‘Fat March’ flat wrong?

Some top fitness experts are angry over a new reality TV show called “Fat March,” which they say has contestants doing too much walking too fast, putting them at a high risk for injuries.

The severely obese contestants on the ABC show, which airs Mondays at 9 p.m., are walking 575 miles in 10 weeks.

At least one former contestant says it was too risky, but the show’s producers, fitness trainers and some contestants disagree. They say many contestants managed to walk this distance without being injured, and most of them lost a lot of weight.

The participants, whose initial weight ranged from roughly 230 to 519 pounds, began by completing 65 miles in eight days of walking over a two-week period.

During the first two weeks of the march, a 274-pound female contestant quit because she said her lower back and feet hurt; a young man was rushed to the emergency room for dehydration.

The heaviest contestant, the 519-pound man, was taken to the emergency room with blisters and possible stress fractures in his feet.

The 12 contestants face substantial peer pressure: Each finisher loses $10,000 of his or her final prize of $100,000 for every contestant who doesn’t finish.

“This show is dangerous for lots of reasons,” says cardiologist James Rippe, a founder of the fitness walking movement. “It’s obviously a terrible idea. It violates everything we know from exercise physiology about a safe, progressive exercise program.”

Out-of-shape people should start walking gradually, says Rippe, an associate professor of cardiology at Tufts University Medical School in Boston and author of “High Performance Health” (Thomas Nelson, 2007).

“There are hundreds of studies in the exercise literature that show when people do too much too fast, they expose themselves to lots of injuries and discouragement, and they don’t get any long-term benefits of exercise because they don’t stick with the program,” he says.

While public-health officials have been trying to encourage people to walk more because it’s an enjoyable activity, Rippe adds, “this show sends a message that walking is painful, you get blisters, you get hurt and it’s humiliating. They’ve made a spectacle of people who did this with all good intentions.”

Because of their extra weight, the marchers are at a high risk for musculoskeletal injuries, says Mark Fenton, another leader in the fitness walking movement. Plus, he says, their hearts and lungs weren’t conditioned for this amount of activity.

When sedentary people are getting started with a walking program, they may need to begin with as little as 10 to 20 minutes of walking at a time and work up from there, says Fenton, author of “The Complete Guide to Walking.”

Kim Kearney, the 274-pound contestant on “Fat March,” says she quit on the fourth day after walking more than 10 miles the day before.

“I was in excruciating pain. The base of my spine felt like I was being stabbed. My chest was on fire. I didn’t feel like I was catching my breath,” says Kearney, 39.

“I didn’t want to continue to risk my life for a ridiculous reality show. This was the most painful thing I’ve ever done in my whole life.”

But Julie Laughlin, the show’s co-executive producer, says most contestants adapted better than expected.

On the first day, the participants covered about five miles in about three hours, much less time than the six or seven hours the TV staff had anticipated, she says.

“They really surprised us,” says Laughlin. “We thought maybe we should have given them a little more distance to walk.”

Lorrie Henry, one of the show’s two fitness trainers, says the walking wasn’t “as arduous and unhealthy as everyone is trying to portray it.”

Before she worked on the show, Henry says, she probably wouldn’t have advised someone who weighed 400 pounds to walk five miles on his first day of physical activity, but she has changed her mind.

“Our bodies are made to walk. We do it every day,” says Henry, a former Marine and a motivational fitness expert from Phoenix.

“If these people were really in trouble, I would have stopped right away and had nothing to do with it.”

Two of the contestants say the march wasn’t easy, but they are glad they did it.

Shea Carpenter, 27, a makeup artist from Indian Rocks Beach, Fla., weighed 289 pounds when the march started.

She says walking this much was harder than she expected, but she had no serious problems other than blisters and a few aches and pains.

“I thought it was going to be a cakewalk, but it wasn’t,” Carpenter says. “I will never underestimate walking again.”

Loralie Thomas, 30, a corporate travel planner from Hainesville, Ill., who weighed 241 pounds at the beginning, says the show would have been dull if the contestants had worked up more gradually.

“Frankly, who wants to watch a show about fat people walking around a block? Maybe some things seem extreme, but I haven’t suffered from it. It made my life a hundred times better.”

All participants had physical and psychological checkups in advance, Laughlin says, and medical experts were on hand throughout.

“We were here to help them, not to hurt them,” she says, adding: “The weight loss is going to blow America’s mind. It’s spectacular.”