Drill Sergeant —

Trigger warning: I discuss “The Biggest Loser” briefly and as we all know, just thinking about “The Biggest Loser” can trigger rage-induced spontaneous combustion.

On my rarely-updated personal blog, I recently shared that our family now has a YMCA pass and my wife and I are each pursuing a path to better health.

Veronica absolutely adores her water aerobics and would go every day if she could, although currently she gets three days a week in (four if she gets up early on Saturday).*

Meanwhile, I’ve ditched the Y-Cycling class in favor of the cardio machines downstairs. As previously mentioned, I wanted to do Y-Cycling so I could get in shape to ride my real bike, but during each of the three classes I attended one of the daycare providers would interrupt halfway through to tell me that my youngest, Lottie, was crying for me.

I switched to the bikes in the cardio room until Lottie adjusted so I wouldn’t disrupt the class anymore. Then I began experimenting with the other machines and to my chagrin, I’ve found that I enjoy the elliptical machine more than the cycles. Maybe it’s because I walk from the train to work each day, but cycling has been kind of punishing, while I can do 45 minutes on the elliptical with what feels like less effort.

But since I am still able to keep my heart rate up in the same range, I think it’s okay, right?

Anyway, last night I stood between the cycle and the elliptical machine, feeling slightly guilty that my original intent (getting in shape to ride my real bike) was falling by the wayside because I enjoy the elliptical more than biking.**

But in the end, I chose the elliptical because I enjoy it more.

There was an added incentive, though.

There are three TVs in front of the cardio machines and the one in front of the elliptical was “The Biggest Loser.” I rarely watch live television, as V and I mostly watch Justin.TV episodes of Mystery Science Theater (a MSTies dream-come-true) or Hulu. The only time I do catch “The Biggest Loser” is when we’re at my mother-in-law’s, and then it’s just sort of background noise.

I have a love/hate relationship with the show. I love it because for a while there it was the only show that had truly gorgeous women, and since I’m an objectifying asshole, I love that shit. But I hate it because… well… these well-intentioned contestants were degraded and humiliated on national television by two of the smuggest, most self-satisfied assholes in the world.***

At my in-laws, the show was rendered virtually mute by a house full of people, so I got the eye candy without the mind rot. But last night it was the opposite: I felt compelled to read the closed captioning and couldn’t enjoy the beauty.

And, of course, about five minutes into it I wanted to throttle Bob Harper about the face and neck.

There were a few things that bothered me and are worthy of comment. For example, something like four of the remaining eight (I think) contestants had gained a small amount of weight in the previous week (which, as we now know thanks to Golda Poretsky’s excellent interview, is sometimes more than a week), so as a “punishment” they created a challenge to divide the group into pairs.

The way they chose the pairs was through a “indulgence challenge” where everyone went to dinner and whoever consumed the most calories got to pick the pairs. First they picked the appetizer and ate it, then they picked the entree, then dessert, flashing the calorie count of each delivered course.

Of the eight contestants, five of them did not “play the game” and ordered what they thought was the lowest calorie option. The remaining three wanted to pick pairs and so chose what they thought were the highest calorie items. And, of course, this all serves the purpose of letting viewers gawk and stare at the gluttonous fatties****, along with the added bonus of tsk-tsking the caloric counts.

But the part that really bothered me was that one of the contestants, Lisa, had gotten the low calorie items for the appetizer and entree, but chose a rich, drool-worthy chocolate tort for dessert because it she “saved up her calories” for something good.

The images of her enjoying her dessert was, of course, accompanied by the disapproving stares and comments of her comrades, which was bad enough. Then the next day, Bob Harper asked them about the challenge and Lisa mentioned her dessert.

Well, Mr. Harper thought it unconscionable that Lisa would dare order the dessert when she wasn’t interested in “playing the game.” On and on he lectured her about how she wasn’t committed to “The Biggest Loser” and she didn’t care about her health and so on.

