Plus Size Sideshow??

This article came (once again) from my friend & colleague Monica Lynch....it's a lengthy read but well worth it....

This one is from The New York Times (Sunday Edition)....

Television
Plus-Size Sideshow

From left, WE TV; Trae Patton/NBC; TLC
From left, scenes from “Bulging Brides” on WE; “The Biggest Loser” on NBC; and “Honey We’re Killing the Kids” on TLC.

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: August 22, 2008
IT’S the suffering that sells.

Before-and-after television needs a deep reserve of misery, and particularly on weight-loss shows the “before” returns in rhythmic waves of humiliation and self-loathing:

In a faded snapshot on the Joy Fit Club segment of “Today,” an obese young woman in a frizzy perm and bulging shorts gamely holds up a fork at a family picnic.

Newly slimmed down contestants on “The Biggest Loser,” don their lost weight — padded fat suits — to race one another across a beach in the hot sun.

The 500-pound heroine of “Ruby,” a new documentary-style series on the Style Network that is scheduled to begin in November, piles bricks under her bed so it won’t splinter under her weight.

The lows drop ever more excruciatingly downward before rising up in a frenzy of exertion, deprivation, extensive weight loss and a new life. And then the cycle starts over again: a new season of “The Biggest Loser” or “Celebrity Fit Club,” fresh variations on “X-Weighted,” “Big Medecine,” “Honey We’re Killing the Kids,” “Bulging Brides” or “I Can Make You Thin” — binge viewing for a nation obsessed with weight.

From top, WeTV; Filmmagic/VH1; Trae Patton/NBC; TLC
From top, an episode on “Bulging Brides”; contestants on “Celebrity Fit Club”; the weigh-in on “The Biggest Loser”; giving advice on “Honey We’re Killing the Kids.”

Society venerates skinniness, but people identify mostly with those who have trouble measuring up. Oprah Winfrey was perhaps the first major star to humanize her weight struggle and ennoble it into a parable of redemption and self-discovery.

Now that kind of journey is engrained in the culture as Americana, an escalator-age version of a Horatio Alger story, from fat to thinness. Early in the 2008 campaign the dark horse who emerged as a Republican favorite was Mike Huckabee, a preacher and former governor of Arkansas who won over primary voters with his tale of huge weight loss as spiritual salvation. On talk shows Mr. Huckabee would hold up his campaign pledges and the bannerlike size 50 pants he wore in his previous life. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton made herself likable by invoking Weight Watchers, while the naturally slender Senator Barack Obama has to watch how much he watches his carbs or risk alienating working-class voters.

Fat was rarely seen in the early days of television, and mostly, it was either funny or scary, Jackie Gleason or the profile silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock. Back then obesity wasn’t an urgent concern or a national pastime, and it figured only at the margins of popular culture. Nowadays magazines and fashion designers cut their cloth to size zero, while the Health and Human Services Department warns that 65 percent of the population is overweight or obese. Thinness is a class-conscious fixation, but fat is a national rite of passage: like marriage, divorce or the death of a loved one, corpulence is something most people cope with at a point in their lives.

So it stands to reason that weight-loss shows are now a part of the television landscape, spanning NBC, the Style Network and Discovery Health, as common as crime procedurals, soap operas or talk shows. (All television genres have signature moments. On westerns it’s the cattle stampede; on weight-loss shows it’s the weigh-in, presented in slow motion and in black and white.)

These fat-reduction spectacles are embedded in a mixed message that mirrors a broader cultural clash of appearance and appetite — and our obsession with both. Against a loop of talk shows and made-for-TV dramas about eating disorders, Americans are goaded into ever more drastic and extreme expectations of physical perfection on prime time, while their path is mined with Double Croissan’wich specials at Burger King and Olive Garden “Tour of Italy” triptychs (lasagna, chicken parmigiana and fettuccine Alfredo). On “Today” a homily on sensible dieting from the Joy Fit Club is followed by instructions in a following segment for hibiscus margaritas and churros — deep-fried, sugar-dipped Mexican crullers. On the WE network’s show “The Secret Lives of Women,” a tribute to three women’s hard-won journey to extreme weight loss is interrupted by an ad for Baskin-Robbins Oreo sundae.

