Is ‘The Biggest Loser’ Reboot Even a Little Better?

The quasi-talk therapy segment consists of Harper telling several contestants that their body fat percentage means that they have a “90 percent chance of dying from an obesity-related complication.” Another contestant was told on screen—seemingly for the first time—that he had type 2 diabetes. Once again, The Biggest Loser seems to invite viewers to revel in the voyeuristic pain and shock of watching a fat person learn that they have a chronic health condition. As I watched I felt that the show wanted to imply at every turn that these wretched fat people only have themselves to blame. In the world of the show, this is a wake up call, evidence of the undeniable failure of his body. This is tough love.

So much of the rhetoric used by the weight loss industry is about losing weight so you can finally get your life back, finally be happy—insistently conflating people’s bodies with their characters and the life that is available to them. To me, The Biggest Loser does not depart from this mindset. Like so many diet companies the show too readily collapses confidence, happiness, physical health, mental health, professional success, trauma recovery, and healthy relationships all into the container of simply being thin. While The Biggest Loser highlights participants’ past traumas and emotional lives and touches time and again on the importance of psychological health, you earn points in the contest by losing weight, not by processing trauma. In other words, I struggled to take much more away from the pilot episode than the idea that losing weight makes you a winner. In the world of The Biggest Loser your weight dictates your success. My takeaway about this as a viewer? Fat bodies are failures; thin bodies are successes.

Contestants and trainers insinuate (or outright state) that fat people will eat themselves to death and need to “win your life back.” While watching, I lost count of the number of teary-eyed contestants who referenced their own deaths, as if they were date-certain events. As if their very bodies necessitated an early demise.

One contestant, a cardiac nurse, recounts the pain she feels when patients, she assumes, doubt her credentials and trustworthiness simply because of her size. By any measure, this is a direct recounting of unchecked prejudice and bias. But in the world of the show, the bias she assumes her patients have are right: she can’t be a good nurse if she’s fat.

In that way, the new The Biggest Loser feels eerily similar to its predecessor, working overtime to link the way someone looks not only to their very mortality, but to their relationships, their sex lives, their parenting, their children’s destinies, their careers, and their very intelligence. In the world of the weight loss industry, including in The Biggest Loser, nearly any problem in a fat person’s life can be attributed to their size. After all, even after the show’s rebrand, the only measure of success—the only way to win—is by losing the most weight. In that way, I can’t see the show as a retreat from diet culture but as an enhancement and advancement of it.

In recent years, dieting has begun to fall out of favor in public discourse around health, gender, and attractiveness. Greater numbers of Americans are aware that most weight loss diets fail. That doesn’t mean, of course, that people aren’t still dieting. Plenty still are. But while the diet industry is worth an estimated $72 billion, the wellness industry is worth an estimated $4.2 trillion. Given the growing worth of the wellness industry, it’s easy to understand why companies (and TV shows) might make wellness a bigger part of their brand identity. It seems to me that it could help their perceived relevance—and their profit margins.

As far as I’m concerned, The Biggest Loser hasn’t reinvented itself—it has only changed its clothes. The show still lingers on long shots of shirtless fat bodies, still relishes blaming fat people for the biases we face too often. Its addition of inspiring music and can-do maxims from its trainers don’t constitute its reinvention—they only make up its disguise. The show hasn’t confronted its own deep-seated and extreme anti-fat bias—it’s only pushed it below the surface, making it even more insidious.

No, The Biggest Loser hasn’t changed. Like the rest of the diet industry, its commitment to “wellness” is the same old wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Related:

https://www.self.com/story/the-biggest-loser, GO TO SAUBIO DIGITAL FOR MORE ANSWERS AND INFORMATION ON ANY TOPIC

Take a look at our comprehensive guide to the best and most popular information ebooks and products available today on Detoxing, Colon Cleansing, Weight Loss and Dating and Romance. They are all in one spot, easy to find and compere to make a quick selection for the product that best fits your needs or wants.

Weight Loss Ebook Reviews

Weight loss products really work! Click here

Dating and Romance Ebook Reviews

Looking for Dating Guides? Click here