Weight Loss / Obesity Reality TV Shows

Chris Powell (right) works with a client on ABC's Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition

My apologies to TV lovers everywhere, but I've never enjoyed reality TV. I blame the fact that my education and work experience has been in film and television. I always feel like I'm being manipulated because I "see through" the techniques they use to contrive drama and conflict. You may be surprised to know that I never became a regular viewer of a reality show.

Jamie Oliver shows the amount of sugar in chocolate milk.

Then along came Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution in the spring of 2010. He went into school food programs in the most obese part of American and tried to educate and transform what the State was feeding our kids. He was passionate and unstoppable. I watched with the family to educate my kids about the dangers of obesity. All too often, I saw myself and my family's eating habits portrayed, mostly through the high consumption of fast food and processed foods. No one seems to cook any more. Oliver wants us to question what we're eating and where our food comes from.

The show returned this season and once again my family watched eagerly. During it I saw commercials for Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition. This was occurring during the time I was beginning to work harder changing my lifestyle through daily walking and restricting my overeating. I caved and watched an episode.

Heavy (A&E)

Since then, I've devoured ALL of the episodes and, on the advice of my nutritionist, also viewed every episode of Heavy from A&E, a similar show but more of a documentary than a reality series. From these viewings I've gained tremendous inspiration and knowledge. Not knowledge on the secrets of losing weight, but knowledge of what it means to be fat.

There's something about seeing a four or five hundred pound person transform themselves every week, over and over and over, young, old, man, woman. You begin to believe that it's possible to do the same. Maybe you don't need to work out four or five hours per day but you see what's possible: that the human body that is that way, doesn't have to be that way.

Watching these shows is like AA for the fat person who's out of control. You don't get to vent your own problems, but you always see yourself in the subjects of these shows and you can identify with their struggles. Every new person brings a trait that I see in myself. Few of these traits are flattering.

You see sad, pathetic traits in others (a childish helplessness is one common trait I've noticed) and you begin to hold a mirror up to yourself. I don't see myself very often, but I do when I watch these shows.

I wish I could watch a new show every week to reset my inspiration. These people, after all, are usually much worse off than me. Almost all the men are a hundred pounds more than me, some practically double my weight. The question posed by these shows is: if they can do it, why can't I?

Soon after I started watching, I doubled my daily exercise time because I realized it was possible that I could do more. The most inspiring episodes are when someone my age (in the mid-forties) or older does a transformation. I had transformed myself before at age 28, but I had come to believe it was no longer possible. I know now that it is possible at almost any age.

Boiled down to one thing, these unscripted obesity programs show that the human body is remarkable. And so is the human mind, which is most certainly at the center of every morbidly obese person's illness.

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Links:

A & E's "Heavy" (all episodes available online)

Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition