When I woke up on New Year’s Day (only slightly the worse for wear), the first thing I did was to break all my New Year’s resolutions right away. I heated up a delicious chocolate croissant and devoured it. The weather was miserable, so instead of venturing outside for a brisk walk, I lay around in my pyjamas and wasted quite a bit of time playing computer games. Then I cooked a big juicy steak for supper and washed it down with a nice big glass of wine.
What a relief! It was good to give in to sloth and gluttony. It was also, as I know from years of bitter experience, inevitable. Why spend weeks (or even months) suffering needless deprivation, when you can backslide right away? By now I know that my slothful, gluttonous nature is basically beyond reform. But so is everybody else’s. Personally, I’m happy to just hold the line.
That’s not to say that all New Year’s resolutions are completely unproductive. You just have to make the right ones. If only I’d resolved to take all the money that I wasted on fitness-club memberships and stash it into RRSPs, I’d be rich. If only I hadn’t wasted my time on all those stupid diets, I wouldn’t have felt like such a miserable failure. My current approach to diet and nutrition is to eat as sensibly as I can, exercise only for fun and ignore all diet, nutrition and fitness advice, especially from so-called experts.
Needless to say, this is not the message of Village on a Diet, the much-hyped new CBC series that premiered on Monday night. It is a Canadian version of the fat shows that now infest cable TV. It pretends that all you need to lose weight is a lot more exercise, a healthier diet and a dose of good old-fashioned will power.
The 10-part series focuses on Taylor, B.C., a small town with a bunch of typically large citizens. They are determined to turn around their desperately unhealthy lives. “The whole town is going to wage war on their weight,” declares the British-accented narrator, even though only a few dozen people in the town took part. Their goal: to lose one ton of weight in three months. “If this town is going to succeed, there’s only one way to do it,” says the voiceover. “And that … is together!” Right away you know that you are about to witness the triumph of the human spirit.
The first episode is mostly about boot camp. It shows overweight people jogging, sweating, vomiting and doing pushups while being harassed by “a team of butt-kicking experts.” The essential appeal of fat shows is voyeuristic. It’s reassuring to watch people in even worse shape than you are. It’s creepily pathetic to see fat young women with low self-esteem cry on camera. “I want to feel beautiful, and right now I don’t feel beautiful,” says one woman, who has just squished herself into a size-24 wedding dress. “I was too lazy to get off my butt.” (Interestingly, fat men don’t say stuff like that. They just talk about how they want to play hockey again.)
Village on a Diet has been promoted as a major contribution to public health. But its essential message is deceptive. To start with, exercise is at best marginally related to weight loss. Go ahead and exercise until you puke, but cutting calories is what makes you lose weight. (Unfortunately, showing people eating less does not make for very compelling TV.)
On top of that, the classic calorie-deprived diet has a failure rate of about 95 per cent. If any other medication had that kind of track record, it would be yanked off the market.
I confidently predict (spoiler alert!) that the plucky citizens of Taylor will meet their one-ton challenge. But then the cameras and the kick-ass experts will depart, and then what? The fat girls will gain the weight back, and they’ll feel even worse about themselves than before. How cruel is that?
“It’s a simple solution to a huge problem,” promises the script. No, it’s not. It’s a phony solution that reduces an extremely complex social challenge to a question of attitude. It’s junk-food TV, and if I were you, I wouldn’t touch it.
