And this just in: the obesity epidemic has recently crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and now many Europeans are falling prey to what is quickly becoming a pandemic—an epidemic of global proportions. What matters most is that too many people are fat.
The epidemic must be stopped, by any means necessary.
34
Few areas of popular culture focus on obesity more than reality television, and that focus is glaring, harsh, often cruel.
The Biggest Loser is an unholy union of capitalism and the weight-loss industrial complex. On the surface, The Biggest Loser is a television show about weight loss, but really, it’s anti-obesity propaganda, offering wish fulfillment for people with unruly, overweight bodies, both on the show and in the viewing audience. The show allows the home viewer to feel motivated without actually doing anything. If the viewer does get motivated, they can participate at home and feel like they are, in some small way, part of the show. Meanwhile, they also have the satisfaction of watching fat people become less fat from one week to the next while competing for $250,000.
I watched the first few seasons of The Biggest Loser avidly. The show offered the ultimate fat-girl fantasy—you go to a “ranch” for a few months, and under the pressure of intense personal trainers, dangerously low caloric intake, the manipulations of reality show producers, and the constant surveillance of television cameras, you lose the weight you’ve never been able to lose on your own.
During those first few seasons, I often toyed with the idea of auditioning to appear on the show, though, realistically, that could never happen. I’m too shy. I would go through withdrawal from the Internet. I can’t work out without music. If Jillian Michaels screamed at me, I would shut down or cry like a baby or strangle her. At the time, I was a vegetarian and I was concerned because I don’t eat Jennie-O turkey, a product the show shamelessly hawked for years by way of product placement. Appearing on the show simply was not and is not feasible for me.
The longer The Biggest Loser has been on the air, however, the more the show has disturbed me. There is the constant shaming of fat people and the medical professionals who take every opportunity to crow about how near death these obese contestants are. There are the trainers, with their undeniably, implausibly perfect bodies, demanding perfection from people who have, for whatever reason, not had a previously healthy relationship with their bodies. There is the spectacle of the contestants pushing themselves in inhuman ways—crying and sweating and vomiting—visibly purging their bodies of weakness. This is not a show about people becoming empowered through fitness, though the show’s slick marketing would have you believe that.
The Biggest Loser is a show about fat as an enemy that must be destroyed, a contagion that must be eradicated. This is a show about unruly bodies that must be disciplined by any means necessary, so that through that discipline, the obese might become more acceptable members of society. They might find happiness, which can, according to the show, according to cultural norms, only be found through thinness. When we watch shows like The Biggest Loser and its many imitators, we are practically begging some power beyond ourselves, “Take these all too human bodies, and make what you will of them.”
With the dramatic reveal of Rachel Frederickson, the Season 15 winner of The Biggest Loser, those of us who watch finally had an unimpeachable reason to be visibly outraged about the show and its practices, even though the show has been on the air and offering a damaging narrative about weight loss since 2004.
When her season began, Frederickson weighed 260 pounds. At her final weigh-in, on live television, she weighed 105, a 60 percent loss in mere months. During this reveal, even trainers Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels gaped at Frederickson’s gaunt body. She had disciplined her body the way she’d been asked to, but apparently, she had disciplined her body a bit too much. The biggest loser, we now know, should lose, but only so much. There are so many rules for the body—often unspoken and ever-shifting.
In an interview, Harper would later say, “I was stunned. That would be the word. I mean, we’ve never had a contestant come in at 105 pounds.” There was a wide range of responses in the press and on social media in the wake of seeing Rachel Frederickson’s new body. Her body, like most women’s bodies, instantly became a public text, a site of discourse, only now because she had taken her weight loss too far. She had disciplined her body too much.
As of late, several former contestants have leveled many accusations against the show, alleging that producers used forced dehydration, severely restricted caloric intake, and encouraged the use of weight-loss drugs and more to help contestants reach their goals, to make for better television. Even more damning was a medical study of one season’s participants, led by metabolism expert Kevin Hall. The study found that thirteen of the fourteen contestants’ metabolisms continued slowing even after their significant weight loss. This slowed metabolism contributed to the contestants gaining back most, if not all or more, of the weight they had lost on the show. The results are a stark reminder that weight loss is a challenge that the medical establishment has not yet overcome. It is certainly not a challenge a reality television show has overcome. It’s no wonder that so many of us struggle with our bodies.
In the two months after her big reveal, Frederickson gained twenty pounds and reached, apparently, a more acceptable but still appropriately disciplined size. She explained that she lost so much weight because she was trying to win the $250,000 prize, but those of us who deny ourselves and try so hard to discipline our bodies know better. Rachel Frederickson was doing exactly what we asked of her, and what too many of us would, if we could, ask of ourselves.
35
There are any number of weight-loss shows in the vein of The Biggest Loser. On Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss, the show takes a slightly more realistic approach to the project of significant weight loss, following fat people on their “weight-loss journey” over a year. The trainer is far more genial than those on The Biggest Loser. We see more of the genuine struggle of weight loss, how it’s not something that can be neatly accomplished and packaged for a televised audience. The message, though, is the same—that self-worth and happiness are inextricably linked to thinness.