Fat – Page 4 – Feministe

Fat and Health, A Response

A guest post by former Feministe blogger Zuzu, who says, “I swear on a stack of pancakes that I didn’t read Atheling’s piece before I wrote this.” Cross-posted at her new blog, Kindly Póg Mo Thóin.

First Things First: What’s It To You?

I’ve been living in New York a long time (and am reluctantly about to leave it). One of the most useful sayings I’ve picked up here is, “What’s it to you?” *

That handy phrase pretty summed up my first reaction to reading Monica’s post about fat and health. Why, if she doesn’t experience any kind of weight-based discrimination at the doctor or elsewhere, does she get invested in defending the BMI against feminist criticism?

And then I got to the donuts, and all became clear. Monica appears to have fallen into the trap of conflating weight and health, and attributing moral laxity to the overweight — who of course couldn’t have gotten that way had they just eased off the donuts. Donuts being the go-to shorthand for the moral failings of fat people. Oh, sometimes it’s pie, occasionally it’s cake, but it’s usually donuts, those tasty little rings of deep-fried sloth.

While I don’t relish having to address such misconceptions again, it’s worth doing the pushback. However, I don’t want to do a point-by-point fisking of Monica’s piece, partly because comments are closed and I missed the window when they were open. Partly because it’s somewhat jumbled, and there were some points raised in comments that throw a different light on the original post. Also? The commenters did a pretty damn good job of refuting particular points. I also don’t want to make this about Monica.

Instead, I want to talk a bit about fat and health and why fat hatred is a feminist issue.

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Shameful Behaviour

Atheling aka wickedday is a white, middle-sized, currently able-bodied, cis- and heterosexual British woman about to start studying for an MA in medieval literature. This piece was originally posted at her personal blog, This Wicked Day, where she also blogs about language, geeky things, random crap on the Internet and University Challenge in addition to feminism.

One of the historic and ongoing aims of feminism and feminist movements has been the attempt to eradicate what’s known in the feminist blogosphere as slut-shaming. Even if you’ve never seen the term before, you’ve almost certainly observed it in action: somebody or somebodies abusing someone else on the basis of their (real or imagined) sex life, where ‘acceptable’ levels and types of sexuality are a) wildly inconsistent and b) liable to change without notice (assuming anyone states them in the first place).

Take Sam. Sam is not any of the Sams I know; Sam is a purely imaginary person, who has had sex 20 times in the last year. That’s a number: a neutral statement. But twenty sexual encounters in a year will be read very differently depending on whether they were all with a long-term partner or with twenty one-night stands. Both those situations are also likely to be perceived differently depending on Hypothetical Sam’s sex, sexuality and gender. And race. And dis/ability status. And age.* And what exactly they were doing. And how many people were involved. And their sex/race/age/etc. And fuck knows what else.

Slut-shaming is the shame directed at the many, many Sams who fall down, or who are alleged to have fallen down, on one of the myriad unstated Rules About Sex and are therefore designated as sluts. It happens less than it used to, but there’s still plenty of it, as is readily imaginable from the range of differing reactions to the cast of Sams posited above.

The practical argument against slut-shaming is simple: it doesn’t work.

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Fat and Health.

Jezebel posted today on a perennial favorite among feminist bloggers: the BMI. This was prompted by a doctor in the New York Times talking about how useless a measure it is for personal health.

Here’s my response: of course it is. It’s an index. This is what indexes do, they aggregate individual pieces of information to tell you something about a whole. The BMI was never intended to be used as a measure of personal health, but was instead meant to tell us something about entire populations. It’s usefulness on that score remains intact: you can broadly say that, if America’s BMI average is increasing, Americans are getting fatter. Unless it can be explained by something else, like a population-wide protein-shake/weight-training-routine frenzy, which is unlikely to happen.

But here’s what that doesn’t mean: that using your weight as one of the things that assesses your health isn’t useful at all. That’s what Dodai seems to be implying at Jezebel when she says this:

In our society, we’re so quick to call someone who appears to be fat “unhealthy.” But health is not a quality that can be judged or seen with the naked eye. There are thin people who smoke and don’t eat any vegetables. There are obese people — including Steven N. Blair, one of the nation’s leading experts on the health benefits of exercise — who jog every day. You can’t see genetic material, a decaying liver or gingivitis in a photograph.

