Curb Your Enthusiasm, Viewers
Danny before; Danny after
Being the biggest loser, is, of course, a winning formula both for the leviathans who compete to reduce their portly physiques, and for NBC, which gains in ratings nearly what contestants lose in pounds.
The program presents them as oafish slugs who can’t get through a few push-ups without begging for a Yoo-Hoo. Once transformed, their emaciation produces a kind of mania that prompts them into ludicrous convictions. “Anybody can do it,” a rabbit-eyed Cahill told “Today Show” viewers a bit too ecstatically. Well, if anybody could do it, Danny, then anybody would<$> do it and we would not have a country in which obesity-related diseases are threatening to derail the already tottering health-care system.
And that’s only one of “The Biggest Loser’s” dangers: It makes the implausible seem not only probable, but swift, dramatic and life-changing.
The bigger problem is that losing the equivalent of a college football linebacker in a shade over six months is dangerous, probably temporary and potentially deadly. “I’m waiting for the first person to have a heart attack,” Dr. Charles Burant, of the University of Michigan Health System told the New York Times.
Ryan C. Benson, who lost 122 pounds on the program in 2005, is now approaching his 330-pound starting weight. He, like a few other contestants, has spoken publicly about the fasting and dehydrating techniques that left him urinating blood. Other contestants, like Alaska’s Kai Hibbard, who lost 118 pounds in the series’ third season, told the Anchorage Daily News how she forced herself to vomit and swallowed laxatives to lose weight, only to gain most of it back. Eric Chopin, who lost 214 of his 404 pounds in 2006, has also gained nearly 122 of those pounds back.
Others maintain their weight loss by exercising four hours a day or limiting their intake to Jell-O and leafy green vegetables.
Unsurprisingly, most of us don’t have the four to six hours that most of these contestants spend in the gym. We also don’t have draconian trainers who alternately cajole, humiliate and embolden us.
Still, we love to buy into the fantasy. So never mind that Oprah Winfrey, one of the world’s richest women with a battalion of chefs, trainers, doctors and experts, can’t get her weight under control. It will be different for us.
But when you’re dealing with a population, 64 percent of which is overweight or obese, you have to start by telling the truth. And the truth is that the best weight loss is a slow, steady, painful lifestyle shift in which exercise is a non-negotiable component. As Dr. Harvey Simon, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told the Los Angeles Times, “People who set unrealistic goals often end up seeking solace in the pantry, thus becoming the biggest losers of all.”