In 2020, Jillian Michaels was driving down California’s Pacific Coast highway while listening to Joe Rogan when his guest raised the Covid lab leak theory.
Taken aback, she pulled over to the side of the road and started vigorously searching. “It took me five facts and a cell phone for me to figure it out,” she said. “It red-pilled me.”
The term, originating from the 1999 film The Matrix, describes a moment of political awakening to a hidden reality and proved to be a pivotal moment in Michaels’ transformation from America’s toughest trainer on The Biggest Loser to a defining voice in the Make America Healthy Again (Maha) movement.
Having spent decades dressed in active-wear dishing out weight-loss advice, the 51-year-old has now reinvented herself as an unfiltered political commentator.
The one-time California liberal, who shared a photograph of her downcast children after Donald Trump’s first election victory, now appears at home nestled between conservatives during appearances on Fox News.
Prepared to opine on everything from magic mushrooms to racism, she caused a stir recently on CNN by backing Mr Trump’s overhaul of the Smithsonian, accusing the museum of making “every single exhibit about white imperialism, when it isn’t relevant at all”.
But according to Michaels, she hasn’t changed. “I just discovered that the world is a different place than I thought.”
Recalling first learning about the Wuhan lab leak theory, she said: “I realised, if we can have a conspiracy this high and this wide, in other words, something that goes up this high into our government and the global powers that be, that is going to negatively impact every single person on the planet, it makes you question everything...”
It was perhaps unsurprising, therefore, when she emerged last year as a prominent figure within Maha, the movement spearheaded by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary.
To its detractors, Maha exists to spread misinformation and pseudo-science about everything from vaccines to raw milk.
For proponents, the movement is a source of empowerment, giving the average American the freedom to escape the toxic additives and environmental pollutants they believe are fuelling the country’s chronic sickness epidemic.
Michaels has been pictured hiking with the health secretary, is on a first-name basis with Casey Means, the surgeon general, and her brother Calley, a special adviser to Mr Kennedy, and attended the White House in May for the release of the Maha report, designed as a blueprint for tackling chronic illness in children.
Yet she is quick to dispel the notion that she is some sort of Maha cheerleader. “I’m nobody’s b----,” she said.
She’s not anti-vax, but says “I do understand their position”, and although she favours beef tallow to seed oil, she’s more invested in reducing people’s overall saturated fat intake. As for her more heterodox views – she calls fluoride in drinking water “toxic waste” and won’t use plastic tupperware.
“I am not tribal. I am not partisan. I hate politics. I care about principles. I don’t care what side they’re coming out of. I will call a spade a spade at the end of the day,” she said. “So, am I grateful to try to be a part of Maha? Sure, because I think it’s the best we’ve got. I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Michaels is primarily concerned about the “catastrophic quartet”: the shady forces of Big Agriculture, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and, most troublesome of all, Big Food, which she holds responsible for soaring obesity rates and claims is designed to “disempower people” and make them “controllable”.
In 2019, she experienced her first brush with cancellation when she questioned why people were “celebrating” the physique of Lizzo, a singer and body positivity campaigner. “It isn’t gonna be awesome if she gets diabetes,” Michaels quipped on a BuzzFeed podcast.
Pointing out that the musician has since lost a significant amount of weight and spoken publicly about counting calories, Michaels is unrepentant. “What happened to body positivity, team? It’s like come on, they’re so full of it, it’s unbelievable.”
She is equally scathing about GLP-1 weight loss drugs, which she labels an “eating disorder” and cites as just another example of the pharmaceutical industry rigging the health system to remove people’s autonomy.
Dismissing the risks of encouraging young people to count calories, she said: “I think that that’s another trick to teach people from learning how to take care of themselves. Because if you want to look at what a real eating disorder is, it’s these drugs in a pen.
“God forbid you teach a kid how to balance a cheque book, which is the same thing as how to balance their energy intake. [People say] you’re going to f— up their head, because what, they’re so weak and fragile and such victims? It all comes back to that [mindset of]: ‘Don’t empower people with information, they’re too fragile.’”
Michaels’ obsession with healthy eating began at an early age. Born in Los Angeles, the daughter of a lawyer and a doctor of Jewish and Syrian descent, she has described herself as an “overweight kid” who used food to manage her anxiety, especially around her parents’ divorce when she was 12.
After taking up martial arts as a teenager, she worked her way up to a black belt and grew to love fitness and the benefits it offered. “When you feel strong physically, you’re feeling stronger and more empowered in pretty much every facet of your life,” she told Men’s Health.
It was in 2004, aged 30, when Michaels auditioned for NBC’s The Biggest Loser, where contestants were pitted against one another to see how much weight they could lose, that her life changed for good. The show went on to become one of the biggest reality series in America, with Michaels as its figurehead for almost 10 years.
Despite her drill sergeant persona – reeling off such pithy catchphrases as, “unless you puke, faint or die, keep going” – Michaels insists she was portrayed as a “villain” on the show because “that’s what makes good TV”.
A recent Netflix documentary suggested Michaels flouted medical advice, imposing intensive calorie restriction and supplements on her contestants – claims she has dismissed as “lies”.
The through line she sees between her hard-nosed methods as a personal trainer and her work as a political commentator is a desire to give people agency. “Just get the information in the world and let people make a decision,” she has said of her approach.
But as her star has risen, she has grown increasingly confident in the “truth” of her own convictions.
She has described herself as a nineties liberal, supporting abortion rights and gay marriage (she is married to a woman). Yet she is profoundly opposed to identity politics and cancel culture.
The reason modern liberals refuse to come on her Keeping It Real podcast, she says, is because “they’re never forced out of their comfort zone, and their arguments don’t hold up”. “They would all be exposed for their baloney.”
Forcing people out of their comfort zones is second nature to Michaels.
During an episode of the Biggest Loser, Michaels reminds a whimpering woman during a gruelling workout that she had “yelled and screamed bloody murder at every contestant” that had walked through the doors of her gym, as she urged her to get back on the treadmill.
Her forceful powers of persuasion will come in handy for Mr Kennedy as he seeks to cure a country in the midst of a profound health crisis.