I took two hours of my time to watch The Biggest Loser on NBC Tuesday night. It featured some true record setters, including a hefty elderly couple and the heaviest man to weigh in at 454 pounds. Their goal is to endure weeks of diet and exercise and abuse at the hands of two merciless trainers to lose the most weight and, therefore, be crowned Biggest Loser and win the show (and, supposedly, their lives back).
Working in a call center as I do, I have seen some ponderously disproportioned people who are stuck in cubicles all day and don’t have the benefit of diet and fitness gurus to help them overcome the problems associated with the current American lifestyle. The folks on this show would have made P. T. Barnum a fortune if he could have assembled so many overweight people under a tent instead of a training camp.
What really shocked me was how little the show tackled diet issues and the fact that nobody was seen actually eating anything. During one close-up shot of somebody who worked out to the point of throwing up I noticed, apart from being grossed out by the fact that I was paying attention to this, that they appeared to be puking nothing but water.
Is this it, then? Do these contestants do nothing but drink water and subject their weight to such drastically insane calisthenics that it drops off in fear or heaves itself out in vomit? I would hate to think that viewers can’t get decent diet advice from the show.
Maybe there isn’t any good diet advice to be had. I wonder if the food industry isn’t so far gone that we will never be able to eat pure decent food again. Maybe the exercisers are in cahoots with the food industry to try and kill us all. Think about it: how many famous exercise icons have dropped dead while exercising? A few like Jack LaLanne have push-ups for breakfast and live to be 110 with minus two percent body fat, but the rest of us have to eat.
Last blog I complained about the choices available for breakfast, but the day after watching The Biggest Loser, sitting at lunch with a cup of 80 calorie yogurt, crudite, grapes and hot tea (with a thermos of water on standby), I didn’t feel that I had learned anything useful from the show at all.
Susan's Scribblings the Blog 