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I’ve been listening to a _lot_ of episodes of Maintenance Phase. Yesterday, among many other episodes, I listened to the one about the reality TV show The Biggest Loser. I used to watch this show, and while typing this, I searched this blog to read what I had to say about the show at the time. The podcast episode played various clips of the trainers being exceptionally awful (Old Skool Drill Seargent Style) to the participants. I had _hoped_ that they would find and discuss that bizarre episode where they visited the trainers’ houses and looked in their fridges and it turned out that Jillian’s fridge was completely empty except for bottle water and ice cream. (Spoiler: they did not.)
I stopped watching The Biggest Loser (and What Not to Wear and Clean House) many years ago, and for the most part, years before those shows stopped being produced. Listening to the podcast got me thinking about what those shows had in common and how my perspective on those shows has changed over the course of my life (and my kids’ lives). I’m a big believer in the idea that a lot of “gossip” (talking about absent third parties), especially the judgier aspects (whether that’s “positive” or “good” judgy, or “negative” or “bad” judgy, just all the judgy, all the Good for Her and Boo Hiss and etc.), is a way of talking about our values in the specific without directly pushing those values on a specific person who is there at the moment because that would be squirmy and awkward, whether we were saying nice things or not nice things. It’s probably not a great idea to tell people, Hey Don’t Ever Do That! And also, it won’t work, and I’m pragmatic enough to care.
Listening to the podcast, I realized that part of what happened with The Biggest Loser — and quite possibly with the other shows as well, especially What Not the Wear — was that the shows got more aggressive in their speech, more critical in their speech, and more normative in their speech. There was less celebration of the person’s own uniqueness and more cookie-cutter aesthetic. And a lot of the cookie-cutter aesthetic was not particularly appealing to me. The joy in those shows was getting to see in a parasocial way a really wide range of humanity in all their bumbling wackitude, and over time, the shows became harsher and harsher in their reshaping project and I wasn’t really there for that.
I didn’t quit being a JW because JW’s interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer is as a wish for the deity to come hurry up and kill everyone else so they can enjoy Paradise on Earth forever. The fundamental genocidal impulse baked into JW — and a lot of other literal, primitive, eschatology focused xtian groups — was clear to me, but that wasn’t why I left. I often say I _wish_ I had left for that reason, because the person I yearn to be is a person who is horrified by that genocidal impulse and sets a super clear boundary and so forth. But I’m really not that person. I mostly perceive that genocidal impulse as a manifestation of inchoate frustration and rage and disappointment and sadness that has transmuted into anger and things like that. It inspires in me a combination of eye roll and “there there” and a desire to go do something more fun, rather than revulsion.
So I must confront the fact that I watched The Biggest Loser and was not completely horrified by it right from the beginning. I’m not going to go back and rewatch things to see, well, was it really that bad in the beginning? I’m totally prepared to believe it was, at minimum, far worse than I had imagined at the time. I’m also very clear that at the time, I was still very much in the mindset of I Would Someday Once Again Be Smaller Than I Was at the Time, and I was still trying to figure out how to re-establish routines of eating and exercising that having two kids severely disrupted.
Anyway. I’m listening to an episode of Maintenance Phase now that is about eating disorders, and fat people having eating disorders and really severe physical symptoms (amenorrhea, vomiting blood, resting pulse below 30, stuff like that) and people who specialize in eating disorders denying them access to treatment because they are fat. Like, it _can’t_ be disordered eating, no matter what you are doing, and no matter what effect it is having on you, if you are not dangerously underweight. There’s a lovely guest on the show, and she’s articulating an alternate definition for eating disorder that does not rely upon the person’s size, or on the specific physical symptoms, but rather from a psychology perspective of, “How much does this interfere with your life?”
