Last week, the new season of the reality show Kilos mortales (My 600-lb Life) premiered on one of the pay TV channels, depicting the struggle to lose weight among people with morbid obesity, most of whom weigh around 300 kilos. The particularity this season is that, along with cases from the United States, cases from Mexico are included, featuring people who could easily be anyone’s neighbor. The premise is simple: first, viewers are given a glimpse into the daily lives of these individuals, then the focus shifts to exclusively medical treatments (including gastric bypass surgeries, among others), a bit of dietary counseling, and mainly, the patients’ daily struggle not to succumb to certain foods, or alternatively, the emotional abuse they endure at the hands of both acquaintances and strangers.
What interpretations can we draw from this kind of mediatization of obesity? Do these shows, which proliferate across television like mushrooms, truly motivate a population—most of whom are overweight or obese—to lose weight?
To begin with, the translation of the show’s name already sends a clear message, in contrast to the original English title. In a society increasingly obsessed with immortality and personal transcendence, it is clear that the kilos touch a sensitive point by provoking death. Observing the portrayal of participants’ daily lives, death is the least of their troubles. For anyone with low sociopathic tendencies, it is impossible to watch the show without feeling compassion for the lives depicted, seeing the difficulty these people face in carrying out routine activities such as washing, standing up, walking, or shopping for groceries. Who among us would be willing to be filmed while taking a shower or cleaning our bodies to show it on television? And it is not to condemn the participants’ exhibitionism; on the contrary, it is deeply moving to think that, in order to obtain surgeries or treatments to change their lives, they agree to reveal these aspects of their lives on TV.
And it is precisely here that the problem lies: pity for another human being is perhaps one of the last feelings any of us would want to provoke in others. Pity is the last thing a person with morbid obesity needs from those around them; they already have enough dealing with morbid stares, hurtful comments from strangers, etc. Of course, the first thought these individuals inspire in others is, “How did they let themselves reach 300 kg?” when sometimes the question should be, “Why does a person reach 300 kg? What events in their lives and emotional abuses drove them to that point?”
Here, we reach a dangerous point: as people, we always tend to compare ourselves to those beside us. When the person next to us is in a state of extreme dysfunction, a few extra kilos and a bit of belly fat “aren’t so bad,” many viewers might think. The argument for showing these extremes, some might say, is to warn about the consequences of maintaining bad lifestyle habits: “this is what could happen to you.” The problem is, above all, turning obesity into a freak show. And like any show, it has elements designed to attract attention, but not to highlight crucial aspects of treating morbid obesity. For example, the program constantly emphasizes surgery and the importance of losing weight, but does not show the importance of a multidisciplinary team—including nutritionists and psychologists—in successful patient treatment. Some other shows, while presenting a multidisciplinary team, reduce transformations that take years in a patient to a one-hour episode. Here lies one of the main problems for people who decide to start a weight-loss treatment: the need to lose a lot in a short time, which is one of the main errors in the approach. The main goal is not to lose kilos, but to have a healthy lifestyle—which, as a consequence, will lead to weight loss.
In a society where we are increasingly accustomed to immediacy, comfort, and minimal effort to get what we want, we sometimes forget that the way to promote healthy lifestyles is not to turn people with morbid obesity into a circus act.
Originally published in El Economista
#obesity #fatshaming #stigmatization #wellbeing #realityshow
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.