After sufficiently humiliating her for making a completely reasonable, completely respectable decision, he began the workout. When it was finally over two-and-a-half hours later, they exited the facility only to be met by Jillian “Satan’s Sweatsock” Michaels or even more.

And all the while, we cut to Bob and Jillian talking about how they are just trying to help these poor, pathetic fatties get healthy.

I’m sorry, but spending a single day exercising for three hours (at least) is never healthy. According to a WebMD article on exercise addiction:

Thirty minutes a day of moderate physical activity is enough to help prevent things like diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. Exercise addicts tend to think that a two-hour run makes them four times as healthy. It doesn’t work that way.

(Emphasis mine)

Or in the words of Ashley Borden, author of “Your Perfect Fit,” from this Elle article on exercise bulimia:

… to move strictly for calorie burning as opposed to exercising for health and enjoyment is a problem.

What “The Biggest Loser” is doing is normalizing exercise addiction and exercise bulimia as a means of producing eye-popping weight loss in contestants, often at the expense of their health.

This alone is troubling, but the subtler message it sends to viewers is what bothers me.

In short, it goes something like this: to get healthy you have to lose weight and to lose weight you have to undertake a brutal exercise routine.

As we all know, none of these beliefs are true, and with regards to Type II Diabetes, research confirms again and again and again that exercise “regardless of weight loss” has an incredibly positive impact on the disease.

Sadly, the message (brutal cardio work = health) has become “common sense.” But as they say, “Common sense is what tells us the Earth is flat and the Sun goes around it.”

I see the same philosophy creeping into the childhood obesity panic. Parents, desperate to “do something” about the child’s weight, will often put them on a mini-Biggest-Loser-style regimen.

For example, we were at the park a few months back when another family arrived: a mother, a grandfather, and two children (a boy and girl). The boy was chubby, the girl was not, and the grandfather kept encouraging the boy to run laps around the playground. He had a stopwatch in his hand and was encouraging him to beat his best time.

Now, I’m no expert in child psychology, but doesn’t it seem sort of cruel to bring a child to a playground and then make him run laps?

But this is the end product of our Biggest Loser health culture. We put so much emphasis on weight loss that we undermine our health efforts by turning the enjoyment of physical movement into a soulless, brutal regimen.

The same happens in our schools’ physical education classes, when gym teachers spend the class running a mini-boot camp rather than teaching our children the many, many, MANY enjoyable ways we can make the most of our amazing mobility and abilities (including those with physical impairments who can find alternative means of physical fitness… it’s all relative, after all).

And that is why I feel like “The Biggest Loser” is one of the cultural greatest mistakes ever made in this War on Obesity. Fans of the show who are inspired to pursue physical fitness will no doubt follow the lead of Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels and embark on a grueling, masochistic exercise regimen.

If your primary motivation is weight loss and long-term weight loss (even using Kelly Brownell’s eat less, move more LEARN program) is virtually impossible, then if you’re not enjoying the regimen you will likely give up when you fail to see the stunning Biggest-Loser-style results six months later.

Now, I’m speaking prematurely for myself, since I’ve only been at it only a month, but given the evidence, both anecdotal and research literature, I think it is fair to say that pursuing a moderate, pleasure-based (as opposed to weight-loss-based) exercise regimen holds the greatest potential for long-term success.

And for me, the ideal regimen would be a daily half-hour ass-whooping for Harper and Michaels.

*Speaking of water aerobics, today I’m interviewing Charlene Kopansky, President and Founder of the Canadian Aquafitness Leaders Alliance, about the effectiveness of water aerobics. I’m very excited!

**Some of you are probably saying “Guilt? Why would you feel guilt over that?” Being raised Catholic, I have a trigger-happy guilt reflex to pretty much everything.

***Seriously, I would never advocate violence against women in any form, but I would gladly turn Jillian Michaels over to the Taliban.

****I hate to keep mentioned it, but in the section I read this morning of “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” Taubes lists an extensive set of studies that backs up the claim that fat people consume no more calories than thin people. But I’ll explain in a later post.