Schaefer Riley Naomi, Rosen Christine (Editors). Acculturated
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15: Controlling Our Bodies,
Controlling Ourselves
Daniel Akst
I
f john bunyan were alive today but still infused with religious
passion, how might he get his message across? Surely not by
writing a book-length allegory like e Pilgrim’s Progress.
No, nowadays a Puritan prophet might likelier blog and per-
haps gather up a few thousand Twitter followers. But these are
mostly tools for niche audiences. Bunyan wrote for the masses.
e Pilgrim’s Progress, when it was published in 1678, was not
considered an esoteric religious tract but a work of popular litera-
ture. It soon proved a runaway best seller embraced by readers of
every social class.
Given this orientation, Bunyan today would probably take his
message to TV. And the program he would create, if it didn’t
already exist, might be e Biggest Loser, the granddaddy of a
thriving genre of weight-loss reality shows that has included Big
Medicine (about bariatric surgery), One Big Happy Family (in
which the whole clan slims down together), and Dance Your Ass
Off , about which the less said the better.
ink of these shows as modern-day allegories of self-trans-
formation, ones that speak to our culture as compellingly as e
Pilgrim’s Progress spoke to that of our forebears. Being on e
Biggest Loser—or striving to lose a lot of weight under any cir-
cumstances—really is a kind of pilgrimage, one beset by the usual
hazards of temptation, weakness, and doubt. It’s a journey one
134 Daniel Akst
makes in the direction of self-mastery through a hostile landscape
studded with fast food and malevolent co-workers bearing baked
goods.
ese shows tell us a lot about ourselves. e message at fi rst is
predictably grim: we are a crass and exhibitionistic people, glut-
ted by excess and devoted to voyeurism, if not schadenfreude.
Often these programs, like so much TV, are maudlin and, frankly,
exploitative. Yet ultimately I came to think that the folks who
appear on these shows are worthy of our admiration for doing
so—and that the people who create them understand quite a lot
about human nature.
What these shows demonstrate is that willpower is weak and
without practical wisdom unlikely to triumph. We are likely to
have more success, to cite one relevant example, keeping ice cream
out of the house than resisting its siren call from the freezer. e
good news is that even the weak of will have opportunities to con-
strain their own choices, if only they acknowledge their weakness
and take up arms against it. As Rousseau says in e Confes-
sions, “If we chose always to be wise, we should rarely need to be
virtuous.”
At the same time, these shows vividly dramatize the challenge
of moderation—that virtue of virtues—in a world of freedom and
affl uence. ey are cautionary tales about the ways in which we
can fall short of our own fondest wishes for ourselves by succumb-
ing to powerful lesser desires on a daily basis. Each indulgence
of these appetites is insignifi cant in itself—what’s one bite?—but
taken together they can impose a burden heavy enough to warp
our lives.
Of all the fat shows, e Biggest Loser is the closest to a cultural
phenomenon (it averaged around ten million viewers in 2010),
and it remains the purest example of the genre. Basically, each
season a group of fat people is selected to compete in a contest to
see who can lose the most weight. is project involves consider-
able suff ering on treadmills and the like, to say nothing of caloric
Controlling Our Bodies, Controlling Ourselves 135
deprivation. Although the contestants are shown in their homes,
sometimes in exaggerated poses of consumption, much of the
action takes place at a retreat where the contestants are subject to
verbal fl agellation—for their own good, of course—at the hands of
painfully thin conductors on the rocky road to fi tness.
As you might guess from this summary, e Biggest Loser is also
the show that hews most closely to e Pilgrim’s Progress. For Big-
gest Loser contestants, being selected for the program is a dream
come true—one much like the narrator’s dream of Christian and
his spiritual pilgrimage in Bunyan’s book. e contestants, most
of them so heavy they seem beyond hope of redemption, have a
great weight that they’re looking to shed, just as Bunyan’s Every-
man hero is trying to do with the weight strapped to his back.