I don’t know _why_ I only just now heard that phrase for what it is. It is _all over_ the DSM. It _is_ an improvement over earlier, more clearly role adjustment phases of psychology, in that it focuses on the presenting client, and not the other people around them who want them to be other than they are. _But it still takes the existing environment of the client for granted_. If you are trying to follow bog standard eating practices for your culture, in your culture, like — in ours — 3 meals and a snack or two, composed of a protein, some fruit and/or veg, some more grain or potato component, with some kind of seasonings including some amount of sweet and some amount of fat and perhaps an alcoholic beverage if an adult or juice if a child — but you are surrounded by people who think that you should eat at most 2 meals a day, and the first one should not be until noon or ideally later, and who think that 1200 calories is too much and you should be aiming for 800 and the mile you walk twice a day is absolutely inadequate and you should be running, and aiming for a minimum of 3 and ideally five miles a day, etc. Well, trying to eat in that bog standard way is going to conflict a lot with the people around you. The picture I am painting here is one of a deeply fucked family environment and one more or less sensible person who is well adapted to a larger group in the culture around her. But it’s not _that_ hard to run through the many people you know in your life and realize just how much of a problem it is to define “hey, it’s a problem when this, but not that” based on “does it interfere with your life”. It’s _one step_ away from, “hey, your husband wants you to change and I’m here to make that happen for him, and that means you are going to have to be different than you are or want to be”. But it is not a meaningful distance down the path.
I know it’s not cool to criticize when not having an alternative suggestion, so here is my alternative suggestion. Rather than saying, it’s not a problem if it isn’t interfering with your life AND it _is_ a problem if it _is_ interfering with your life, let’s just assume that if the person is asking the question, “Hey, is this a problem?” We should probably respond with, “What would be a satisfactory answer to that question _to you_?” AND think for ourselves, “What is a satisfactory answer to that question _to me_?” Find the shared bits, do those first, and then decide how much appetite remains to proceed along this or any related path. My hope is that would move everyone in a solution focused, “What Is It I Want?” direction, which is probably more helpful than debating the eating-disorder-ness in some sort of Platonic sense.
Obviously, don’t do this while someone is crashing. Do all the first-aid-y type stuff first. And if you are running a clinic for eating disorders and someone comes in and asks for treatment, your symptom checklist cannot be allowed to reduce down to a number on a scale.
Further! I would _expect_ that a lot of what would come up when the question, “What would be a satisfactory answer to that question _to you_?” would be a lot of rambling commentary about, I just want everyone to let me be me and yet these specific people in my life are giving me a bunch of shit about this list of things. That would help identify the context where conflict is occurring _and_ provide a basis for getting some color on that conflict. From there, a list of I Could Change This Thing I’m Doing and That Would Get Them to Back Off could be developed AND a list of What Do We Want to Ask of the Other Side / Can Those Relationships Be Wound Down in an Orderly Fashion. A lot of really painful conflict becomes more manageable when we have a timeline for when we won’t have to deal with those people as much / ever again. I know that sounds hard, but it’s probably a more productive choice than trying to adapt to the demands of mean people who are asking for impossible and undesirable things. If you are a member of a genocidal cult, your best path forward involves planning how you are going to leave. If you’ve got a lot of interpersonal conflict and family pressure that revolves around eating practices, that is not likely to be solved by focusing exclusively on your own eating practices. You are also going to need to have some kind of a strategy for navigating the relationship pressure as well.
Oh, yeah, a couple more observations.
If I watched Ruby and The Biggest Loser and perceived it as being much _less_ fat-bashing than I expected, but failed to notice the real problem with The Biggest Loser, part of which was the completely inappropriate and dangerous volume of exercise and the punitive nature of the exercise, but most of which was just how _everyone_ completely bought into the idea that being fat was Not OK, and I now listen to the podcast and I can hear just how much of a problem it is to just assume that Being Fat Is Not OK and relentlessly refuse to engage with the most basic and pervasive scientific evidence that, actually, being fat is definitely better for you than being underweight and probably also better for you than current definitions of “ideal weight”, where am I going in the future? I _feel_ like in the future, I’m going to listen to clips from The Biggest Loser and go, That’s a Criminal Threat, that’s Harassment, and the whole show is a hate crime.
