Avenue Magazine Edmonton

For someone flipping channels, it’s not an edifying sight: a man browbeats two fat women into running up a set of outdoor stairs. Clearly out of shape and angry, they curse him as they gasp for air; the words between the three turn harshly personal.

The first episode of Anaid Productions’ X-Weighted — with Halifax DJs Angela and Nicolle in a struggle to shed pounds under the remorseless gaze of trainer and fitness expert Paul Plakas — should, by all rights, have made people recoil in embarrassment. Quite the contrary. Audiences have turned the locally produced show — now broadcast across North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand — into a hit, and the Greek-Canadian Plakas into a celebrity. Viewers send messages with requests for advice to his four different Facebook groups. Pleas for personal training arrive from as far away as the U.K. Fans accost him in the street to tell him how important he is in their lives. Women e-mail him boudoir photos of themselves wearing nothing but lingerie and smiles.

Yet one of those Facebook groups declares its members hate Paul Plakas — and scenes from other episodes confirm that the Angela/Nicolle encounter was not atypical. Plakas raises the hackles of show participants more than occasionally.

An episode from the third season, which launched in May, finds Plakas training a woman who wanted to lose weight as a tribute to her brother, who died in a car crash a year before. Tammy, a day-care operator, signed up for a half marathon in B.C. — a 13-mile run that would pass the accident site. With family and friends there to cheer her on, she hoped her feat would honour her brother’s memory as well as help her overcome her weight problem.

“We got off on the wrong foot from the beginning,” says Tammy, a soft-spoken mother and wife. “He annoyed me. I didn’t appreciate the manner in which he dealt with me.” With Tammy working out in her own city and not training as stringently as Edmonton-based Plakas would have liked, their relationship soured even more by the time marathon day arrived. “She told me the night before that the longest run she had done in preparation was an hour,” he recalls. “At the one-hour point she said she was fatigued, but I told her she wasn’t doing the best she could.” Tempers flared. Plakas told her that if she didn’t do better, she’d be letting him down, herself down — and her late brother, too.

“I thought, ‘Oh, shit, maybe I shouldn’t have said that on this day,’ ” Plakas confesses. Tammy saw red. She accused him of failing to prepare her properly for the race — and that it was his fault she was in this situation. “Finally I told her, ‘Tammy, you’re a *#%@$ bitch.’ ”