In both sagas the burden appears to be the weight of sin, except
in this case it’s the sin of overindulgence. Yet whether you believe
in original sin or just the virtue of self-mastery, at some level all
sinning, ancient and modern, is about the control of desire, and
in this sense e Biggest Loser is a morality tale just as Bunyan’s
was. Contestants who desperately want to behave diff erently
are defeated by their own uncontrollable appetites, a position in
which almost all of us fi nd ourselves sooner or later. “I do not do
what I would like to do,” Paul lamented in his letter to the Romans,
“but instead I do what I hate . . . so I am not really the one who
does this thing; rather it is the sin that lives in me.”
Having failed to regulate their desires, Biggest Loser contestants
embark on the show’s journey as fallen, and this profound spiri-
tual infi rmity is visible to all in their great unhideable girth, which
broadcasts their shame as clearly as if they wore a scarlet letter.
eir goal on the program is to put down that weight, unbur-
den themselves of their sin, and number themselves among the
elect—the minority of American adults whose body weight is in
the range of normal.
All this is to say that Biggest Loser contestants have already been
through Bunyan’s Valley of Humiliation by the time they are on
136 Daniel Akst
the show, and with their health troubles linger dangerously in
the Valley of the Shadow of Death, as the show’s appalled doctor
dramatizes for us. But the powerful premise of this series is that
America’s fatties have the power to change. Like Bunyan’s pilgrim,
they can choose salvation. e diff erence is that self-discipline,
rather than Jesus, is held to be the answer. is is America, after
all, where each of us is supposed to be our own savior.
Yet Biggest Loser participants know they can’t do it alone. None
of us can, which may be why contestants tearfully embrace the
show’s glamorous trainers—hard-body messiahs who hold out
the prospect of redemption through suff ering. (Biggest Loser sea-
sons often focus on couples or even whole families, as if to under-
score the group nature of our failings.) e painful exercises the
show’s trainers demand off er a way for their overweight charges
to atone for the pleasures of overeating, a form of self-abuse that
participants have evidently indulged in for years, at least judging
by the evidence of their massive bodies, which betray their past as
eff ectively as the rings of a tree trunk disclose its age.
Virtue, it seems, requires struggle, for dieters as much as for
Bunyan’s pilgrim, and in both cases it’s a life-and-death confl ict.
Indeed, redemption for Biggest Loser contestants can occur only
if they are reborn in a diff erent body. Contestants testify that they
haven’t had a boyfriend or girlfriend, that they are the life of the
party who inevitably goes home alone, that they dream of the love
and happiness that will one day be theirs if only they can slim
down. eir goal, in other words, isn’t just weight loss but a new
life in a version of heaven—a heaven of normality—that they can
only reach by emerging from the chrysalis of the program’s retreat
resurrected as their own masters.
e desire to attain the promised land of thinness—and a rec-
ognition that, on their own, they are powerless in the face of their
appetites—goes a long way toward explaining why people sign up
for these programs. Sartre’s famous comment notwithstanding,
Controlling Our Bodies, Controlling Ourselves 137
hell is not other people. On the contrary, social ties are crucial for
establishing and enforcing norms—and helping each of us defer
gratifi cation and resist unseemly excess.
ose ties have become frayed in modern society. In some
cases, as when an entire family or neighborhood is overweight,
communal ties reinforce harmful norms. On e Biggest Loser,
the audience performs the norming function that tight-knit com-
munities once did, applying social pressure, moral support, and a
sense that for better or worse somebody is watching. is is how
a great deal of human behavior is moderated.
“Our friends and relatives,” the psychologist Howard Rachlin
writes, “are essential mirrors of the patterns of our behavior over
long periods—mirrors of our souls. ey are the magic ‘mirrors
on the wall’ who can tell us whether this drink, this cigarette, this
ice-cream sundae, this line of cocaine, is more likely to be part of
a new future or an old past. We dispense with these individuals at
a terrible risk to our self-control.”
By committing to their quest so publicly, participants on these
shows make it much more diffi cult for themselves to give up. John
Norcross, a psychologist at the University of Scranton, has stud-
ied New Year’s resolutions and found that making a public com-
mitment is a good way to increase the odds of living up to them.
