When I watched the first episode of The Biggest Loser reboot, I didn’t expect to think about high school. But I did.
Like many high school physical education programs, ours required us to run the mile twice a year. The track was set back away from other buildings, down a steep hill and through a small forest, which made even getting to it a trek, so our P.E. teachers would only allow us to walk back as a whole class. On the day we ran the mile, that meant waiting for the slowest runner to finish. And as one of the fattest kids in class, that meant everyone was waiting for me.
Runners finished in waves: the first heat, our track and cross-country runners; the second, athletes from other teams: basketball, baseball, volleyball; the third, fit but not athletic students; the fourth, the slow kids. Usually the fat kids. Always me.
I spent so much of high school wanting to disappear, wanting to simply, mercifully go unnoticed. As a fat kid, I so regularly felt spotlighted, illuminated by light I just wanted to escape. My body regularly drew unwanted and unkind attention. Gym class, in particular, forced me into a spotlight I deeply wanted to avoid.
I was regularly aware—often overly aware—of how bodies like mine were so often depicted when taking on physically demanding tasks. In movies and on TV, fat, active bodies were shown as punch lines (their lack of coordination and savvy leading to pratfalls and being thrown about for the sheer entertainment of seeing fat pain) or as pitiful failures (who simply cannot stop eating).
Running the mile called all of that up to the surface. The minutes between the fastest runner’s finish time and my own seemed to last forever. Some students would openly express their displeasure at being made to wait for the fat kids. Others would decide to “encourage us” with pep talks and shouts from the sidelines—another wave of unwanted attention that led to mocking jeers from less earnest classmates. All of that came rushing back as I watched the premiere of The Biggest Loser, a television juggernaut focused on dramatic weight loss from its fat contestants.
After four years off the air, The Biggest Loser is back for its 18th season. The show’s earlier incarnation had an unsavory reputation—reports of contestant injuries, disordered eating behaviors, verbal abuse of contestants, and more, all of which I wrote about at length here—but a rebooted production has returned, supposedly as a kinder, gentler version of itself. Its own website states that the show will “provide the contestants with a 360-degree view of what it takes to make a serious lifestyle change, rather than focus solely on weight loss.”
As I watched the show’s rebooted premiere, all I could think about was how hauntingly similar it was to its first incarnation. If the first episode of the new season is any indication, the show seems to be focused almost exclusively on the pain of being fat, which can be alleviated, or at least treated, by becoming thinner. Rarely do mainstream narratives about how hard it is to be fat explore the systemic and structural biases that make this the case. Rather, the pain of being fat is attributed to the personal failings that are presumed to underlie our bodies. In other words, it isn’t hard to be fat because of the ways that people and institutions treat us—it’s hard to be fat because only someone with a weak character, tenuous work ethic, or unresolved trauma could allow themselves to get fat in the first place. The Biggest Loser seems more than happy to trot out that same narrative, yet again.
Watching the first episode was a near-perfect replica of that terrible high school experience, now 20 years ago. I wasn’t just thinking about what it was like; I was reliving that moment. The emotional pain, the humiliation, the certain sense of failure surged through me. It was a visceral jolt back to 2000.
For the first challenge, the team with the person who ran the mile the fastest was offered an advantage. The catch: The teams would be judged by their slowest runner’s time. Just like in high school, the slowest runner was one of the fattest participants—the show’s third heaviest contestant. As the event unfolded, the trainer ran alongside one of the heavier women, asking her about the trauma that had led her to become fat. Or, so the subtext goes, so unforgivably, unimaginably fat.
This seems to me to be the raison d’être of The Biggest Loser: creating and re-creating the distinct, visceral, sinking feeling of fat humiliation. Despite its reframing as a series focused on, according to Chris McCumber, president of the USA Network, a “holistic, 360-degree look at wellness,” The Biggest Loser spends much of its time on shots of fat workouts, sweat stains on brightly colored shirts and spandex. Cutaway shots of contestants vomiting into large buckets, painted to match their team color, placed there in anticipation of immense physical distress. We see a fat woman crying, talking about the death of her father when she was a young child as she walks on the treadmill. The camera bores in on a fat man on a treadmill, grimacing from the effort. It is like a pornography of fat suffering, cameras gawking at the many perceived failures of fat bodies. For all its talk about wellness, the show seems relentlessly focused on fat pain and the desperation of fat people to just get thin.
