The Biggest Loser

I’ve really wanted to talk about this show for some time.  My attention deficit doesn’t allow for me to blog it real time.  Trust me.  I would if I could.  But it is truly one of those reality shows I tell people they have to see to believe.  Don’t get me wrong; there’s nothing innately spectacular about the show itself.  Aside from the incredible amount of voyeurism inherent in the production, it can be described, quite simply, as a bunch of obese people fighting the odds they placed against themselves.  It is the manifestation of our National self-hate, and if I were the one who came up with it, I would have called it “The Glutton Review”.  At once funny and sad, The Biggest Loser occupies the self-respect shaped hole that we as Americans ignore daily, be it as we thread fast food drive-thrus with our oversized cars, sit lazily on our over sized escalators, or cart ourselves around the grocery store in our motorized scooters looking for our next glucose laced fix.

If you don’t know what it is, or haven’t seen it, The Biggest Loser pits obese contestants against each other in a race to shed the most pounds, through a series of trials and daily workouts.  The ham-like players are housed in a ranch (no seriously), and put to work daily in a gym with two trainers.  At the end of each week (summarized in a weekly episode), each contestant is weighed to see how much they’ve lost, and then vote off their weakest link.  Every week has a goddamn twist to the strategy, so much so I stopped caring about who gets voted off, and I’ve started just focusing on who loses the most, who complains the most, and who is closest enough to death for me to start placing bets.  (I actually was excited by an elderly contestant in the first episode of this season collapsing in the gym.  The prospect of his end near, he was ultimately voted off.  Awesome, right?!  It’s the closest we’ve ever been as a society to the Thunder Dome.)

Forget the contest, though.  This show is about our collective failure to recognize the death sentence we’ve placed on ourselves through our despicable diets.

Just kidding.  It’s more about seeing these monsters remove their shirts for weigh-in, and how many nipple jokes I can make in the 20 minutes it takes for 54 year old Ronald Morelli to climb the stairs to the giant scale each contestant is subjected to each week.  Like, they needed a scale that big to adequately measure these bastards’ girth.  You could weigh a semi-truck on that thing.  Anyway, Ronald, a seemingly nice guy, had a stomach bypass a few years ago to limit his intake.  Unfortunately, even modern medical science was no match for Ronald “McDonald” Morelli’s appetite, as he still manages to carry a weight of 400+ pounds.  An MRI early on this season revealed that his stomach is still stapled, and smaller than the base of his hand.  The surrounding tissue is nothing but fat, blood, and McDouble wrappers.  Oh, and when he takes his shirt off, he looks like a turtle that’s been in a house fire.  His 18 year old son, Mikey, has fared better, dropping nearly 100 pounds in the 11 weeks since he’s been on the show, staving off an otherwise genetic death sentence.  You root for these guys because their situation is absolutely indelible, and they haven’t given up.  However, if you saw them at the mall, you’d probably throw lunch meat at them and taunt them for having a prehistoric olifactory system, in which their animal-like sight is based on movement.

Not pictured: 13 jars of mayonnaise. Wonder where they went...

These two are the model for what I assume the show is trying to illustrate.  Between ad placements for Activia and Fiber One bars (because, y’know, pooping is a good diet’s copilot), the common thread here is that these situations are ultimately preventable.  The producers do their best to communicate that, should you reach a size only acceptable if you happen to be born a planet, the effects are difficult to reverse.  In fact, it takes nearly 30 weeks, two trainers, going to the gym every day for 6 – 8 hours a day, and a diet of grain, vegetables, and anything else considered a catalyst for bowel movements to shed the visible damage.  While beauty is on the inside, we are constantly reminded that we are unhealthy, lazy slobs.  Balance that message with the dichotomy of urging us to stick around for the entire 2 hours to watch the drama unfold, and you’ve got an incredibly tangible slice of American hypocrisy.

Of course, going back to what I said before, we mostly watch the show to feed (get it?) our voyeuristic tendencies.  I am no model of health, nor do I preach anything beyond my lifestyle, but these people have just taken eating to a whole new level.  They’ve made food a drug, and their addiction has killed who they used to be.  So you have to give it to them for trying, even though it took a television show, money, fame (sort of), and leaving their families behind to get it done.  We reap what we sow.  Which, now that I think of it, is an ironic reference to farming and food in this case.  (So was putting this rotund herd in a effing RANCH, but, hey, they’re getting healthy!)

Then there are the failures.  The people who go on the show explicitly for money.  People like, say, Joelle Gwynn, (seen here looking a lot like Grimace) whose sloth was only matched by her denial.  You could fill her stretch pants three times over with the yards of complaint she slung at Bob the Effeminate Trainer.  Time and again, she’d use words like “can’t” and “won’t” and “bacon” as she huffed and puffed her way through the level 1.3 setting on the treadmill.  When tempted during a challenge with money to leave the show ($5000), she admitted in her confessional that the amount would buy her a home.  Really?  Where do you live, a Hooverville?  And more importantly, where do you keep your giant time machine?

So we cheer a little when the biggun we hate fails, and we cheer when the one we root for succeeds.  The Biggest Loser, while preachy and often times transparent, is at best an entertaining game show in which we quietly admit to ourselves that we are a nation of heart disease and obesity.  It’s a dark comedy, really.  These people are at death’s door, and possibly the only thing keeping them alive is a dollar menu, or their next trip to Cinnabon.  It’s disgusting and sad, and it’s one of my favorite television shows on right now.