Because I do not watch TV much, there are huge swathes of popular culture that I am oblivious to. Well, not completely oblivious, because I do read news sites and come across news headlines about things that enter into the periphery of my consciousness so that I know that something is going on and may even be aware of the people involved without knowing the particulars. For example, I knew that there was some kind of public feud between two rappers one of whom was Drake while the other’s name escapes me but did not know what it was about. I could look it up of course, but I wasn’t interested enough to bother.
I am also aware that there are a vast number of reality shows out there but have never watched any, though I know that some of them involve squabbling housewives and others involve people trying to find romantic partners while yet others involve some kind of survival tests. I was aware that in their quest for ratings, the TV networks and the show’s producers go to some lengths to create drama among the participants, even providing them with scripts or prompts, so that the word ‘reality TV’, implying that the shows are organically evolving with the cameras being just passive observers, is really a joke. Since the shows are taped well in advance and heavily edited before broadcast to create various storylines, they have to be filmed in secret and the participants are sequestered so that they cannot meet with their families and friends and are bound by confidentiality agreements so that surprises can be sprung on viewers. This isolation likely increases their sense of vulnerability. It is only long after the shows have been broadcast that people start revealing the often brutal and abusive conditions that prevailed while the filming was going on.
One such case is the reality series The Biggest Loser that ran for 17 seasons. Each season started with a cast of overweight people who underwent strenuous diet and exercise regimens in a competition to see who could lose the most weight, with the winner taking home $250,000. The series was apparently a huge hit with massive ratings. This seems to be due to the combination of four factors: that some people are obsessed with being slim, that people want to be on TV and are willing to do anything to get on it, that audiences seem to love seeing fat people being humiliated, and people love competitions. If there is drama and fighting among the participants, so much the better for ratings. The producers selected people who were deeply unhappy with their weights and thought that it was the cause of many of the problems in their lives, whether that was true or not. Hence they were desperate and unlikely to quit and walk away midway.
Originally the series started with men’s starting weight being around 300 lbs and women around 200 lbs. But as the seasons went on, the pressure to make it ever more dramatic resulted in heavier people being recruited and then being subjected to even more strenuous regimens, seriously risking the health of the participants. At times, the way that the trainers treated the participants reminded me of the harsh way that Marine recruits were treated at boot camp as depicted in the film Full Metal Jacket.
Although many of the participants lost huge amounts of weight so that they were hardly recognizable, eventually many of them gained back the lost weight and some even more once the show was over. One reason may be that the strenuous exercises they did resulted in their metabolisms permanently slowing down, so that now they burn fewer calories than they used to, resulting in weight gain even if they ate less than they used to. The problem is that once fat cells are added to the body, they do not go away. Losing weight only results in those cells getting smaller, ready to regain their size. (In the comments, Silentbob links to an article that points out that this last statement is misleading, that the number of fat cells in the body for anyone remains roughly the same over time.)
Now Netflix has released a three-part documentary Fit for TV: The Reality of the Biggest Loser that reveals the ugliness of what went on. What was shown on TV was bad enough with the fitness trainers berating the participants as they do the various exercises in the gym and outside, to the point of vomiting and collapsing. But it appears that it was even worse behind the scenes. Allegations that participants were given caffeine pills and other drugs created a scandal that resulted in the plug being pulled from the show. But the show might have been killed anyway by the current availability of the injectable weight-loss drug Ozempic that makes the need for diet and exercise unnecessary. What kind of ratings would there be to see people injecting themselves?
Here’s the trailer. It gives a fairly good idea of the documentary though it does not capture the pathos of some of the people who took part and felt that they had been taken advantage of.
“Reality” TV is not a new concept. Nigel Kneale, creator of “Quatermass”, foresaw its development in the TV play “The Year of the Sex Olympics” (not as raunchy as the title suggests, which is hardly surprising given that it was broadcast on the BBC in 1968.
From wiki:
Fun fact: it stars Brian Cox, late of “Succession”, in a major role.
My first exposure to reality TV was in 1978 when the BBC broadcast “Living in the past”, where 15 volunteers sustained themselves for an entire year using only the tools, clothing, crops and livestock they’d have had in about 200BC. 12 months of filming resulted in just 12 episodes of 50 minutes each, a rate of content production that would never be tolerated today.