Faced with the prospect of embarrassment, you’ll work that much
harder to stick to the resolutions you’ve proclaimed to be your
own. Failure, as Ed Harris said in Apollo 13, is not an option.
To the extent e Biggest Loser serves as a powerful commit-
ment device for people who need help in this department, it does
so in a rich tradition much older than e Pilgrim’s Progress.
Demosthenes is said to have embarrassed himself into seclusion
for three months by intentionally shaving half his head. Unwilling
to be seen in public until it grew back, he used the time to work on
his rhetorical skills. In an Internet version of the same scheme, the
sociologist Jeff rey J. Sallaz at the University of Arizona overcame
138 Daniel Akst
procrastination by posting an embarrassing picture of himself
on Facebook, which he resolved to leave there until he fi nished
reviewing copyedits on a manuscript he’d produced.
Self-embarrassment can be eff ective, but dieters have relied on
other poison-pill techniques as well. In a book called e Black-
mail Diet, author John Bear suggested people could force them-
selves to lose weight by committing to some hideous consequence
if they didn’t. Bear himself slimmed down by pledging to donate
5,000 to the American Nazi Party if he failed. He didn’t.
e Internet is bringing such enterprising self-management
techniques to the masses. A website called Stickk.com enables
users to enter legally binding agreements to lose weight or accom-
plish practically any other goal on pain of fi nancial penalty. When
you make a commitment on Stickk.com, have your credit card
ready. If you fail in your contractual quest, your money goes to
the designated charity of your choice—or perhaps more motivat-
ing still, to the anticharity you choose, along the lines that John
Bear evidently pioneered. Stickk.com’s motto: “Put out a contract
on yourself.”
But giving individuals the tools to commit to virtue isn’t the
same as establishing a social climate that uses the power of iner-
tia to make virtuous action into a kind of default. Today’s hyper-
caloric environment, in which family meals have disintegrated,
portion sizes have exploded, and snacks are ubiquitous, has made
fat into something like a national norm. More than two-thirds
of Americans are overweight and about half of those are obese,
numbers that suggest a truly massive public health problem. Esti-
mates of the health impact vary, but one reasonably good one,
from a 2009 study ( e Preventable Causes of Death in the United
States) by leading scientists in the fi eld, found that if we could
get everybody in America to slim down to an appropriate body
weight, we’d prevent 216,000 premature deaths annually.
Few of those lives will be saved by means of a painful personal
pilgrimage like the ones portrayed on e Biggest Loser. Instead
Controlling Our Bodies, Controlling Ourselves 139
it will require cultural and political changes that make us more
active and less susceptible to our own unruly appetites. We’ll need
to help one another to form better habits, and perhaps better pri-
orities as well. In short, we will have to come together in some
way, at the very least for meals, but probably for policy changes
as well. Virtue, in this arena as in so many, is a collective activity,
and the revolution in our behavior, when it comes, is unlikely to
be televised.
16: Public Broadcasting
The Allure of Overexposure
Rob Long
N
ot long ago, I was enjoying an episode of Bravo TV’s
repellent, grotesque, and thoroughly addictive Real House-
wives of New York City.
(Please stay with me here. I could waste time claiming merely
to have been “fl ipping around” the dial; I could say that it “was on
in an airport lounge”; I could even blame, outlandishly, some kind
of “TiVo malfunction.” But the truth is, I was watching it, at home,
by choice. Don’t judge me.)
Real Housewives of New York City, for those who aren’t famil-
iar, is a reality television program that follows the exploits of self-
described “society women” in the Big Apple. Each episode records
in garish detail their petty squabbles and minor triumphs—the
whole awful tacky tapestry of their deeply middle-class lives, the
striving and social climbing and backstabbing, the shrieking hissy
fi ts and unhinged behavior. e entire series—and its sisters, e
Real Housewives of Orange County, Atlanta, New Jersey, and now
Washington, DC—emits such a nasty, sulfurous pong and displays
behavior so off ensive and sociopathic that it’s a mystery to me why
it’s not an even bigger hit.
One of the housewives, though, wasn’t really a housewife at all:
she was a single career gal when the episode was shot—I think
her tagline in the credits is something like “New York City is my