Some shows are hell-bent on exploitation. On Fit to Fat to Fit, physically impeccable trainers gain weight so they can better empathize with their clients. Then they have to lose the weight again so as to return to their natural, more perfect forms. The show chronicles their initial joy of eating with abandon, followed by the apparent misery of having to eat fast food and being fat, and finally the lasting satisfaction of these trainers returning to their preferred state of impeccable fitness. Their clients are, by and large, accessories to the tragic, then triumphant gain-loss narrative the show loves.
Khloé Kardashian, who has often been tormented by tabloids for weighing a bit more than 110 pounds, is hosting a show for E! called Revenge Body, where participants get revenge on someone who has wronged them by losing weight and getting into shape. It’s a hell of a thing, this idea that the way to truly settle old scores is to get thinner and fitter. The very premise of the show suggests that if you’re fat, the people who have wronged you are probably gloating and reveling in your circumstance.
On My 600-lb Life, the show’s morbidly obese subjects travel to Houston, where one Dr. Younan Nowzaradan—or Dr. Now, as he is often called—performs weight-loss surgery on them. On this show, fat is treated as a pitiable spectacle. My 600-lb Life revels in the stories of people who are so overwhelmed by their unruly bodies that they often have to be helped out of their homes by EMTs. They are at the point of no return, their bodies failing them, their loved ones exasperated and ready to walk away. The fat people on this show eat outrageous quantities of food and are often suffering from unresolved trauma. They also suffer from any number of physical ailments. They are, in many ways, cautionary tales. Watch her, out of breath, making her way to the mailbox. Watch him, sunken into the couch, eating from a greasy bag of hamburgers. Watch her struggle to get in and out of her car, the steering wheel choking her gut. We see these people at their most vulnerable, in ill-fitting, often oversized clothes, if they can even wear clothes, their corpulence spreading everywhere, defying convention, defying our cultural norms.
Each episode has a very familiar narrative arc, in which we meet the subject and learn about their life, the seemingly miserable limitations of it. Then they meet Dr. Now, who chastises them and their loved ones for letting things get so out of hand. He tends to be palpably distressed by his patient and their family. Dr. Now often requires that these people go on a 1,200-calorie-a-day diet so they can lose fifty pounds before he will perform the weight-loss surgery. He does the surgery and it always goes well and then the subject sees a therapist and stumbles along trying to live and eat differently. This show loves to gratuitously display the fat body, all the excess, the mounds of flesh. The surgeries are graphic, and we see insides, globules of fat being shoved aside by medical instruments, as the obese body is medically brought to heel. Through medical intervention, the show offers redemption or, at least, a chance at redemption. Each episode tries to end on a hopeful note, but sometimes, even with medical intervention, there is no happy ending, which for the show is a drastically thinner body. In that, My 600-lb Life offers some truth.
I hate these shows, but clearly I watch them. I watch them even though sometimes they enrage me and sometimes they break my heart and all too often they reveal painfully familiar experiences of loneliness, depression, and genuine suffering born of living in a world that cannot accommodate overweight bodies. I watch these shows because even though I know how damaging and unrealistic they are, some part of me still yearns for the salvation they promise.
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It’s not just reality TV that is obsessed with weight. If you watch enough daytime television, particularly on “women’s networks,” you are treated to an endless parade of commercials about weight-loss products and diet foods—means of disciplining the body that will also fatten the coffers of one corporation or another. These commercials drive me crazy. They encourage self-loathing. They tell us, most of us, that we aren’t good enough in our bodies as they are. They offer us the cruelest aspiration. In these commercials, women swoon at the possibility of satisfying their hunger with somewhat repulsive foods while also maintaining an appropriately slim figure. The joy women express over fat-free yogurt and 100-calorie snack packs is not to be believed. Every time I watch a yogurt commercial I think, My god, I want to be that happy. I really do.
It is a powerful lie to equate thinness with self-worth. Clearly, this lie is damn convincing because the weight-loss industry thrives. Women continue to try to bend themselves to societal will. Women continue to hunger. And so do I.
In one of her many commercials for Weight Watchers, Jessica Simpson smiles brightly and says, “I started losing weight right away. I started smiling right away.” In her commercials for Weight Watchers, Jennifer Hudson shrieks about her newfound happiness and how, through weight loss—not, say, winning an Oscar—she achieved success. These are just two of many weight-loss advertisements that equate happiness with thinness and, by the law of inverses, obesity with misery.
Valerie Bertinelli was a Jenny Craig spokeswoman who proudly showed off her “new body” in 2012. Though she lost forty pounds, she then gained some of that weight back. For that crime, her penance was to go on the talk show circuit, trying to fight fat shaming. She would, of course, eventually head back to the gym when her press tour was over. She wanted, according to ABC News, to be “back in bikini shape by summer.” Kirstie Alley also rejoined the Jenny Craig fold around that time. “Without a coach helping us along the way, I don’t think someone can make it for the long haul,” Alley said. The public weight-struggle spectacle is a popular fallback for once-famous women who yearn to recapture their former glory.
Women, for that is whom these ecstatic diet food commercials and celebrity weight-loss endorsements are for, can have it all when they eat the right foods and follow the right diets and pay the right price.
What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?
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For most of my life, Oprah Winfrey has been a cultural icon who publicly struggles with her weight. For most of my life I have also struggled with my weight, though, mercifully, out of the public eye. Oprah has lost weight and celebrated that victory.