In the pilot episode, although contestants recount their own trauma histories (both prompted by trainers and on their own), we don’t see a mental health professional onscreen. If the contestants are getting support from mental health professionals offscreen, that’s good and right. But if we don’t see it onscreen or learn that it’s happening offscreen, we’re still being presented with a scenario in which people are embarking on physically and emotionally grueling lifestyle changes without mental health support. In the show’s first episode, the show’s therapeutic element is facilitated by Bob Harper—a personal trainer, not a therapist. Harper opens the segment by telling contestants that “you can’t fix this,” pointing to his stomach, “until you fix this,” pointing to his head. He shares his own health fears, recounting a story of recovering from a heart attack. He treats his own fear tenderly, excising it carefully, as if with a scalpel. When he turns to the contestants, however, he wields that fear like a hatchet.
The quasi-talk-therapy segment consists of Harper telling several contestants that their body fat percentage means that they have a “90% chance of dying from an obesity-related complication.” Another contestant was told onscreen—seemingly for the first time—that he had type 2 diabetes. Once again, The Biggest Loser seems to invite viewers to revel in the voyeuristic pain and shock of watching a fat person learn that they have a chronic health condition. As I watched I felt that the show wanted to imply at every turn that these wretched fat people have only themselves to blame. In the world of the show, this is a wake-up call, evidence of the undeniable failure of his body. This is tough love.
So much of the rhetoric used by the weight-loss industry is about losing weight so you can finally get your life back, finally be happy—insistently conflating people’s body with their character and the life that is available to them. To me, The Biggest Loser does not depart from this mindset. Like so many diet companies the show too readily collapses confidence, happiness, physical health, mental health, professional success, trauma recovery, and healthy relationships all into the container of simply being thin. While The Biggest Loser highlights participants’ past traumas and emotional lives and touches time and again on the importance of psychological health, you earn points in the contest by losing weight, not by processing trauma. In other words, I struggled to take much more away from the pilot episode than the idea that losing weight makes you a winner. In the world of The Biggest Loser, your weight dictates your success. My takeaway about this as a viewer? Fat bodies are failures; thin bodies are successes.
Contestants and trainers insinuate (or outright state) that fat people will eat themselves to death and need to “win your life back.” While watching, I lost count of the number of teary-eyed contestants who referenced their own death, as if they were date-certain events. As if their very body necessitated an early demise.
One contestant, a cardiac nurse, recounts the pain she feels when patients, she assumes, doubt her credentials and trustworthiness simply because of her size. By any measure, this is a direct recounting of unchecked prejudice and bias. But in the world of the show, the bias she assumes her patients have are right: She can’t be a good nurse if she’s fat.
In that way, the new The Biggest Loser feels eerily similar to its predecessor, working overtime to link the way someone looks not only to their very mortality, but to their relationships, their sex lives, their parenting, their children’s destinies, their careers, and their very intelligence. In the world of the weight-loss industry, including in The Biggest Loser, nearly any problem in a fat person’s life can be attributed to their size. After all, even after the show’s rebrand, the only measure of success—the only way to win—is by losing the most weight. In that way, I can’t see the show as a retreat from diet culture but as an enhancement and advancement of it.
In recent years dieting has begun to fall out of favor in public discourse around health, gender, and attractiveness. Greater numbers of Americans are aware that most weight-loss diets fail. That doesn’t mean, of course, that people aren’t still dieting. Plenty still are. But while the diet industry is worth an estimated $72 billion, the wellness industry is worth an estimated $4.2 trillion. Given the growing worth of the wellness industry, it’s easy to understand why companies (and TV shows) might make wellness a bigger part of their brand identity. It seems to me that it could help their perceived relevance—and their profit margins.
As far as I’m concerned, The Biggest Loser hasn’t reinvented itself; it has only changed its clothes. The show still lingers on long shots of shirtless fat bodies, still relishes blaming fat people for the biases we face too often. Its addition of inspiring music and can-do maxims from its trainers don’t constitute its reinvention—they only make up its disguise. The show hasn’t confronted its own deep-seated and extreme antifat bias. It’s only pushed it below the surface, making it even more insidious.
No, The Biggest Loser hasn’t changed. Like the rest of the diet industry, its commitment to “wellness” is the same old wolf in sheep’s clothing.
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