Can you judge health with a naked eye? It’s true, you can’t. But let’s be honest, there’s not an epidemic of fat runners out there. Those people are outliers, and not everyone is an outlier. I’m with people who argue that we shouldn’t focus solely on weight in public health debates, and that we should be talking about eating better and exercising as a way to promote health without reinforcing, intentionally or not, the notion that some body types are better than others. But, by and large, (pardon the expression) weightier people suffer health problems that are well documented. It’s not that thin people are necessarily fit. It’s that America as a whole is unhealthy, and one of the ways we can document our decades-long decrease in activity is by documenting our expanding waistlines.

In all, this demonization of the BMI is odd. I’m outside my normal BMI range, but I’ve never had a doctor say, “Boy, are you overweight!” I have had doctors ask me what’s happening when I come in for my yearly check-up and my weight’s gone up or down. They’re never concerned when I’ve put on ten pounds; they’re concerned when I tell them it’s because I’ve stopped exercising. Likewise, no doctor talks about my weight when she does routine blood tests, listens to me breathe or feels my glands. I’ve only ever heard doctors talk about the BMI in public health contexts; when they talk about groups of patients or populations as a whole.

At the same time, I hope a doctor would tell me if I’ve put on too much weight and it should cause concern. That’s what doctors are for. Counseling you on the health risks of, whatever. Weight can signal a lack of activity or too many donuts, and that shouldn’t irk anyone. Yet, it does.

UPDATE: Comments to this post are closed, since just about everything possible to say has already been said. Thanks, everyone, for reading and commenting.

Diets all around!

Well, here’s some research that can’t possibly be misconstrued: a new study published in The Lancet has documented an association between the amount of weight a mother gains during her pregnancy and the birth weight of her infant. Since birth weight can be used to predict adult BMI, cue the ZOMG! Obesity! commentary. “For babies, studies are just now beginning to show that the effects of tipping the scales at birth may linger throughout life. Many experts suggest that excessive nutrition in pregnancy creates an abnormal uterine environment that permanently changes the baby’s brain, pancreas, fat tissue and other biological systems, said a co-author of the study, Dr. David Ludwig.”

(A note: some of what follows may be triggering for people who have experiences with eating disorders.)

And, of course, since the womb is a baby’s first environment, this is one more thing that pregnant women can be policed on. “As more and more Americans struggle with obesity, the role of early prevention is key [and] early prevention may also extend to the development of the fetus,” said Dr. Jennifer Wu, an obstetrician/gynecologist. William Callaghan, acting chief of the maternal and infant health branch of the CDC added The Lancet paper “just adds more fuel to the fire that [managing weight gain] is an absolutely critical part of preconception care and prenatal care.” Of course, the doctors both go on to mention the importance of good nutrition and and exercise, serving once again to conflate weight with health.

When I was pregnant with A, I became highly attuned to the ever growing list of things I was and was not supposed to be doing. There were the obvious things (drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, using various controlled substances), and the less obvious things (not eating cold cuts). But the list went on and on and on. Restrictions on fish, cheese, processed foods, sprouts, spinach, caffeine, sugar substitutes, hot tubs, any activity where I might fall down, sleeping position, you name it. And every time I casually mentioned that I would give anything for a blue cheese burger and a beer, I would get a very stern “But the baby! You don’t want to risk it!” response.

I see a role here for practitioners to engage with their patients about eating habits, in no small part because pregnancy is enormously taxing on your body and it’s good to make sure you’re getting enough vitamins and drinking enough water. (I’m actually surprised that this isn’t already a part of what practitioners talk about with patients.) However, I do not recommend the strategy one of the midwives took with me early on in my pregnancy, which was to lecture me about my BMI and losing weight. (Keep in mind here that I’m on active duty: my job requires working out 5 days a week, passing regular fitness assessments, and maintaining either a specified weight or body fat percentage.) Ultimately, I gained very little weight during my pregnancy, and lost it all rapidly after delivery owing to some truly horrific medical complications from the delivery. When my daughter was two weeks old, I went back in for follow up and mentioned that I was really worried about how much weight I’d lost. In two weeks, I’d lost all of the weight I gained during the pregnancy plus another 10 pounds. The doctor laughed. “Oh, women don’t normally worry that they’ve lost weight after a pregnancy.” I glared. “I don’t care about that. I’m asking because I am worried. Losing thirty pounds in two weeks isn’t normal, even if you’ve just had a baby.” “Oh, well, I think you’re fine from a health point of view, but let us know if you keep losing weight. You’re really lucky.” In case anyone was wondering, being hospitalized for eight days and having hideous medical complications makes a girl feel really lucky that at least she lost weight.

