnics.
Michelle instructs people on how to throw a frisbee. Quite a few of them have obviously messed around with frisbees before, doing fancy throws and running around to catch them and so on.
It’s great for upper body exercise, good for core and legs from all the bending and running, also good cardio.
They’re all having a lot of fun and getting some exercise in at the same time. Michelle suggests they take one to their next BBQ and see who’ll get up to play!

Her last family activity involves her favourite four legged friend in the world, Patty. Her doggy! Her doggy likes playing frisbee. So it’s no wonder Michelle loves frisbee. Her dog is even good enough to catch the frisbee after chasing it. Well done!
Michelle says dog owners tend to be more active from taking the dog for walks and looking after them and playing and generally having fun!

Michelle says she recommends at least 30 minutes a day of exercise but even 10 minutes is better than nothing!

Dr Swan is back after the ad break, but he’s brought a friend! Professor Bob Montgomery, President of the Australian Psychology Society, is here to talk about some brainy stuff.
David wants to progress in his career, be a better Dad, better husband.
Lisa wants to keep her weight off.
Rick wants to be a police officer. Dr Swan says he’s tall enough!
Shannon wants to get married, start a family, be healthy.

How do you transform such things into reality? Bob says there’s two important things about goals. A goal is an action plan, apparently. Then you work out what steps you need to achieve that goal.
Bob then says that the goal of keeping the weight off means eating sensibly and being physically active.

Uhhh, thanks Bob. We kinda already knew that. Bloody psychologists.

Bob says the other characteristic of a goal is that they’re realistically challenging. A healthy lifestyle means you can have special nights out, few more drinks because it’s New Year’s, parties and so on. It has to be affordable, practical, enjoyable, nutritionally sound. That’s what you want.

David asks Bob how you work out what you’re actually capable of achieving versus what you think you can achieve. Bob says start out with something realistic, something you feel you can get to, so you can get to that and then shift it up, rather than setting it too high and getting discouraged.

Shannon says while growing up he was told not to plan to fail because if you do, you will.
Whut?
He asks if he should be expecting to relapse or just be aware that it’s possible?
Bob says you should expect to slip a little bit, it’s not a failure, it’s human nature. The key is dealing with it well, that’s the way to success.

Janella’s doing breakfasty things this morning.
She has a bowl of cereal. Two cups of cereal is about 260 calories. One cup of full cream milk is about 160 calories. Suppose it depends on the cereal though.
The cereal tends to have a fair bit of sodium in it too which can lead to heart disease and so on, so they’ve already been cutting that out anyway.

So instead Janella’s going to make an orange couscous with sultanas and yoghurt. Yum, sultanas!
Everyone’s making faces at the idea of couscous for breakfast.

Quarter some fresh apricots and put them in a pot with some sultanas. Delicious!
Juice an orange into the pot, too. To moisten the apricots and add some plumpness to the sultanas.
Then a vanilla pod. Scrape the seeds out into a bowl. Put the pod into the pot with the other things and put some yoghurt in with the vanilla seeds.
Half a cup of couscous. 330 calories in that but it’s for two people.

But it’s just like other grains. Like oats and stuff. So it’s not so unusual, Janella tries to insist.

With the vanilla seeds in the yoghurt it looks… weird. Almost like cookies and cream ice cream topping.
Hayley says she’d eat breakfast cereals for every meal of the day if she could but the couscous meal takes longer to prepare. Would it keep alright? Janella says it’d keep for a couple of days and actually get nicer as the apricots soften up some more and soak up some more of the liquids.

As Janella is spooning out the yoghurt it looks more like it’s got poppy seeds in it. Very strange.
Phoebe gets the taste test first and she says it’s “divine”.

After another ad break, let’s do lunch!

Lunch is a sandwich. Janella says sandwiches are often seen as a healthy choice but it depends on the type of bread you choose and what you put inside that counts.
Typical sandwich in Australia was white bread, which was in the old days before you knew better, Janella says. I think what she means is before the panic merchants convinced the gullible folks of the world that white bread is bad for you!
Cheese, salami, salad, margarine… 590 calories in the sandwich, apparently. Jeepers!

So they’re going to make a nice sandwich with low-GI bread and salmon and chick peas and some green leafy crap.
She adds some cumin powder to some chick peas, garlic and some herbs. They’re all going into one of those little choppy things to blend up into a paste. As smooth as possible. Traditionally you put oil in it to make it smoother but you can use water for a healthy option.
Hayley asks if you can use other herbs instead and Janella says absolutely, anything you want really!
Then Shannon asks if you could use it as a rub on something like fish. Janella even says you could put an egg in there and make patties out of it. Shannon says it’d be great with some chilli.