When Big Brother first aired in the UK it was legitimately interesting -- none of the contestants really knew what they were getting into, and it was apparent (especially with hindsight) that to a large extent neither did the producers. The contestants were mostly just normal people, and the resulting show was became riveting viewing. Subsequent seasons became subject to the law of diminishing returns, but the producers rapidly became more savvy in their casting, rejecting anyone remotely normal and stuffing their rosters with freaks and idiots. On one level this did mean TV audiences were able to have exposure to types of people they might not know in their own lives -- wildly flamboyant extroverted gay stereotypes, or transgender immigrants… and I’m proud to say the UK TV audience took these freaks to their hearts and gave them the win (Brian Belo had quite a successful follow on career in television, among others).
Unfortunately the search for extremes also turned up less acceptable examples of humanity, and the conflicts were generally stoked by even more disgusting scum, the tabloid press. Hypocritically enough when ignorant racist former contestant Jade Goody was diagnosed with and died from cancer, all was forgiven and forgotten and she became practically another Princess Di(e).
The point of “reality” TV is that it’s CHEAP -- there’s no script and the participants aren’t actors. A variant I’m aware of but haven’t bothered to keep up with is something they call “constructed reality”, which poses as reality TV (i.e. as something vaguely real) but DOES have scripts and DOES pay its participants as if they’re actors. Yeah, no thanks.
Biggest loser sounds like it went along the Big Brother trajectory -- starting as an on-paper reasonable experiment with potentially educational and inspirational goals (because getting thinner and fitter IS better than not doing), but inevitably falling to the capitalist drive to capture eyeballs by becoming ever more extreme. Blame the audience.
What’s interesting is that since weight-loss drugs that actually work have become available, the odious “healty at every size” movement and the morbidly obese crusaders against “fat-phobia” who spent their time and made their money promoting the lie that it was OK to weigh as much as two healthy people your height have pretty much all just… got thin. (At least, the ones who lived long enough -- really quite a lot of “fat-fluencers” died of obesity-related conditions before making it to 40). Oddly, it turns out that when you can just inject something that will make it so you don’t eat a whole chocolate cake for breakfast (instead of just having the willpower to decide not to, like a normal person), people who previously bleated that “I just can’t lose weight” and “it’s genetic” and “I’m big boned” discover that hey, they just can, it’s not genetic and their bones are just the right size. It’s almost as if their problem was their choices, not their metabolism or heritage. In any case, it’s encouraging to note that it’s been a long time since there was a plus-size model on the front of any fashion magazine -- the brief fad for pretending it was OK to be grossly overweight is over, and with the availability of weight-control drugs, likely never to return.
More pop culture comes from online events today. There are so many channels for these events that everybody has culture they are not aware of. What is happening in Fortnight? What about Roblox? Streaming movies and shows? There are popular sports like dirt biking that don’t get much TV coverage. Twitch streaming, virtual idols and online musicians. There are popular cartoons with no print version at all. Entire concerts are streamed online. Memes have multiple online cultural groups of their own.
@1 sonofrojblake:
This happened in the US also. The break out reality show was MTV’s Real World. The first couple of seasons the show was a bunch of random people mostly trying to break into entertainment. The producers realized they could pump the ratings with more conflict and packed with show with people who over reacted or acted that way.
This set off the typical cycle of making things worse for short term gains. If the show is banking on ratings from staged hysterical events they need to stage more outlandish events every season. Eventually it wears thin and the show now has nobody with anything else interesting.
To lose fat weight without losing muscle and without slowing metabolism and without hunger, the key is to stop eating carbohydrates. People get real success from low carb ketogenic eating, or even better from a carnivore diet of only animal products. It worked for me.
Oddly, it turns out that when you can just inject something that will make it so you don’t eat a whole chocolate cake for breakfast (instead of just having the willpower to decide not to, like a normal person), people who previously bleated that “I just can’t lose weight” and “it’s genetic” and “I’m big boned” discover that hey, they just can, it’s not genetic and their bones are just the right size. It’s almost as if their problem was their choices, not their metabolism or heritage.
This is nothing but ignorant bullshit victim-blaming. If someone is able to lose weight with the aid of a drug, it DOES NOT logically follow that they could have lost weight without the drug; nor does it logically follow that “it’s not genetic.”
In any case, it’s encouraging to note that it’s been a long time since there was a plus-size model on the front of any fashion magazine…
You DO know there’s a significant difference between “plus-size” and “unhealthily obese and in need of medical intervention,” right? I don’t pay much attention to fashion magazines, so I may be missing something; but why do you find it “encouraging” that you don’t have to look at plus-size models? Do you think rigid conformity to narrow standards of “beauty” is a good thing?
