Diet Shows And Why I Hate Them.

I can't watch diet or exercise shows. It seems they're becoming more and more common. Dieting and lifestyle changes are taking over TV, like they took over magazines at some point. It bugs me. I'm not necessarily against the diet mentality being discussed, but I hate when it becomes the dominant, or even the only, viewpoint out there.

You Are What You Eat is a fat-shaming show. The idea is that an overweight person's diet is scrutinized, and often mocked, by a horrified nutritionist. There are fridge raids, there is jiggling fat on camera. There are snarky, "funny" comments about various foods. The underlying idea is that a relatively normal diet is HORRIBLY DANGEROUS and you have to be stopped NOW if you're eating too many fats, carbs or salts compared to the recommended daily amounts. There's no chance to talk back and disagree with the nutritionist.

I know some people learn healthy eating through the show, but the method is pure scare tactics. And - I'm gonna say this - I don't think learning to eat healthy is a positive goal per se, if it comes with a lowered self esteem and public shaming. Mental health over physical, always.

The Biggest Loser is a particularly odious case, because it puts fat people in a boot camp where they're forced to have too much exercise. It's a competition over who loses the  most, so the idea is to crash diet, be publicly weighed, and then possibly lose over the gain of 1 pound. It violates against all the rules we've learned about healthy dieting: not dieting too fast, not overexercising, not starving yourself, etc. I can imagine most contestants don't keep the weight off. No matter how high their motivation, who can keep up with a boot camp mentality their whole lives?

There was one diet show I was able to watch, a British one called Freaky Eaters. Despite the title, I found it to be fairly positive, and watched several episodes on Youtube. The idea of the show is not to lose weight or eat in any predefined way. Rather, they delve into the psychological reasons behind the eating (usually these are people who only eat one kind of food: potatoes, white bread, nothing but meat, etc.). They also have a doctor who checks for any physical damage done by the diet. Usually, it's not scare tactics. But I stopped watching when, in one episode, a woman with a candy-binging problem was told, "Your BMI is higher than it should be, it's 27." Um, but that's only two points above "normalweight", and according to many studies it's the slightly overweight who are healthiest... She was then told she is at a high risk for diabetes, "and once you get diabetes, it's never cured, you have it for your whole life." (I'm paraphrasing because I can't stand to see it again.) Who doesn't know this? And yet some people have diabetes and manage to live a fairly normal life. It's not a death sentence.

This angered me, and I haven't seen the show since. It just seemed so hypocritical. It seemed like they were saying, "You have no real health problems at present, but if your BMI is over 25, YOU CERTAINLY WILL. This gives me the right to talk to you like a child, even if you're here to fix your problems." There's a risk of overclosing on a show like this; this is someone who already wants to change and is willing to do something, so there's no need to shame them. Not that there ever is, but you lose all "tough love" credibility when nagging or scaring people enters the picture.

Who watches these shows? Who goes on them? I imagine the people on the shows are often desperate to change, either because of the social pressure to be slim and healthy, or because their lifestyles genuinely make them feel bad. But how much are they truly helped, and what percentage of the viewers is in fact enjoying the humiliation? I've heard people talk about these shows in tones of amazement and judgement: "Can you imagine, that guy was eating five bags of chips a DAY", or, "She said she doesn't eat a lot, but of course when they opened her fridge, they found all this junk..."

The worst part is, I sometimes think in the same way. I haven't watched any episodes of You Are What You Eat, but I have read articles on several episodes. Seeing a table spread with someone's weekly diet can give me a positive jolt: "Ah, I eat a lot better than that!" It gives you a sense of relief, but I'd say the relief is false; it's not based on being OK the way you are and making your own choices. It's more like an underlying idea that eating healthy is a contest where you've just won. You've proven yourself to be normal and acceptable, not a big bad fatty. The person on the show should be ashamed of how they eat, and you're right to eat the way you do. This goes against everything I believe about eating and health. Is this the very feeling people are seeking when they set out to watch a diet show?

What worries me about this trend is that shows like this present only the least healthy-living fat people, setting them up against a strict slim expert. The effect is much the same as in the clichéd comic trope of  "angry doctor stares at fat patient standing on scale". The experts have to nag at stubborn fatties. It's funny to shame fat people. It's shocking to see how fatties live. We're problem people in need of an intervention, and the reason for the fat can always be located and removed easily by valiant experts. This is, of course, not a realistic image of all fat people. It has nothing to do with what the studies say, and it might in fact change nothing.

One thing is for sure: this type of TV reinforces stereotypes about fat people and food. And that's just not healthy.