Ragen Chastain (who is one of the most awesome people I know) has a post on her blog about The Biggest Loser. She is not a fan.

The Biggest Loser has named a new champion.  Rachel Frederickson won the show by losing 60% of her body weight, going from 260 pounds to 105 pounds. This is a Biggest Loser Record. She lost the most and so she walked away with $250,000 because TBL is a game show wherein people manipulate their body size for money. It’s not a health show, it’s a game show. A terrible, terrible game show. [Emphasis added.]

Most reality shows—well, the ones that don’t consist of cameras following minor celebrities or “real” people around and waiting for them to get into pointless fights with each other—are really just glorified game shows. I’m not knocking game shows. I’ve enjoyed a few game shows, and I admire that they admit that they are, in fact, game shows. Not so much with shows like The Biggest Loser, which seems to me, based on the little I’ve seen of it, to be entirely about people deemed overweight who volunteer to be abused on television by obnoxious exercise buffs.

The Biggest Loser uses the concept of health as an incentive, a smokescreen, and profit generator.  They use threats about, and promises of, health to convince fat people to be physically and mentally abused for profit.  They use the idea that they abuse fat people “for our own good to make us healthy” to help their audiences justify watching the physical and emotional abuse for entertainment.

Honestly, we are nearing the point Stephen King wrote about in his novella The Running Man, which was adapted almost beyond recognition for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Continue reading →