I’ve got concerns about two different ways this could go. First, there’s even more pressure on women than there was before about losing weight, dieting, and the moralizing and guilt that follows. It’ll just be amplified when it comes to pregnancy: “Well, it’s fine if you want to be selfish and overweight, but think of your baby! Dooming a child to a life of being overweight!” We already live in a world where the word policed doesn’t just mean social pressure and stigma for some women for conduct during pregnancy: it means criminal prosecution. This has the potential to become just one more thing where pregnant women are judged, shamed, and guilted about not providing a perfect uterine environment. (As though there is such a thing and that women are able to control it like that. Environmental exposures, anyone?)

The study’s authors conclude “In view of the apparent association between birthweight and adult weight, obesity prevention efforts targeted at women during pregnancy might be beneficial for offspring.” Well, yes, it might, if done in a way that’s constructive, understanding of the fact that significant and sustained weight loss is not a realistic goal, and focuses on good eating habits as part of a healthy pregnancy. But I’m not particularly optimistic that’s how it’ll shake down. You’re likely to wind up with people saying truly asinine things like “The idea that a big baby is a healthy baby, and a crying baby is probably a hungry baby who should be fed, are things we really need to rethink,” Dr. Birch said. Spoken like someone who’s never had an infant.

More on Fast Fashion

To follow up on my previous post, let’s discuss a few more things about Fast Fashion.

Who says women love to shop? It’s obviously not true that every woman everywhere loooooves to shop. Personally, I hate shopping. I think it’s boring; it’s time consuming, tedious and expensive. If I have absolutely have to, I prefer to do it online so I don’t have to interact with annoying store clerks and I can try things on in the comfort of my own home. Even women who don’t like to or, more importantly, cannot afford to shop still face societal pressure to do so.

Who defines “cheap”? If you have ever been to Forever 21 or looked at the website I shared, you’d know most of the dresses go for about $20-$30 dollars. Now whether you think a $20 dress is cheap or expensive is a matter of perspective, priority, and relative privilege, but in our current retail structure, a $20 dress is considered cheap both in terms of quality and pricing. I am reminded of German fashion designer Jil Sander, who told the New York Times earlier this summer “My mother always said that we were too poor to buy too cheap.” I also did not have a wealthy upbringing in West Africa (surprise! I’m a WOC!) and this is a philosophy my mother drilled into all her children. We rarely bought new clothes and when we did they were meant to last for years because my younger siblings and cousins would have to get mileage out of them as well. There were no Wal-Mart or Target equivalents in Africa when I was growing up, and the first “mall” in Lagos was built in the late ’90s. So unless you were wearing traditional clothes, western clothes were almost always imported. A lot of our clothing consisted of discarded items from the closets of Americans and Europeans just like you. I hated wearing someone else’s second-hand clothes because they reminded me every day I couldn’t have new clothes like the wealthier kids at my French private school. It’s ironic that, for both admittedly aesthetic and financial reasons, I now do the bulk of my shopping at thrift stores.

What about fat women? I did not address the size issue because I was planning to do so in another post. Just because I shop at vintage/thrift/consignment stores doesn’t mean I’m not aware their politics can be fucked as well. Just last week I had to scratch Mustard Seed, a well-recommended store in the DC metro area off my list because according to the woman on the phone they rarely buy clothes over a size 12. Yes, size 12 because that’s considered plus-size. I don’t have to remind you the average American woman is a size 14. I am bigger than the average American woman. (Surprise! I’m fat!)

What’s style got to do with it? Consumers at Fast Fashion stores are style-conscious. Yes, I know it sounds vain! But shopping at Wal-Mart and shopping at Forever 21 are not one and the same. Fast Fashion thrives on our desire for the latest clothes from magazines and the runway. Styling tips always tell larger women to “dress for their body type”, whatever the hell that means. Yes, I recognize that I am an able-bodied, childless woman and this allows me to take to time experiment with different lengths, patterns, and structures. And it’s still a frustrating process. Many things I try on don’t fit. I’m lucky to have a good friend who will hem my muumuus and turn tube dresses into skirts for me. Even when I go into straight size stores, I try on things that are not marked my size. (Yes, this is style advice, not feminist life advice.) More on fat fashion later…

Why don’t you just stop buying clothes? Take it from an African woman: Western women (and men DUH), in a global context, have unsurpassed buying power. Their choices affect people all over the world. This is not meant to shame anyone but rather to force us to confront our consumer choices. The reason I started this discussion is precisely because I don’t have a good solution to this problem. Actually, no one has a good answer. To those of you that say “stop shopping altogether” I’m glad that’s working out for you because you never have to buy anything ever.

