Beth Bernstein, MFT Matilda St. John, MFT
The beginning of the current boom in reality television dates back to the first season of Survivor in 2000. Since that time most reality television shows echo the basic themes laid out in the Survivor format: competition in an isolated setting that encourages contentiousness and deceit among contestants, weekly public humiliation of one person who is cast off the show, participation in bizarre or humiliating activities motivated by small prizes and cut-throat competition to win a grand prize which is usually money. We suppose it was just a matter of time before reality television turned its focus to the body, specifically competitive weight loss, which arrived in the fall of 2004 with NBC’s premiere of The Biggest Loser. In this show, 12 fat contestants are isolated on a ranch, put on extremely low-fat, low-carb diets, and given a grueling exercise regimen overseen by two personal trainers. The competition begins immediately when the 12 contestants are divided into two teams, each team guided by a trainer.
The 12 contestants are introduced to viewers via voice-overs where they speak of their self-hatred and unhappiness, which they attribute solely to their weight. All make references to having unhealthful lifestyles. This sets up a show based on a fat-phobic premise: these contestants, and by extension all fat people, are gluttonous, slothful, unable to help themselves without external intervention, and are therefore deserving of the treatment they are about to receive. There’s a “stacking the jury” feel to the casting of contestants; there’s not one healthful, happy, well-adjusted fat person in the group to challenge the premise. The producers filled the cast with people who admit to having sedentary lifestyles, issues with food, low self-esteem, and a poor relationship with their bodies. The contestants’ sizes are arguably irrelevant—there are people of all sizes living unhealthful, self-hating lifestyles—but having fat contestants, against the backdrop of a national “War on Obesity,” gives the producers permission to abuse and shame the contestants under the guise of saving them.
Each show contains three acts, the first building to a competition between the two teams, with the winning team getting a prize and/or some edge over the losing team, the second leading to a weigh-in where all contestants strip down to minimal clothing and are weighed on a huge floor scale with a stadium-sized display, and the third culminating in a voting-off ceremony wherein the losing team (measured as the team that lost the least weight) votes off one member. One winner (crowned “the biggest loser”) succeeds by avoiding being voted off, making it to the final three contestants, and losing the most body weight and body fat.
In keeping with other reality TV shows, the challenges issued to contestants are over-the-top, but on The Biggest Loser these tasks are specifically tailored to shame the fat contestants about their bodies. Challenges included performing a song and dance number about being fat for an audience of bored tourists, building a tower of food they’re forbidden to eat using only their mouths to move the food, and squeezing themselves through the small window of a moving race car. The editors exploit and encourage the viewers’ contempt with unflattering camera angles early in the show, which later transform into soft, glowing portrayals to convey approval of their ever-smaller bodies. There is a relentless equation of weight loss with increasing health, beauty and quality of life. This assertion remains steadfast, simplistic and entirely unexamined. Indeed we’re shown evidence of contestants becoming physically stronger and increasing their stamina but, given the speed of the transformation and the intensity of the regimen they’re following, contestants appear to remain just as estranged from a conscious experience of their bodies as when they started.
Food is referenced constantly on the show; the voting-off ritual is referred to as “time to cut the fat,” contestants’ lost weight is converted into food (i.e., 50 pounds of apple pie), and small mountains of cupcakes abound to tempt the contestants off their diets. Contestants are repeatedly faced with their stated “favorite foods,” but always shown in cartoonishly large amounts (thousands of doughnuts, hundreds of pieces of fried chicken, a vat of macaroni and cheese). This ludicrous scope sets up the repeated suggestion that only fat people eat these foods in excessive amounts and that fat people cannot be trusted around these foods. Their stated issues with eating go largely unaddressed. Contestants are portrayed as utterly ignorant about food choices, knowing less than the average dieter about the calorie, carbohydrate and fat content of most foods. Portrayals of actual eating include footage of exhausted contestants morosely stabbing at salads while rhapsodizing about the foods they’d like to be eating. Like any dieters, contestants are taught to contain and deny their appetites. Their program is to eat what they’re told to eat rather than learn to listen to and trust their bodies’ hunger.
