My 600-lb Life is the kind of cable show relegated to guilty pleasure for many. This is likely the kind of show you might watch when certain that no one will know you are watching it, eyes transfixed by the unearthly scenes of excess. Worse still, such shows with a voyeuristic freak show undertone can encourage groups to gather around and watch together for the purpose of ridiculing those perceived to be worse off than us. But at its core, My 600-lb Life is an inspiration.
True, there is nothing overtly pleasant about watching morbidly obese people facing a bevy of life-threatening health crises try to lose weight. Beyond the physical grotesqueness, the show follows people mired in deep spiritual anguish. Some participants on the semi-staged reality drama remain impassive, unwilling to make lasting changes.
There are others, though, for whom the show follows a veritable metamorphosis. Unlike the flippant make-over shows, hundreds of excess pounds of body fat do not evaporate in a brief transformation. No, for the people on My 600-lb Life changes are real. Like any real changes, they come not with dramatic and sudden results, but slowly and methodically.
At the beginning of the episode, the patient is often aloof, shifting blame for the hideous circumstance he or she finds herself in. You can talk body positivity until you’re blue in the face; there is nothing healthy or attractive about struggling to walk, bathe yourself, or meet basic needs of daily life. There is nothing undignified about this kind of dependence as there are many means by which a person may require help from other people. But to witness someone so incapacitated by voluntary overindulgence in food is uncomfortable and deeply sad.
As the episode unfolds, the patient seeks help from the mysterious Dr. Nowzaradan, affectionately known as Dr. Now. Moving someone of such girth requires Herculean effort on the part of the people who have spent years enabling the incapacitated person. One way or another, they arrive.
There doesn’t seem to be a single moment when the patient makes a choice for or against success. Rather, the intervening weeks and months between visits with Dr. Now follow a trajectory. The attitude of the patient spirals up or down based on external circumstances and, above all, the spiritual health of the individual person.
The term “spiritual” is charged. Afterall, we are only talking about weight loss. And yet, to become so colossally overweight requires a disordering of desires to an extent that can only be described as spiritual. In graphic scenes, whether real or purely reenacted is beside the point, the viewers watch idolatry on display. For the patient, food has become the priority, the focal point of every waking hour.
To choose anything other than God as a master is to choose slavery. The person who sought comfort in food has been ensnared by the results of overconsumption. The sustenance that is so desperately desired at all times is also loathed for the destruction it is wreaking. It is not just physical destruction; the weight also damages relationships. The parents and spouses who should be serving with love are enabling an addiction, forming a deficient and hollow human connection.
That’s why when the weight starts to come off, it is so much more than pounds. The trauma underlying the obsession with comfort-by-food must come to the fore. In addressing these wounds or continuing to run from them, the patients begin to reorder not only their appetites but also their relationships.
The results of My 600-lb Life are seldom glamorous; they are beautiful. Rather than a Biggest Loser confetti-strewn weigh in with lots of fanfare, the reality show offers a quieter success. Losing hundreds of pounds doesn’t happen in the blink of an eye and there is a long road to go after the show. And yet, the results are often deeply moving. Someone who weighed 600 pounds would likely be unable to sit in the front seat of a car and walk down the sidewalk with ease. Someone who is 450 pounds, a far cry from slim, may be able to. Witnessing that new lease on life, purchased with the accumulation of many choices over many ordinary days, is inspirational.