200 grams of red salmon for two sandwiches. Lots of omega 3, good for lots of things, not so good on taste though. Fish is fishy and ew!
Janella smashes the fish up a bowl to smash the bones up so they’re all smooshy and dissolved and then they’re fine to eat, allegedly.

Gherkin/dill pickle. They have salt in them, but how much depends on the brand. Get them with sea salt and honey, if you can. And if you like gherkins, I suppose!

Wholemeal bread. Burgen, of course!

Use the chickpea spread as margarine, essentially. Janella says some people need lashings of butter or margarine and if you absolutely must have that, get one that lowers cholesterol. If you’re going to do it it should be with something good for you!

Shannon then gets to have a bite of the sandwich. Janella says it’s a big sandwich and that’s the idea, it’ll keep you all fuelled up and good to go for the rest of the day until dinner time.
430 calories. Hayley gets a shot at the sandwich next. Janella says it’ll get it her over her cereal fetish and Hayley says no it won’t!
Hayley takes a big bite, “Mmmm, good!” So eloquent!

After a healthy breakfast and a healthy lunch, best not spoil it with an unhealthy dinner.
Janella uncovers a plate full of… I don’t know. Pork spare ribs. 1100 calories, Janella says. All the fatties are looking at it with undisguised lust. Hayley is also looking at it with a little drool threatening to come out.

The healthy alternative is a healthy pork stir fry. 200 gram piece of low calorie pork. About 100 calories per 100 grams of the pork, which is about the same as chicken or fish.
It’s a no oil recipe so Janella’s using some stock to cook the onions first.
Everyone’s made a stirfry, when Janella asks. She’s a little surprised. She asks if they’d done so before coming on the show. Even Rick? Rick looks a little sheepish while everyone laughs at the idea.

Lots of ingredients in a stir fry and I’d probably miss some so I’m not going to list them. Go check the website if you want the full ingredients list. Put some onions and broccoli and capsicum and carrots and mushrooms and ginger and garlic and STUFF in the wok. It’s pretty simple making a stir fry.
Quinoa! Quinoa seeds, high in protein, high in calcium, iron, fibre. Some people in Australia call it “Keen-wah” but the proper pronounciation is “Kee-noah”. So there ya go.
You cook it just like rice. Twice as much water to quinoa and you’re good to go.

Add a bunch of green leafy stuff to the wok then some sauces and put the lid on.

Quinoa is apparently even better than brown rice for you. It’s yummy and it’s less dense than brown rice. You can even get quinoa milk and quinoa flakes to have for breakfast.
Quinoa milk?! I wonder if it tastes better than my bloody soy milk!

Put some quinoa on the plate, add some of the stir fry to the plate, pour some stock over the top, some spring onions and coreander, done!

Lisa seems a little unimpressed but she says she’d eat it after having a taste.

And we’re all done with Janella for another week, time to get back to the big gym to meet their special guest.

Michelle’s in the big gym saying they’ve seen some amazing transformation over the years, some contestants losing more than 50% of their body weight. And what comes with that is a huge transformation in their mental states and their confidence and lifestyle changes for the better.
Today’s former contestant has managed to make the changes and along the way he’s managed to find love.

Introducing Sean Holbrook!
We see the huge poster of old-Sean. Sean says he has no idea who that is, it’s not him. That guy died.
174.6kg was his start weight. He’d developed type 2 diabetes, his elder brother had recently died…
He was a very severe diabetic, so much so that his reading wouldn’t even come up on the diabetes machine thingy, until they started medicating him properly for it.

He wasn’t able to sleep for more than about an hour. He’d wake up with a dry mouth, need to go to the toilet, so he’d be constantly tired and be falling asleep all day.

Then he came on the show and lost the weight. Then he went back to his same old doctor who’d been treating him for diabetes. And he’d done a test to see how much damage had been done to his body by having diabetes and there was absolutely no trace of him ever having diabetes at all.
The doctor couldn’t believe it and said he did it! His doctor had told him he could do it, but his doctor had never met anyone who had actually done it!
Doctors know you can do it but they don’t often see people who actually manage it.

Sean wasn’t sure he could ever do it but when he got home he managed to ramp it up. And you just take it in baby steps, just have faith in yourself and keep at it.
Part of the journey is discovering the things that lead to you being so big. You have to confront those issues, that’s very important.
Since he’s lost the weight he’s adjusted his attitudes. He says it’s an attitude to sit at a table and just stuff your face, disregarding everything else.

Two really important things he took home with him.
Shannan had told him that 70% of weightloss is good nutrition. You are what you eat.

The other important thing? Vanity. Michelle laughs at that. Vanity’s usually looked upon as a bad thing because it’s looked on as selfishness or only thinking of yourself. Michelle says it’s about self respect and being the best version of yourself.
Sean says it wasn’t till the night of the finale that he felt like he’d achieved something. He says he looked and felt like a rockstar at the end of it.