Do an image search for ‘plus size model’ and see for yourself. A good 40% of my results were plainly obese.
Holms: That means 60% of “plus-size models” were NOT “plainly obese.”
@Raging Bee
Presumably he means encouraging for anorexia clinics.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/beauty-standards-and-mental-health
(I’m kidding of course. We all know he means encouraging to his desire to treat women as decorative objects.)
“The break out reality show was MTV’s Real World.”
And this started the process that utterly ruined MTV. Yes, another factor was the ability to find music on internet, but there would still have been a market for programs covering new musicians and trends.
Instead, the cheap garbage of reality TV engulfed everything like the Wehrmacht engulfed Poland.
Perhaps I was being too subtle for one with no biology knowledge. Rephrased: “A good 40% of my results were plainly overweight to an unhealthy degree.”
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/obesity/symptoms-causes/syc-20375742
I was interested in this extraordinary claim and so investigated. It’s true but misleading. Fat cells do not “go away”, but neither are they “added to the body”. Or to be more precise such cells are created and destroyed at equal rates in both the fat and the thin.
The picture Mano is painting of ever increasing (but never decreasing) fat cells is false.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/106343
Silentbob @#10,
Thanks for the correction. I have made a change in the post.
@Raging Bee, 4:
It can’t be, since there aren’t any “victims” here. If you eat too much and get fat, you are in no sense a “victim”. This is not like people who were told cigarettes were good for them, or, later, that they weren’t bad for them. Everyone knows that the scientific consensus is that your health is better if you’re not fat, and that if you eat too much, you get fat. There’s not some conspiracy by “big food” to cover this up -- quite the opposite, there’s been a predatory industry around trying to get people to eat less since before I was born. So no, I’m not “victim-blaming”, because I reject the idea that if you’re fat you’re a victim. You’re not. You made choices, choices had consequences, consequences you cannot pretend you didn’t know were a predictable result of your choices.
Well, OK… if the drug you’re talking about is some science-fictional thing that will just miraculously melt/evaporate fat. But that’s not the drug we’re talking about -- the ones at issue are ones that, to simplify it possibly too much, cause the patient to eat less. Because that’s the issue -- that pesky first law of thermodynamics. More energy in than out = more weight. Less energy in than out = weight loss. The mechanisms around what make people crave putting more energy in are complex, but those two equations are at the bottom of everything and you can’t cheat them.
I’m going to assume this question is not rhetorical. Yes, I do know that. You, on the other hand, don’t seem to be able to make the connection between the normalisation and indeed celebration of people whose weight is well above that deemed by medical professionals to be healthy, and people in wider society deciding that oh, yes, go on then, I will have another cake, and ending up being a disproportionate drain on the healthcare system. Obviously if you live in a barbarian country where healthcare isn’t free that’s not too much of a problem, but in the civilised world it is an issue that people who’ve chosen to inflict obesity on themselves (and have been influenced to imagine that this is acceptable by, e.g., plus-sized models on magazine covers or in adverts) are consuming, alongside all the chocolate, the very limited resources of a healthcare system paid for by people who haven’t actively sabotaged their own health.
You are obviously missing more than you realise.
For the simple (and, I would have thought, obvious) reason that exposure of this kind has a negative influence on the hordes of dolts who actually consume the media they appear in. If it’s reasonable (and it is) to say that it’s bad that young girls (and let’s face it, it is mostly (although not exclusively) girls) are exposed to images of models who are “too skinny”, that such images make them prone to anorexia or bulimia and all the other health problems that go along with those conditions -- why on Bod’s earth isn’t AT LEAST equally reprehensible to be showing images of big fat women and saying “hey, this is better than OK, this is great, and an empowering! Have another cake!”. But no -- until recently the “body positivity” movement was selling the lie that it’s fine to be overweight and who cares what your doctor thinks. What’s encouraging is that that movement seems to be in recession, which can surely only be a positive thing for the health of women (mainly) everywhere. But I can see you’re against that, so, onwards.
