I love them! I hate them! You know the shows, like VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club or NBC’s Biggest Loser, and a host of others. Honestly I do love to watch these shows. Something about watching these shows makes me feel better about myself. What is it? Is it because I see people even worse off than me and that makes my life not seem so bad? Is it because I take pleasure in others misery? Or is it just because it feels good to see people in the same situation as me, thereby making me feel not so alone? I don’t know. But I do like to watch them. At the same time, I TOTALLY hate these shows! The biggest reason I hate these shows is that it perpetuates the myth that get-thin-quick schemes work and are healthy. I think most doctors would agree that losing 20 or 30 pounds in a week is NOT healthy! The thing I have taken from the vast number of diet and healthy eating programs I have been on is the idea that you should be losing about 1-2 pounds a week for healthy weight loss. Studies have shown that the faster you lose, the easier it is for your body to regain the weight. Sure, we all want to be thin TOMORROW, but it didn’t take a day, a week, or a month to gain all this weight, it took years! I have been losing weight at a slow healthy pace (65 pounds in about a year, a little over a pound a week), and at this pace it seems easy to maintain. I guess you give your body time to catch up with the idea of being thin or something. I suppose it’s physical and psychological: you shrink both your physical stomach and your psychological cravings at this pace. But 30 pounds in a week??? I would imagine these people need EXTREME self discipline to maintain their loses. I would imagine they have to fight serious cravings to keep the weight off. At the pace I’m losing, I really don’t fight any intense cravings at all. Sure we all have cravings… like I HAD to have a caramel filled Ghirardelli candy last night, heehee. But everyone has these kind of food-specific cravings from time to time, even really skinny people! When I have lost weight very fast in the past (like when I was on Phen-Fen or when I had the gastric band) I fought intense physical cravings for food and struggled with huge loss issues about not being about to eat much at a time. I don’t know. This time it just seems a lot easier, and I am attributing it to losing so slowly. I just don’t feel deprived and I don’t miss the massive quantities of food.
OK back to the subject: weight loss shows. Why have these shoes become such a phenomenon? I suppose it is just another topic that fascinates us in the long line of reality-based programming we all seem glued to. I suppose it does have something to do with the fact that we love to see other people in our same situation, we can relate. Some studies have shown that as many as 120 million Americans are overweight (maybe even more!). That’s over 65 percent of Americans!!! And I think the rest of world is not far behind us! So I guess watching these fat shows seems very familiar to us. We like to see other people like us on TV.
The one good thing going for these shows is that they are doing it through diet and exercise, showing us that it CAN be done without pills or surgery. That I like! When I had to have my gastric band removed (due to an allergy) my surgeon wanted me to convert to the gastric bypass. I told her adamantly that I was going to do it on my own. She just shook her head and said with a chuckle, good luck. She just keep forcing the idea down my throat that 98% of people who lose weight by diet and exercise, gain it all back. Well, I don’t know how accurate her statistics are, or if that was some scare tactic she uses, but I know people who have done it successfully, and I was going to be one of them too no matter what she said. And shows like this show us that it is possible. I like how they come back to the people from previous seasons to show how they are doing, and it’s great to see that some of them have kept off the weight and have even gotten healthier and more fit! So I guess these celebrity weight loss shows are OK as long as you watch them knowing that you probably wont be able to (or want to) lose weight that fast and that the best way to do it is with good old-fashioned diet and exercise. It’s not an easy battle, but we can all do it!!!
When a person is fit and healthy, it is obvious to all around that person. He or she gives off a striking appearance of confidence that originates with those physical and mental attributes of the fitness lifestyle.