This conversation about women and consumption is not a new one, and probably be culturally relevant for as long as we have to wear clothes. It is especially relevant this week as Inditex, Zara’s parent company, announced its aggressive expansion plans. The company opened more than 90 stores in 29 countries in the first quarter alone. This is American Apparel on crack. Also this week Uniqlo’s parent company, the appropriately named Fast Retailing, outlined plans to launch a non-profit initiative in Bangladesh, alongside Grameen Bank, that would create jobs for garment workers. This venture would produce high quality items that cost around $1. While they currently only have plans to sell to Bangladeshis, this and similar nonprofit approaches would go a long way in improving Western women’s cheap clothing options- allowing them to buy stylish clothes that aren’t quite as harmful to women in other parts of the world.

In the meantime, I am trying to make small, practical changes in my life. You can decide what changes work for you.

When Feminists Attack Other Feminists for Page Views

Yesterday, Slate’s Emily Gould dropped this post accusing Jezebel of playing on women’s insecurities to pimp them out to advertisers and masking said tactic in the guise of feminism. If the post itself weren’t a mess of contradictions and hypocrisy, the fact that she used the oldest trick in the online feminist playbook – trashing another feminist or feminist blog to ostensibly protect the movement but really just trying to gin up inner circle controversy to get more hits on Google – would be enough to make many of us call bullshit.

But the post is a bizarre sort of mess, built primarily on the claim that Jezebel writer Irin Carmon’s fairly nuanced and well reported look at gender discrimination in the writing and on-air department of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show is not, in fact, feminist journalism at all. According to Gould, Carmon’s post, especially her query as to whether Olivia Munn got her new Daily Show gig less because of her comic chops and more because of her large male fan base, is part of a regular pattern by the feminist blogs to incite “what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism.”

Wait a minute. Since when is it not feminist to ask why a show has only had two consistent on-air female correspondents in seven years and can’t seem to keep women on the writing staff? Aren’t we still for gender equality in the workplace? Since when is it not responsible journalism to track down people who’ve worked inside what’s been repeatedly reported as a “boy’s club” and ask them if, in fact, the reports are true? And since when is it not ok to ask why certain women with certain qualities get hired while others do not and why women are held to a different standard than men in applying for the same job? If feminism isn’t about rooting out and exposing the nitty gritty of sexism, I’m confused about what we’ve been doing all this time.

No matter, though, because attacking Carmon’s post is just a jumping off point to get Gould to her main argument: feminist blogs, en masse but especially, especially Jezebel, are guilty of applying a faux-feminist bent to the glossy magazines’ tactic of playing on women’s insecurities to get high traffic and, therefore, advertisers. The insecurity in the Daily Show piece was about Olivia Munn as an example of what feminist women evidently fear most, a woman who “dares to seem to want to sexually attract men” – an offensive, contradictory assertion based at once on tired stereotypes of feminists as scared of or opposed to sex and women as catfighting bitches so threatened by one another as sexual rivals they fail to focus on the important things.

Yet even posts on what most would agree are important things, like body image and beauty standards, are suspect in Gould’s eyes. There is probably a bit of truth here: all feminist bloggers know these topics are sure to stir up the commenters and most post something at some point or another that simply bemoans the existence of beauty standards and the stars who meet them without saying much about how to change those standards or mitigate their impact on women.

Yet, it’s possible these particular posts get lots of page views and comment action because banging up against beauty ideals is a very tangible experience of sexism that most women face every single day in varying forms. The impulse to read and talk about this experience online is less a manifestation of insecurities than a desire to have the experience of oppression validated by a sympathetic sisterhood. That isn’t about advertising but about the very necessity of feminist community – we know we’re not crazy or alone because our sisters feel the same way and together maybe we can do something about it.

Which is exactly why Gould’s solution to this supposedly disastrous problem with the feminist blogosphere is so bizarre (emphasis mine):

It’s certainly important to have honest, open conversations about the issues that reliably rake in comments and page views—rape, underage sexuality, and the cruel tyranny of the impossible beauty standards promoted by most advertisers and magazines (except the ones canny enough to use gently lit, slightly rounder, older, or more ethnic examples of “true beauty”). But it may just be that it’s not possible to have these conversations online.

