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The Biggest Loser: Couples (8 p.m., NBC)

I feel sick to my stomach this morning, and it’s not because of the pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey I inhaled while watching two hours of The Biggest Loser: Couples last night. Nope, it was the sheer sadism inherent in a show that strips morbidly obese individuals of their dignity and self-respect — not to mention their clothing — and then dangles the proverbial carrot cake in front of them as a test of willpower.

I feel for these people, I really do. Hell, it’s post holidays and I’m carrying a few surplus pounds myself. But there’s a thick line between a daily battle with the dessert tray and the brazen gluttony that brought these 10 couples to their buckling knees on a super-sized erector seesaw. Yeppers, for last night’s physical challenge, whomever teeter-tottered the best won a calling card to phone home from this oh-so-very public camp for fatties.

There, I said the word. But that’s the flabby, grotesque reality of the matter, as competing teams — a mother and daughter, a divorced duo, two brothers — collapsed off of treadmills and were plopped down in front of double-wide screens to witness the entire poundage they eat in junk food per year.

It’s in poor enough taste that at the conclusion of each episode contestants must send a couple home, relegating the losers to losing no more. It’s all the more humiliating that folks with such poor body images must weigh themselves on a slab-like scale, clad only in sports bras and spandex for the ladies and shorts for the men, jelly rolls and moobs and back fat on embarrassing display for mass network consumption.

The kicker here was a truly mortifying challenge that the Machiavellian masterminds thought up for week two in this latest, “couples” edition of the series. In the cruel and unusual “temptation round,” each pair was split and placed in separate rooms, then informed that they would have four minutes with a sickeningly-intended spread of sweet and greasy comfort food.

Whoever pounded the most calories in that time frame would be “rewarded” with $5,000. You read me right, these well-meaning souls, so determined to better their health, if not save their own lives, were dared — nay, taunted — to binge for money. Chocolates and drumsticks and corn dogs, oh my — each presented as wholesome as apple pie on a red-and-white checkered tablecloth, a sign stabbed into each menu offering with calorie counts (210 for an ounce of candy, 270 for cheesecake) for the strategizing contestant. Stay classy, NBC!

One gentlemen began rationalizing to himself — and the cameras, natch — why he should take such a monumental step backward, then tried to decipher what was the “best” (read: least detrimental) food on which to gorge. Others were shocked when their partners, replayed for their betrayed horror later, overstuffed themselves with the mistress also known as Little Debbie.

According to boot camp trainers Jillian (below left) and Bob, the purported point of this torturous exercise was to force the teams to weigh a few thousand dollars against an improved existence and realize just how lucky they were to be there. People would kill to be embarrassed and treated like squealing guinea pigs on national television, first sniffing the shit as an innocent thrill before ultimately shoveling it by the pudgy handful down their throats for cash.

By the time the show wound down, as contestants placed their send-off votes down on silver platters, the wretched taste in my mouth was nauseating. I just couldn’t digest watching human beings reduced to their basest forms, desperately — and in vain, thanks to the fine, compassionate folks at The Biggest Loser — trying to step away from the Ho Hos, deny themselves the Ding Dongs and drop the weight, all of it broadcast for our, what, motivation? Entertainment? What is the purpose of this again?

Time to purge.

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