Some of the women I work with are big fans of the reality T.V. competition "The Biggest Loser." The show, if you're unfamiliar with it, takes overweight contestants, generally with tragic personal tales of loss or abuse, and motivates them through competitions to lose weight for a cash prize. Their methods on the ranch are intense and based around rigorous diet and exercise and a lot of emotional purging and largely negative reinforcement.
Recently NBC gave Jillian Michaels, one of the shows' hosts and trainers, a show all of her own where she visits overweight families across America for a week and formulates action plans for them to live a more healthy lifestyle. At least, that's what the intention of the show is claimed to be. After sitting through an episode of the show, and having read many of the follow up horror story accounts of contestants on The Biggest Loser, I think that what Michaels does is more about size than health and is more about effective and profitable television than personal and familial growth.
Michaels's attitudes around the people that she works with on these shows is condescending and militant. She screams at them as they are working out, telling them they've been killing themselves for all this time and repeatedly asking them don't they want to be skinny, don't they want to be healthy. She repeatedly without problem equates health with thinness, an attitude that has manifested itself so deeply in contemporary American culture that many people don't see a problem with it at all. Her attitudes about fat and about the contestants have also been illustrated through press interviews.
The episode of the show that I watched is very effectively recapped in the AV Club post here. The episode ended with the family losing weight before the daughter's wedding, providing the producers with an opportunity to make a charitable gesture in financing this heteronormative ceremonious right of passage, and providing them with an accompanying institution to justify the success of the process that they've all gone through, and that viewers have witnessed. My heart is warmed.
Never mind the fact that the show promotes widely problematic attitudes of fast easy results and doesn't address the greater systemic issues of why our country is so fat, and doesn't address our relentless panic around that alleged epidemic. An issue the show does address, but perhaps inadequately, is the idea of our cultural attitudes about food being linked to our inability to communicate with one another within our sociological units, particularly the family. If you can't hold a conversation with a group of people, why not bring an element into play that will facilitate some kind of action and fill the time? Why not just eat? Though I honestly feel that this is an oversimplification of the problem.
What Jillian Michaels and her widespread success illustrate is the perversely unhealthy attitudes around food, weight and body image that we practice as a culture. Fatshionista wrote a piece (here) that expresses the idea of how Michaels, through this process, becomes a savior to these people, a savior who ultimately abandons them as to further her career and her brand and the brand of the show, and then they are left at risk of feeling more hopeless than they did to begin with. This makes sense to me. As does the fact that contestants on Biggest Loser have reported how the show's methods were so unhealthy that in certain instances they were so dehydrated they were peeing blood (here) or developing serious eating disorders (here).
We can't allow ourselves to justify the ineffective and destructive attitudes and methods of competition-based reality television shows and the personalities birthed through them because of deeply seeded panic we have as a culture around fat people. If you're worried about obesity, why not examine the way food is made, marketed and manufactured throughout this country? Why not look at how cities are designed furthering the car-centric layout we've thoughtlessly created and perpetuated? Why not examine how advertisers create unrealistic representations of people that leave us all hating our bodies and suffering from destructive feelings of inadequacy? Losing it with Jillian Michaels is not about solving the obesity crisis. It's about salvaging a false sense of control through force that is so tempting to us in a society that is driven on contempt for ourselves but faith in the systems that govern us and dictate our perceptions of reality.
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