Congratulations, Ms. Gould. You’ve managed to suggest putting yourself out of a job while also uttering one of the most absurd, out of touch sentences on the internet as of late – and I assure you, that’s not an overstatement for page views.

For many in my generation, the internet feminist community serves the same purpose as consciousness raising groups of the 1970’s. Feminist (and womanist, gender justice, mujerista and women’s liberationist and the many subsets of these) blogs are where we get angry over shared grievances, organize against said inequalities, and build and strengthen our feminist community. Disagreements that break out in the comment threads over everything from what’s offensive and what can be reclaimed to the very meaning of the term ‘feminism’ serve the same purpose as heated debates in women’s studies classes: to sharpen our critique and analysis and build on the shared knowledge and ideology of varying expressions of varying feminisms. The difference is that, while the playing field is nowhere near as equal as it should and must be, the participants in the conversation don’t have to pony up $30,000 a year or even leave their apartments to join in.

This unique opportunity to build a movement in such a space is why the most disturbing aspect of Gould’s piece is how she seems to see herself – and the feminist bloggers who write for outlets large enough to concern herself with bashing – as the arbitrators of what’s “feminist” and important and commenters and writers on smaller sites as mere puppets to be led around at will. Not only does this adherence to hierarchy reek of hypocrisy from those purportedly trying to abolish it’s twin brother, patriarchy, it excises those most in need of community and support from the conversation. Since many, though certainly not all, of the women considered online feminist celebs are white and educated and often heterosexual and living in the big cities, it’s not hard to see exactly which voices are being marginalized in their dismissal as part of the big group of lemmings.

If you think the existing posts on body image are doing little more than making women feel worse, a point that can definitely be made, take a page from the fat acceptance blogs and ask readers to submit pictures of what they consider beautiful or be a little bit vulnerable and talk about a personal experience with body hatred and what helped you out. It’s obvious young women need and want to talk about it, so why not be a part of the solution?

I, for one, would take a thousand of these posts over one more from a well positioned feminist deciding for all of us that attacking another well positioned woman or blog is the most important feminist issue of the day.

Bikinis and Bridesmaids and Blubber, Oh My!

As a member of the Order of Fat Curmudgeonly Feminist Hermits, there are few months that I view with more trepidation than June. Not only am I deluged with invitations to social events I dread attending, but I’m also deeply immersed in the advertising that surrounds such social events.

I am referring, of course, to pool parties and weddings.

You’d think that I’d be fans of both of these events because they involve many of my favourite things, like water, free food, dancing, and opportunities to observe drunk people in their natural habitat. However, there’s a big elephant in the room at these events. The elephant in the room being, naturally, the lack of elephants in the room; if you plan on attending a pool party or being the guest of honour at a wedding, you had better be as svelte as possible.

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What’s wrong with skinny?

That’s what Lisa Hilton asks in the Daily Beast this week — although she’s actually asking, “What’s wrong with living off of coffee and cigarettes? Better than being fat!”

Katie Drummond over at Slant/Truth gives Hilton’s piece a great take-down, pointing out that while official eating disorder diagnosis rates may not be skyrocketing, a lot of women engage in disordered eating without having a diagnosed eating disorder. But Hilton isn’t just concerned with what she deems “hysteria” over super-skinny models; see, she’s worried that for all of our obsessing over skinny girls, we’re actually really fat. Obese, even! And don’t you know that being obese is unhealthy?

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Girls vs. Boys

via The Awl, this is one of the worst articles I’ve read in a long while. The New York Times decides to take a look at the girls vs. boys TV networks Lifetime and Spike — and concludes that men are sex-addicted idiots and women are fat, fearful and desperate world-savers. No, really:

We can, from these observations, construct the perfect day as imagined by a gal and by a guy.

In the gal’s perfect day she is kidnapped on the way back from putting the kids on the school bus but vanquishes the kidnappers in time to go for a fattening lunch with her single-mom pals, at which they lament their lack of dates before donning designer gowns to go to a school board meeting where they successfully address all major educational problems.

In the guy’s perfect day he awakes and, still sleepy, sticks his hand down a running garbage disposal trying to retrieve the bottle opener he has dropped in it; an ambulance crew made up entirely of strippers rushes him to the Hospital for Advanced Trauma Care and Stripping, where naked but highly trained female surgeons sew his hand back on, then take him home and wash his entire house as well as his car with their breasts while answering questions like: Does being spanked make a woman want to have sex?

