Once upon a time there was a man named Richard Simmons. Richard was a sweet man with a big heart, and if you were fat, Richard would be your friend. Thanks to television you could aerobicize with Richard or deal your meals through Richard, and you lost a little weight.
Alas, Richard came with silly little gym shorts and bad hair. He sat down with David Letterman for some very self-deprecating interviews–which, if you were thin by then, you found funny. But what most people didn’t know was that if you were really fat, Richard would visit you at home or call you on the phone even after the cameras stopped rolling.
Richard Simmons, now over 60, has disappeared from the weight loss landscape. In the current cultural war on fat his style was too low-tech, too mom-and-pop. Today, we want professionals to help us slim down: Trainers and nutritionists and computerized metabolic counters. If you don’t believe me, just watch The Biggest Loser, NBC’s weight loss reality contest, now in its sixth season.
With muscles tastefully defined under their ironic T-shirts and cargo shorts, trainers Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels represent both the means and the ends of the show. Constantly pushing her long brown hair back in frustration, Jillian describes her workouts as “beatings, beatings, and more beatings.” She likes to make people cry so they can get to the emotional root of their fatness.
Bob, as the show’s resident yogi (and with a slight Southern accent), appears to be the softer side of the duo. But Bob likes to win, and he punishes people who get in his way. Together with a medical staff, they push out-of-shape contestants to target weights at incredible speed. In the end, the successful contestants go home to become motivational speakers and trainers themselves.
I have, I must admit, watched The Biggest Loser since its inception. Reducing one’s life to a calorie equation is a study in rational choice that, formerly, only economists dreamt about. But starting with Season One in the fall of 2004, fat Americans began to live out this thought experiment for our entertainment.
Some of them were huge; some you wouldn’t notice in the checkout line at Wal-Mart. They were all doing and getting worked up over the stupidest things. In the pressure cooker that was the Biggest Loser House, consuming extra calories by, say, tasting a cupcake, could pose a real moral dilemma. In addition there were pantry confessionals, an ominous industrial scale, and some really excellent original orchestral music leading them through their intense workouts.
Refrigerators containing his “trigger” foods went dark when a contestant was eliminated. A healthily plump Caroline Rhea seemed to take the whole thing as a joke: “I’m sorry, you are not the biggest loser,” she would say, unconvincingly.
It was so camp; I was hooked.
Five seasons later, a lot has changed. Gone are the pantry confessionals. An additional trainer, Kim Lyons, didn’t last. Rhea has been replaced by the pert Alison Sweeney, whose weight fluctuates but only in negative correlation with her fertility. The contestants, whom we’ll just call Losers, are cast as pairs and, having watched the show for years, are now very sophisticated players. They throw Weigh-Ins and Challenges in order to manipulate their standings against other players: One of them even “drank” a shot of M&Ms to that end. But the prize, you see, is still $250,000.
Earlier in 2004, a reality show called My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss aired on Fox. Modeled after Donald Trump’s Apprentice, the show took 12 contestants to compete for a high profile position with a legendary employer. Going in, the contestants were given no further details: which boss, whose company, it didn’t matter. They went after the prize with the kind of energy only people who hate their jobs seem to have. They ran office exercises on a paintball course and tried to sell products such as reusable toilet paper.
The show was a hoax. The CEO was an actor who described his character as someone who “probably has a number of sexual harassment lawsuits pending.” My husband and I thought it was hilarious, but the show was cancelled after a few weeks.
Presumably the biggest idiot, or the most desperate contestant, won MBFOB. But the joke was on him. In contrast, The Biggest Loser plays it straight, despite the irony of using television to preach an active lifestyle. The contestants go happily along, even when forced to race down North America’s largest Slip ‘n’ Slide in their underwear. The camera zooms way in, making synecdoche of beer bellies and “muffin tops.”
It’s okay, we’re “changing lives.” This Oprahesque self-importance, and the show’s insipid theme song, disguise the obvious: If you go on a television show and try to lose 50 percent of your body weight in three months, your primary goal is not fitness. (Why do you think they complain so much about their “last chance” workout?) It’s a get-rich-quick scheme with the Losers in a race to see who can offer the show the cheapest return on excess calories.
Speaking of returns, I have to wonder how the Losers feel about all the shilling they do on camera. The show has perfected a technique of product embed surely designed to foil DVRs across America. Dutifully, the Losers gather to hear their trainers in scripted segments explain that, when they get hungry, they just chew Extra sugar-free gum. Surprise, the Losers win packs of Extra during their next Challenge! Visibly disturbed by Losers who won’t taste cauliflower, celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito teaches them to prepare mussels. In the microwave. It’s so easy with Ziploc steam bags. Cue the Ziploc commercial at the next break.
Despite their efforts, I remain skeptical that Jenny-O lean turkey is the Losers’ favorite brand of protein, or that none had eaten at Subway before coming on the show. I don’t believe that any chef would recommend mussels microwaved en Ziploc to people skittish about seafood.
If you wanted to watch a television program about obesity in America, you missed Shaquille O’Neal’s excellent 2007 program, Shaq’s Big Challenge. On that show, Shaq used his celebrity to argue for better nutrition in the school lunch program and physical education for all public school students in the state of Florida. It was an intelligent and sensitive look at a serious issue.
Naturally, when I heard that this season’s Biggest Loser would be focused on families, I thought the show was headed in that direction. I pictured Bob and Jillian teaching families to love sports and having serious talks about nutrition. Certainly there is a need: During the first episode Bob surprised Losers Vicky and Brady at their local doughnut shop. Their daughter, 64 pounds at four years old, continued to reach for the doughnuts as her parents celebrated the news of being selected for the show. Neither they nor Bob stopped her.
It’s business as usual on the Biggest Loser campus. Maybe she’ll be a contestant in the coming years.
Natalie Bostick is a writer in New York.