OK, that’s an interesting pivot away from weight and health you’re making. Almost as if you have an agenda. But for the sake of completeness, I’ll answer it:
No, I don’t. I obviously have my own “narrow standards of beauty” (although I wouldn’t characterise them as that narrow, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?). However, even brief, limited communication with half-a-dozen or so other human beings or a minute or so looking around the internet will almost immediately confirm that tastes on that score vary enormously from person to person. Anyone who chooses for whatever reason to try to conform to a narrow standard of beauty has the problem of “whose standards?”. I could name half a dozen women I find attractive, for sure, but I could equally name half a dozen more who do nothing for me but who are regularly held up as sex symbols (or whatever you want to call them). It seems weird to even ask me the question, since why should anyone give a monkey’s what I think?
It seems such a bizarre non-sequitur after the discussion of the objective reality of the effect of weight on human health. You probably ought to have a think about your motivations.
And following on @6: a “plus sized model” doesn’t need to be clinically obese to be a negative influence, any more than a skinny model needs to be diagnosed anorexic themselves before they’re a negative influence. They don’t need to be a qualifying candidate for severe medical intervention to be implicitly saying “your excess weight doesn’t matter”. The problem is not the specific size they are, it’s the normalisation of the idea that health and weight are unrelated, an idea you can’t pretend hasn’t been pushed and pushed hard in recent years. It’s encouraging that this damaging and false narrative is finally getting pushed back.
It can’t be, since there aren’t any “victims” here. If you eat too much and get fat, you are in no sense a “victim”…
If you knew anything about diet, metabolism and psychology — or anything beyond your own obvious personal disgust at “ugly” women — you’d know it’s not that simple.
You, on the other hand, don’t seem to be able to make the connection between the normalisation and indeed celebration of people whose weight is well above that deemed by medical professionals to be healthy…
And what IS the maximum weight “deemed by medical professionals to be healthy?” Do you really know whether all the “plus-size” models you want to erase from view are above that weight? Also, do you actually know who’s defining what “plus-size” means in the fashion and clothing business? It’s not doctors, it’s retailers and advertizers trying to sell clothes to as many different kinds of women as feasible. I’m sure you’d at least agree that all women should be allowed to buy decent clothes that fit them, right? Or do you want “fat” women to be further shamed by not making clothes that fit them? Should Lane Bryant be fined out of business?
Seriously, you sound A LOT like all those bigots, modesty-enforcers, homophobes and transphobes who scream about the “normalisation and indeed celebration” of whatever “deviant lifestyles” they’re desperate to shame, stigmatize and erase from public view.
Also, please try to remember that — as you’ve already stated — diet and weight are PERSONAL HEALTH issues, which means they’re supposed to be confidential and best left between each individual and their physician — not guys like us who don’t know anything about them except how attractive we think they are. Just like sexual health matters and trans healthcare, right?
And this concludes the third of my allowed three comments here. I see little point in saying more, since all this bullshit about shaming “fat” women for their own good has already been dealt with here anyway.
@Raging Bee, 13:
You’ve really got it in for women, haven’t you? Where did I call anyone (male OR female) ugly?
Read the last paragraph of my first post again: where did it even mention women? (Hint: it didn’t. It was entirely gender neutral. Do you really think that was accidental, to cover up misogyny? Or is it possible that it’s equally bad for men and boys to be fat?) Again, I think you really need to examine your motivations for bringing up gendered assumptions and concepts of beauty when what I was talking about was public health.
This seems a facetious question, since you claim such knowledge of the issues. Furthermore, it seems especially facetious since it is implicitly questioning the very existence of an advisable maximum weight for a given person. You can’t possibly be suggesting that there’s no such thing as too fat, can you? I’m going to say no, even you wouldn’t be so obtuse..
The first pass filter for most primary care providers, as you well know, is body mass index. This would suggest that given my height I should weigh no more than 83.7kg. Wildly obviously there may be confounding factors -- I could be healthy heavier than that because I have a body fat percentage of 5% and can bench press twice my weight. (In my twenties that was true -- no longer). But it’s a useful starting point. It also, incidentally, defines a MINIMUM healthy weight too -- pace Coco Chanel, you CAN be too thin.
In March my BMI was 26. Any model considered “plus size” was, to put it crudely, visibly fatter than I was then. So, yeah, I do know. I mean -- it’s obvious. You might be surprised how not-fat someone with a BMI of 26 actually looks. As an aside -- when I hit 26 I decided enough was enough and started limiting my calorie intake. No additional exercise, just less food -- no snacks etc. Today my BMI is 23.3 and I have more energy, am getting better sleep, have lower cholesterol and lower blood pressure than I had in March. It’s not complicated. I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but life experience suggests few things worth doing are.
No. Do I care? No. Does it matter? No.
Seems the conflict here is not improving ratings.