Weirdly, that makes me feel very optimistic about the future, and our future increased capacity for compassion.
I stopped watching The Biggest Loser (and What Not to Wear and Clean House) many years ago, and for the most part, years before those shows stopped being produced. Listening to the podcast got me thinking about what those shows had in common and how my perspective on those shows has changed over the course of my life (and my kids’ lives). I’m a big believer in the idea that a lot of “gossip” (talking about absent third parties), especially the judgier aspects (whether that’s “positive” or “good” judgy, or “negative” or “bad” judgy, just all the judgy, all the Good for Her and Boo Hiss and etc.), is a way of talking about our values in the specific without directly pushing those values on a specific person who is there at the moment because that would be squirmy and awkward, whether we were saying nice things or not nice things. It’s probably not a great idea to tell people, Hey Don’t Ever Do That! And also, it won’t work, and I’m pragmatic enough to care.
Listening to the podcast, I realized that part of what happened with The Biggest Loser — and quite possibly with the other shows as well, especially What Not the Wear — was that the shows got more aggressive in their speech, more critical in their speech, and more normative in their speech. There was less celebration of the person’s own uniqueness and more cookie-cutter aesthetic. And a lot of the cookie-cutter aesthetic was not particularly appealing to me. The joy in those shows was getting to see in a parasocial way a really wide range of humanity in all their bumbling wackitude, and over time, the shows became harsher and harsher in their reshaping project and I wasn’t really there for that.
I didn’t quit being a JW because JW’s interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer is as a wish for the deity to come hurry up and kill everyone else so they can enjoy Paradise on Earth forever. The fundamental genocidal impulse baked into JW — and a lot of other literal, primitive, eschatology focused xtian groups — was clear to me, but that wasn’t why I left. I often say I _wish_ I had left for that reason, because the person I yearn to be is a person who is horrified by that genocidal impulse and sets a super clear boundary and so forth. But I’m really not that person. I mostly perceive that genocidal impulse as a manifestation of inchoate frustration and rage and disappointment and sadness that has transmuted into anger and things like that. It inspires in me a combination of eye roll and “there there” and a desire to go do something more fun, rather than revulsion.
So I must confront the fact that I watched The Biggest Loser and was not completely horrified by it right from the beginning. I’m not going to go back and rewatch things to see, well, was it really that bad in the beginning? I’m totally prepared to believe it was, at minimum, far worse than I had imagined at the time. I’m also very clear that at the time, I was still very much in the mindset of I Would Someday Once Again Be Smaller Than I Was at the Time, and I was still trying to figure out how to re-establish routines of eating and exercising that having two kids severely disrupted.
Anyway. I’m listening to an episode of Maintenance Phase now that is about eating disorders, and fat people having eating disorders and really severe physical symptoms (amenorrhea, vomiting blood, resting pulse below 30, stuff like that) and people who specialize in eating disorders denying them access to treatment because they are fat. Like, it _can’t_ be disordered eating, no matter what you are doing, and no matter what effect it is having on you, if you are not dangerously underweight. There’s a lovely guest on the show, and she’s articulating an alternate definition for eating disorder that does not rely upon the person’s size, or on the specific physical symptoms, but rather from a psychology perspective of, “How much does this interfere with your life?”