It’s a world of contradictions bracketed by all-you-can-eat breakfast at Applebee’s and pay-as-you-go gastric bypass.

Television is rife with shows that are part public health warning, part carnival side show (Jenny Craig meets Coney Island), and none is more so than “The Biggest Loser,” which returns on Sept. 16 for its fifth season. This NBC reality competition selects alarmingly overweight people and puts them through a Herculean diet and exercise regimen. The winner of the $250,000 prize is the one who loses the most weight, but everybody goes home lighter. Contestants are divided into teams and swaddled in tough love, encouragement and self-esteem tips, aided by trainers, dieticians and counselors.

There is not much laughter in the dining halls or steam rooms but plenty of inspirational sweat, hugs and tears.

But “The Biggest Loser” is first and foremost a reality show, where the entertainment value is measured in extremes. There isn’t much punch or visual payoff to a loss of 20 or 30 pounds; viewers have come to expect 100- and 200-pound miracles. Contestants who weigh 300 and 400 pounds are stripped down physically and emotionally, put in form-fitting bike shorts and forced to get on a scale, as clumsy and vulnerable as the human blobs of the future in “Wall-E.”

Audiences look on with repulsion or empathy, and sometimes both. It’s a conceit that simultaneously prods viewers to gape at unimaginably large human beings and also root for their success. Mostly the visuals feed complacency; as overweight as a viewer may feel, he or she surely will never fall this far into the potato chip abyss. And if the morbidly obese people on screen can drop 100 pounds, then even the chubbiest kid on the couch can fit into a swimsuit by summer.

On all of these shows the obese confess to past excesses and shameful moments. Often the kind of infra-red camera that captures illegal aliens crossing the borders at night catches the contestants raiding the fridge or bolting down raw cookie dough straight from the package. There are old snapshots of solitary prom nights and beach holidays spent indoors. It’s biography as body mass index, chronicled with lurid close-ups of bulging stomachs, tree trunk thighs and wobbly arms. On a recent segment of the Joy Fit Club the “Today” host Hoda Kotb introduced Mary, a woman who weighed 345 pounds before losing 174 pounds on Weight Watchers over years. “Lets look at her story,” Ms. Kotb said.

Mary obligingly spoke of embarrassing moments and moments of despair over a mournful montage of photographs from childhood to middle age, marooned on a couch in giant jeans stretched tight, arms failing to conceal overlapping stomach folds.

Then comes the reveal: Mary danced out, trim in a wrap dress and high heels, and triumphantly described her joy and the many surgeries she underwent to get rid of excess skin, including a tummy tuck, breast lift and work on her arms. (“I had my arm waddles wacked off,” she explained.)

These plus-size transformations are spellbinding, admirable and even enviable, but they are also teases, making impossible transformations seem just a commitment away. The lonely, self-hating journey of weight loss is turned into an exhilarating and emotionally fulfilling team sport. These programs also dismay advocates from groups like the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination or the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, who complain that they frame obesity as a character issue or a public-health menace and further stigmatize those who do not conform.

Few other shows on television have done much to reflect the new supersize viewer, though Tyra Banks and Dr. Phil pay lip service to confidence-building and size acceptance. And Dove has an advertising campaign featuring normal-to-plus-size women that sells self-esteem along with facial cleansers.

Real women — and the national average is between size 12 and 14 — are certainly not represented on television in any proportion to their actual numbers. Sitcom moms and crime-show detectives are reed thin (though off screen, should they commit the crime of failing to lose postpartum weight or reveal an inch of flab on the beach, they are exposed and mocked as cellulite recidivists). At most, an occasional sidekick will show some avoirdupois. Roseanne was the first television heroine who was heavy and sexually active, but she didn’t start a trend any more than the Junoesque heroine of ABC’s “Less Than Perfect” did.

The American physique has changed, but television still perpetuates a two-way body image distortion. Characters on dramatic series are unrealistically slender, while reality shows like “The Biggest Loser” showcase contestants who are dramatically obese.

Viewers are caught somewhere in the contradictions.

Very interesting, dont'cha think Family?

"To say that obesity is caused by merely consuming too many calories is like saying that the only cause of the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party."