So, clearly, members of one sex are living in a sad, unrealistic fantasy world, trying in vain to compensate for the drabness of their day-to-day lives. Members of the other are living a rich life of the imagination, at peace with their self-image and excited by what the future might hold. Which is which goes without saying.

The whole article seems to be a case of the author confirming what he already believes to be true. For example, he asserts that Lifetime is full of true-crime scary-tales, whereas Spike is full of men getting kicked in the balls. Which is kind of true, on both counts. Except that I watch Spike three or four times a week because they play CSI over and over again, right around the time that I go to the gym, and I always want to see who the killer is so I stay on the StairMaster longer. Maybe that’s only because my ass is fat from watching too much Lifetime, but, point being, mainstream and men’s television is chock full of scary-time crime-dramas. I guess Lifetime is just noteable because it’s the only network where women usually save themselves instead of being rescued by whatever dude is playing their cop partner. Which isn’t to say that Lifetime is great and totally feminist — it’s really not. And it does play into the “your gonna get raped!!” culture of fear that women live in by constantly presenting story lines where women are raped, abused, etc etc. But that’s pretty much the entire premise of Law & Order SVU, so I’m still not sure why Lifetime is really breaking the mold.

But anyway, the crime soaps are the least egregious part of the article, and I am in full accord with the author in his characterization of Spike as hyper-masculine douchery (also, yes, I know CSI is a shitty show; it is, however, an unintentionally hilarious show, hence my gym-wating). Crappiness of both Lifetime and Spike aside, though, the article gets even worse:

IN GAL LAND THINGS WEIGH MORE THAN THEY DO IN GUY LAND.

By “things” here we mean, basically, “women.”

Haha did you see that? He called us fat! Good one, bro.

Plump women are almost never seen on Spike, and hotties are almost never seen on Lifetime. It’s a tough call as to which is the more cynical ploy: brazenly playing to a female audience that probably could stand to lose a few pounds or shamelessly playing to a male audience that likes to fantasize about women more gorgeous than actually exist in real life.

Hmmm, yes, which is more shameless… including actresses that look like actual real women on a network that targets actual real women, or only featuring actresses who are Playboy-perfect because, look, boobs? Clearly those things are the same on the cynical scale.

Shocker: “The Biggest Loser” promotes unhealthy weight loss practices

Apparently contestants on The Biggest Loser exercise for six hours a day, dehydrate themselves until they urinate blood, and push their bodies to extreme limits, sometimes causing them to pass out or be otherwise injured. Two contestants were taken to the emergency room on the first episode of the current season. Gawker summarizes the Times article thusly:

The winner of season one “dropped some of the weight by fasting and dehydrating himself to the point that he was urinating blood.” Actually many of the people dropped mostly water weight, and gained much of it back after the show ended and they began hydrating properly.
Whose fault is it that these dangerously fat people are dangerously dehydrating themselves in pursuit of a cash prize? The fault of the fat people themselves, according to the professional fitness trainer Jillian “Evil” Michaels. “Contestants can get a little too crazy and they can get too thin,” she said.
Don’t go blaming the show for that; they never said they were qualified to know about health and weight loss and whatever! The show’s waivers state that no guarantees have been made that the medical professionals are qualified to “diagnose medical conditions that may affect my fitness to participate in the series.”
Also the show tried to intimidate former contestants into not speaking to the New York Times.

The contestants also end up gaining weight back after the show, through such unhealthy practices as drinking water.

Inspiring people to eat healthier and exercise more is a great goal. Exercise is great! Healthy, nutritious food is great! But that’s not what The Biggest Loser does. The Biggest Loser puts fat people on display as moral failures — it suggests that people are fat simply because they are lazy, and if only they worked a little harder, they could lose the weight. In reality, the contestants are nearly killing themselves for the amusement of the viewing audience. I’ve never actually watched The Biggest Loser because the whole concept disturbs me, but I’m further unnerved to know that the show puts its contestants through extreme weight-loss without proper medical oversight. To make matters worse, they do it under the guise of “health” — as if extreme exercise, disordered eating and intentional dehydration are “healthy” so long as they make you thin.

I suppose, though, that a real show about health — where in the end there would still be some healthy fat people and some healthy thin people and some healthy in-between people — would make really boring TV. But NBC could at least drop the pretense of The Biggest Loser being a “health” show and just admit it’s about making fat people do all sorts of extreme and dangerous things for our entertainment. You know, hold up the mirror.