'My 600-Lb Life' Returns With A Warning About Blind Positivity
'My 600-Lb Life' is a show about food addiction. There's nothing 'positive' about it.
“My 600-Lb Life” returns to TLC tonight with season 12. The network’s flagship obesity program has been warning Americans about the dangers of extreme food addiction since 2012. I watched every episode and wrote about it for The Spectator in a debut piece published Monday:
In season nine, twenty-three-year-old Nicole Lewis of Marion, Ohio, is so big at 684 pounds that she couldn’t fit through the bathroom door of her own home. Her size forced her to endure the public humiliation of having her husband hose her down on the outdoor porch to keep clean, a scene broadcast on national television.
In season four, Lupita (“Lupé”) Samano, then thirty-nine, was featured on screen breaking the toilet at the bariatric surgeon’s office. Samano hadn’t walked on her own for ten years after she went into a diabetic coma with so much fat around her neck that doctors had to insert a trachea for the ventilator. “I walked into the ER and I never walked out,” she said.
Season five opened with thirty-eight-year-old Kirsten Perez sobbing in the shower because she can’t stand long enough in the shower. “I’m completely miserable every day, every moment, of every minute of every second,” she explained.
“I feel like I’m in jail,” Perez said. “I’m a prisoner of this fat.” The language is identical to drug addicts who describe their inescapable relationship with toxic substances.
Many of TLC’s televised patients have caretakers whose lives are on hold to cater the addiction. Daily life remains a struggle. Many have lost jobs because of their weight. Travel is a nightmare; rudimentary tasks such as bathing and cooking require herculean efforts, assuming they can lift their 600-pound bodies out of bed in the first place. Some can’t even drive because they can’t fit in the driver’s seat of a car. Yet the addiction is so strong that at 678 pounds, Janine Mueller still finds her way to the fast food drive-thru in her motorized scooter.
“They used to have those sideshows where you’d go and pay ten cents to see the fat lady,” Mueller said in season six. “Now all they have to do is wait and see if I leave my apartment.”
There’s nothing healthy about these peoples’ lifestyles (let alone “positive”) at 600 pounds. Yet there’s a growing network of corporate-sponsored activists committed to glorifying “health at every size” under the righteous banner of “body positivity.”
Much like drugs and alcohol, food addiction kills. Maybe not tomorrow but certainly over a sustained period of time. Hyper-processed consumables masquerading as food eventually compromise internal organs and render addicts sick and desperate. As I wrote in The Spectator this week, “Public health authorities might reserve the ‘addiction’ label for illicit substances such as cannabis and heroin but it’s clear by watching My 600-Lb. Life that everybody is a ‘junkie.’” In fact, research suggests sugar is more addictive than cocaine.
“There are 262 different names for sugar,” Dr. Robert Lustig explained in his 2021 book, “Metabolical,” and Big Food has a habit of concealing how much is embedded in the food supply. “By choosing different sugars as the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth ingredients, it can rapidly add up to be the dominant ingredient.”
“My 600-Lb. Life” offers a graphic depiction into the horrors of extreme food addiction. So naturally, the program has become a target of activists who seek the normalize said addiction.
“The People on ‘My 600-lb Life’ Deserve Body Positivity, Too,” wrote Jill Grunenwald, a self-described “Fat bi xennial” in a 2019 Medium post.
Aubrey Gordon, a “fat liberation” activist whose book was promoted by the New York Times in January, complained in 2020 that TLC’s program was an exercise in “treating very fat people as freakshows, displaying their bodies and medical struggles to fuel audiences’ disgust, revulsion, and sense of superiority.”
Does “My 600-Lb Life” exploit its subjects? Probably. The low-paid stars are almost always poor, plucked from the lowest socioeconomic classes to pursue the network-subsidized weight-loss surgery in exchange for providing reality entertainment. But imagine activists with a mainstream movement to glorify heroin complaining about Spike TV airing documentaries that raise awareness about the opioid epidemic. Would we really call destigmatizing heroin “positive?”
Links:
CNN: Diet drinks boost risk of dangerous heart condition by 20%, study says
Wall Street Journal: There’s No Easy Way to Stop Taking Ozempic
New York Times: Powerful Psychedelic Gains Renewed Attention as a Treatment for Opioid Addiction
Washington Post: Ultra-processed foods linked to 32 health problems: What to know
Washington Examiner: Politicians want to legalize marijuana, the drug just linked to strokes and heart attacks
Washington Examiner: Teenage and youth antidepressant prescriptions skyrocketed after pandemic
Daily Caller: Here’s How The Medical Industry Is Keeping Detransitioners From Getting Crucial Care
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