What we see of the contestants’ weight loss regimen (being encouraged to workout until they vomit and then resume exercising, severe food restriction before weigh-ins, pressure to ignore exercise-aggravated injuries) is troubling. Additionally, the amount of weight lost is staggering; many of the male contestants had weight losses in the double digits in successive weeks. The winning contestant reportedly lost 122 pounds in 21 weeks. While we as HAES-informed therapists might view this as boot camp to develop an eating disorder, there was nothing but positive regard for these worrisome numbers on the show, and a similar lack of alarm in the popular media. During the run of other reality television shows that highlight radical physical transformation (The Swan, Extreme Makeover), many articles appeared in the popular media discussing the disturbing and questionable ethics of a show that forces a person to surrender all decisions about their body to the aesthetics of an “expert.” We could find no such critical analysis of The Biggest Loser. Apparently, what was disquieting on other shows was “inspiring” on this one, exposing the cultural approval for weight loss by any means necessary.
On most competitive reality shows subjugation of the self to grueling and humiliating tasks and the intrusion of being constantly filmed are excused as understandable in the pursuit of cash. The reality shows that focus on radical physical transformation differ because exiting contestants voice the belief that they have somehow undergone a psychological and spiritual transformation. While contestants from shows like Fear Factor might express that they had overcome a phobia by doing some outrageous stunt, you do not hear them express contempt and disgust for their former selves. However, on The Biggest Loser, every contestant’s exit interview centered on the gratitude they felt for the subjugation, with many saying they didn’t care about the prize, since this had been a learning experience they so desperately needed.
There is an almost missionary fervor in the testimony of these converted “heathens,” who tearfully testify to the new lease on life they have been given by the trainers who saved them. In a particularly disturbing episode in the second half of the season, contestants were required to run around a track wearing vests carrying the amount of weight that each had lost so far. At the end of the race, viewers saw contestants laying down their weighted vests and expressing incredulity that they could have ever been so heavy. They were then faced with overexposed, life-size “before” pictures of themselves in minimal, unflattering clothing. One contestant (the ultimate winner of the show) was shown crying and attacking the cutout in a burst of shame and disgust aimed at his former self. Through these tactics, producers encourage psychological splitting (former fat self=bad, new compliant self=good). While many of the contestants claim to love their new selves in the exit interview, this love seems highly conditional, as they (and we) are continually encouraged to view their former, fatter selves with disdain.
As HAES-informed therapists we are committed to helping people foster greater awareness in their relationship with their bodies, encouraging all of our clients to listen to and trust themselves. For clients who are struggling to have their own experience of their bodies as opposed to one that is dictated to them, exposure to The Biggest Loser is counterproductive at best. We saw no evidence of contestants being encouraged to define their own program or find their own answers, much less to express choice or preference. The two male contestants who offered any resistance to the program imposed on them were pathologized as defiant, unmotivated, and under-performing.
The Biggest Loser’s premise is the same shopworn idea that fat is bad, and bullying fat people under the guise of saving them is appropriate. By shifting from sedentary binge eaters into over-exercising dieters, contestants are transformed from fat people with one set of impairments in their relationship to food and their bodies into thinner people with a different set of socially rewarded impairments. Through their repeatedly expressed gratitude for this change, the contestants not only participate in their own oppression, but also affirm it. By extension, the fat viewer is encouraged to follow suit. Disturbingly, NBC reports that hundreds of thousands of people have auditioned for the chance to be part of season two, and, as of this writing, they are also auditioning couples and families who wish to compete together. To us, this highlights the insidiousness of internalized fat phobia, encouraged and produced by the show, which defines subjugation as moral uplift and a privilege. In the end, the biggest loser is the viewer who digests this banquet of misinformation uncritically.
Beth Bernstein, MFT, and Matilda St. John are licensed Marriage and Family Therapists practicing in Oakland, California. Their previous works have appeared in Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, Bust: The Magazine for Women with Something to Get Off Their Chests, and Reading Women’s Lives.
This article is from the Health at Every Size Journal and can be cited as Beth Bernstein, MFT and Matilda St. John, MFT, “HAES/The Biggest Loser,” from Health At Every Size 20:1 (Spring 2006).