What’s life like now? He’s in love! N’awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
Sean says it’s difficult to love someone unless you love yourself first.

Rick asks Sean if he was worried about going home during his time at Camp. Sean says you won’t be the same person going home. Be prepared for that. Be prepared to find out who you really are. And you need to remain focused on losing weight, looking after yourself, that’s the most important thing.

They’re in the kitchen. When they leave the show they’re going to face potential disaster 240 times a year.
Err, what? There’s 365 days in the year Hails!
Most of them often had very unhealthy lunches. Phoebe says she’d have as much as two days worth of food per lunch.

So the challenge today is to prepare several healthy packed lunches to take with them through the week. Oh, I see, 240 times a year on week days only!

Hayley then splits them into pairs. Caitlin and David, Rick and Lisa are together leaving Shannon and Phoebe.
Next she’s giving them different lunches. Caitlin and David have sandwiches, Rick and Lisa have wraps, Shannon and Phoebe are on salads.
Shannon says he used to eat a lot of salads before coming on the show. In the form of fillings for burgers!

They’re not just making lunch for themselves though. They’re making lunch for 20 people!
20 hungry gym junkies, in fact. Their lunches will be on the menu and the junkies will have to decide on which is best. They’ll take into account calories, nutrition and of course taste!

Rick wants to be able to take the Masterclass shield with him when he goes home. His name is on it 3 times so far, he wants it for a fourth time! Shannon’s not even up on the shield once!

Phoebe and Shannon are ambitiously going to be attempting a caesar salad. A caesar salad! Phoebe says if they can pull off a low calorie caesar people will be really impressed.

Lisa and Rick are doing 10 vegetarian wraps and 10 chicken and salad wraps.

Caitlin and David are doing beef and salad and ham and salad sandwiches.
David’s a big fan of the burgen weight management bread. It’s his favourite. He’s totally not fishing for a lucrative promotional deal, honest!

Little bit of parmesan cheese, low fat mayo dressing, skin off the chicken and pan fried it, used burgen bread to make croutons out of because everyone loves croutons. Michelle is thrilled by the idea.

Lisa’s getting Rick to steam the chicken for his wraps. Michelle loves it because it keeps the chicken nice and moist. She asks Rick if that’s why he’s doing it and he says he doesn’t know, he usually just George Foreman’s everything. Bwahahaha!
They’ve managed to co-opt Michelle to shred the chicken for them while they carry on assembling wraps and so on.

David has discovered the wonderful world of salsa, he says. He’d eat it on everything. Not his oats in the morning, but pretty much everything else.
Caitlin says she wouldn’t eat a roast beef and salsa sandwich. It’s a bit odd.
While it sounds nice I have to agree with her on this one.

Phoebe’s come up with a tuna and chickpea salad to go along with their caesar option.
But Phoebe’s a bit of a control freak and is taking on a lot of the responsibilities, like cutting the shallots the way she wants.
But everyone can boil and peel an egg!

Not Shannon, apparently!
He has no idea. They’ve all turned out mangly and ruined and horrible! Phoebe says she’s never trusting Shannon with her eggs again!

15 minutes to go, time to start packing up your lunches!
Michelle’s in the background reading something or other with great intensity!

Rick’s wraps look really good, so much so that Michelle interrupts him for a second to say how good they look. Let him wrap wraps, woman!

Everyone arrives at the Fitness First gym and heads to the cafe to set up their lunches.
Everyone is really convinced they’ll do really well with their various lunches.

Shannon says there’s a lot of interest in how they managed to keep the calories so low but once they explained they were really impressed.

David gets some repeat sandwich customers… and Shannon and Phoebe are thrilled to have run out of caesar salads so quick. The chickpea salads aren’t far behind.

Lots of glowing praise for pretty much all the meals from the gym junkies. Some comments on some things being a little too dry or not being fans of tuna and so on. Typical taste differences you’d expect. Nobody says any of the foods are horrible though which is certainly a good sign.

The trainers go over the smart things they did back at Camp, using cholesterol lowering spreads or avocado, etc. And they tasted good, they’d absolutely eat them themselves!

But who won over the gym junkies in the end?
Shannon’s quite confident. They only got 5 votes though.
Sandwiches also got 5 votes.
Rick and Lisa’s wraps proved a smash hit with 10 votes! Fully half the votes available, very impressive.

So Rick and Lisa get their name on the shield this week.

And now Masterclass is done for the week. Lots more great ideas to use in the years to come but now the weigh-in looms…

Sunday night… Last Chance Training! Shannan and Michelle flog their contestants once more and Caitlin takes a tumble on the treadmill.
Also, in TEH OUTBACKZ, the “unthinkable” happens as the boys have their first desert weight-in. I’ma guess record losses?