When I watched thefirst episodeofThe Biggest Loserreboot, I didnt expect to think about high school.
Like many high school physical education programs, ours required us to initiate the mile twice a year.
teachers would only allow us to walk back as a whole class.
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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 forme.
Usually the fat kids.
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 awareoftenoverly awareof how bodies like mine were so often depicted when taking on physically demanding tasks.
Running the mile called all of that up to the surface.
The minutes between the fastest runners 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.
After four years off the air,The Biggest Loseris back for its 18th season.
Watching the first episode was a near-perfect replica of that terrible high school experience, now 20 years ago.
I wasnt just thinking about what it was like; I wasrelivingthat moment.
The emotional pain, the humiliation, the certain sense of failure surged through me.
It was a visceral jolt back to 2000.
Or, so the subtext goes, so unforgivably, unimaginably fat.
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.
If the contestants are getting support from mental health professionals offscreen, thats good and right.
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.
Another contestant was toldonscreenseemingly for the first timethat he had throw in 2 diabetes.
To me,The Biggest Loserdoes not depart from this mindset.
In the world ofThe Biggest Loser,your weight dictates your success.
My takeaway about this as a viewer?
Fat bodies are failures; thin bodies are successes.
As if their very bodynecessitatedan early demise.
In recent yearsdieting has begun to fall out of favorin public discourse around health, gender, and attractiveness.
Greater numbers of Americans are aware thatmost weight-loss diets fail.
That doesnt mean, of course, that people arent stilldieting.
It seems to me that it could help their perceived relevanceand their profit margins.
As far as Im concerned,The Biggest Loserhasnt reinvented itself; it has only changed its clothes.
The show hasnt confronted its own deep-seated and extreme antifat bias.
Its only pushed it below the surface, making it even more insidious.
No,The Biggest Loserhasnt changed.