I don’t know _why_ I only just now heard that phrase for what it is. It is _all over_ the DSM. It _is_ an improvement over earlier, more clearly role adjustment phases of psychology, in that it focuses on the presenting client, and not the other people around them who want them to be other than they are. _But it still takes the existing environment of the client for granted_. If you are trying to follow bog standard eating practices for your culture, in your culture, like — in ours — 3 meals and a snack or two, composed of a protein, some fruit and/or veg, some more grain or potato component, with some kind of seasonings including some amount of sweet and some amount of fat and perhaps an alcoholic beverage if an adult or juice if a child — but you are surrounded by people who think that you should eat at most 2 meals a day, and the first one should not be until noon or ideally later, and who think that 1200 calories is too much and you should be aiming for 800 and the mile you walk twice a day is absolutely inadequate and you should be running, and aiming for a minimum of 3 and ideally five miles a day, etc. Well, trying to eat in that bog standard way is going to conflict a lot with the people around you. The picture I am painting here is one of a deeply fucked family environment and one more or less sensible person who is well adapted to a larger group in the culture around her. But it’s not _that_ hard to run through the many people you know in your life and realize just how much of a problem it is to define “hey, it’s a problem when this, but not that” based on “does it interfere with your life”. It’s _one step_ away from, “hey, your husband wants you to change and I’m here to make that happen for him, and that means you are going to have to be different than you are or want to be”. But it is not a meaningful distance down the path.
I know it’s not cool to criticize when not having an alternative suggestion, so here is my alternative suggestion. Rather than saying, it’s not a problem if it isn’t interfering with your life AND it _is_ a problem if it _is_ interfering with your life, let’s just assume that if the person is asking the question, “Hey, is this a problem?” We should probably respond with, “What would be a satisfactory answer to that question _to you_?” AND think for ourselves, “What is a satisfactory answer to that question _to me_?” Find the shared bits, do those first, and then decide how much appetite remains to proceed along this or any related path. My hope is that would move everyone in a solution focused, “What Is It I Want?” direction, which is probably more helpful than debating the eating-disorder-ness in some sort of Platonic sense.
Obviously, don’t do this while someone is crashing. Do all the first-aid-y type stuff first. And if you are running a clinic for eating disorders and someone comes in and asks for treatment, your symptom checklist cannot be allowed to reduce down to a number on a scale.
Further! I would _expect_ that a lot of what would come up when the question, “What would be a satisfactory answer to that question _to you_?” would be a lot of rambling commentary about, I just want everyone to let me be me and yet these specific people in my life are giving me a bunch of shit about this list of things. That would help identify the context where conflict is occurring _and_ provide a basis for getting some color on that conflict. From there, a list of I Could Change This Thing I’m Doing and That Would Get Them to Back Off could be developed AND a list of What Do We Want to Ask of the Other Side / Can Those Relationships Be Wound Down in an Orderly Fashion. A lot of really painful conflict becomes more manageable when we have a timeline for when we won’t have to deal with those people as much / ever again. I know that sounds hard, but it’s probably a more productive choice than trying to adapt to the demands of mean people who are asking for impossible and undesirable things. If you are a member of a genocidal cult, your best path forward involves planning how you are going to leave. If you’ve got a lot of interpersonal conflict and family pressure that revolves around eating practices, that is not likely to be solved by focusing exclusively on your own eating practices. You are also going to need to have some kind of a strategy for navigating the relationship pressure as well.
Oh, yeah, a couple more observations.
If I watched Ruby and The Biggest Loser and perceived it as being much _less_ fat-bashing than I expected, but failed to notice the real problem with The Biggest Loser, part of which was the completely inappropriate and dangerous volume of exercise and the punitive nature of the exercise, but most of which was just how _everyone_ completely bought into the idea that being fat was Not OK, and I now listen to the podcast and I can hear just how much of a problem it is to just assume that Being Fat Is Not OK and relentlessly refuse to engage with the most basic and pervasive scientific evidence that, actually, being fat is definitely better for you than being underweight and probably also better for you than current definitions of “ideal weight”, where am I going in the future? I _feel_ like in the future, I’m going to listen to clips from The Biggest Loser and go, That’s a Criminal Threat, that’s Harassment, and the whole show is a hate crime.
Weirdly, that makes me feel very optimistic about the future, and our future increased capacity for compassion.