We need a change
Do it today
I can feel my spirit rising
We need a change
So do it today
‘Cause I can see a clear horizon
What have you done today to make you feel proud?
It's never too late to try
What have you done today to make you feel proud?
You could be so many people
If you make that break for freedom
What have you done today to make you feel proud?
(excerpt from “Proud,” The Biggest Loser theme song)
These words from the theme song of the television show The Biggest Loser are typical of depictions of fatness in American culture. The phrases “we need a change” and a “break for freedom” are typical in that fatness is constructed as a self-imposed prison that can be “cured” through altering one's diet or level of exercise. Joyce L. Huff's essay “A ‘Horror of Corpulence’: Interrogating Bantingism and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fat-Phobia” finds in the Victorian era the flowering of the understanding of body fat as sediment that prohibits the body from functioning at full capacity. It was at this cultural moment that the construction of the body as object shifted to reading the body as “action” wherein fat becomes “the residue of certain inefficient or incorrect eating habits” (44). According to this model, fat is something exterior to the body, rather than something “belonging to and incorporated within” it. Large accumulations of fatty tissue then would act as a “symbolic pollution” of sediment, the building up of which serves to shackle the body (44). Indeed, modern-day understandings of the psychological motivations for overeating include the idea of using fatness as a shield to protect oneself from relationships, happiness, and success in a bid to self-sabotage or cloak oneself in some manner, thus furthering the metaphor of self-imprisonment (Goodman 44). From the nineteenth century onward, immorality, excessive consumption, and the erring body have become linked. By remolding the body through diet and exercise, one might free oneself from the bodily prison, emerging proud and realigning the body with culturally prescribed norms of beauty and health.
The contestants on The Biggest Loser (NBC, 2004-) listen intently, hoping that their fatness can be “cured” by altering their diet. Courtesy of NBC/PhotoFest. Photo by Dave Bjerke.
The call to experience the pride of action, resolve, and freedom to determine one's very personhood through dramatic weight loss is present in the first two seasons of the series, but the third incarnation of The Biggest Loser marked a departure from the format of earlier episodes. Where previously only fourteen people competed for the $250,000 grand prize and the title “Biggest Loser,” the 2006 season included a representative from each of the fifty states, and after a brief interview and workout with the trainers, these contestants were narrowed down to fourteen competitors who would remain on the ranch. The thirty-six others were sent home with a “secret.” They would remain in the competition by working out at home, and the two at-home competitors who lost the most weight would return to the ranch and compete for the grand prize. Where previous contestants had expressed desire to lose weight to make their families proud, several contestants began to describe their weight loss not only as a source of personal or familial pride, but as a source of communal gratification for their entire states. The effect of this alteration was to construct the body and fat-phobic notions of health as a locus of state and national pride.
This essay explores the narratives employed by The Biggest Loser and examines how the bedrock American myths of the self-made man and the frontier inform our notions of fatness and weight loss. Examining the rhetoric of weight loss allows us to read these myths of land and nationhood as they interpret the American body and thereby produce hegemonic body and beauty ideals. To uncover the myth not only in the televised narrative but also in the contestants’ feelings about their participation, I consider the construction of the television show, interviews with contestants after the season aired, and an interview with the trainers before the start of the third season.
The Biggest Loser is one of several reality television shows that center the dramatic narrative on obese contestants’ weight loss through diet and exercise. Each week the contestants are asked to lose as much weight as possible under the tutelage of their team's personal trainer, Bob or Kim, and with the help of two physicians and one nutritionist who remain nearly invisible for the duration of the show. Like those on Survivor, The Biggest Loser’s contestants face challenges, working as a team in the early stages of competition and later as individuals, to gain immunity from elimination. There are two types of challenges performed: physical and temptation. The former require contestants to perform competitive tasks that demonstrate endurance and strength, such as building a tower of wet sand carried from the ocean's edge. The temptation places the contestants, either singly or as a group, in a room with an elaborate spread of forbidden high-fat, high-calorie foods. The competitor who consumes the most calories in a timed period wins a highly valuable prize, such as a cruise with family members or home exercise equipment, but this gain comes at the expense of ruining his or her diet. The team winning the physical challenge also earns a prize, and the contestants proceed to weigh in. The team with the highest combined percentage of body weight lost is safe for the week, and the losing team is required to vote off a team member. In the case of a tie, the opposing team acts as the tie-breaker, making the strategic decision of whom to send home doubly important. After four months spent on the ranch, the remaining three contestants are sent home to continue their weight loss, returning for the live finale, in which the contestant with the highest percentage of body weight lost is declared The Biggest Loser and awarded the $250,000 grand prize.
The Biggest Loser, by removing the contestants from their homes and allowing them to “fix” their bodies on a ranch, enacts a narrative of decontamination of the fat body and reinsertion of the thin body into mainstream society. As the tone of the theme song indicates, this reality show is framed differently from similar programs. Whereas television shows like Survivor pit contestants against each other and place the focus on a large cash reward, often by asking them to put themselves in dangerous situations (eating as little or as much food as can be caught or found near the campsite, for example), and to outwit, outlast, and outplay each other, The Biggest Loser places the focus on transformation, both psychological and physical, as well as teamwork. “Playing the game” is often frowned on by the contestants as well as the trainers, who see strategic voting, weight gain, and similar tactics dangerous both to the relationships the contestants have formed and to their health. The name of the show itself gestures toward its ultimate purpose, to change one's appearance the most through weight loss. This internal and external transformation is understood as more than a simple competitive makeover show. The Biggest Loser posits itself as the opportunity to grant the “freedom” to be “so many people.” This framing is made possible by the already constructed notion of fatness as a spoiled identity. According to Le'a Kent, fatness is “an identity that can communicate only its own failure, an identity for which all other narratives are impossible” (132). The notion of spoiled identity neatly sets up the desirability of weight loss. When contestants believe that losing weight will liberate them, allowing any number of possibilities once they have remade themselves, they can begin the difficult road of weight loss. Building on this notion of spoiled identity, which is already in circulation in mainstream American culture, The Biggest Loser also contributes to the maintenance of that construction using the discourses of mental and physical health, morality, and sexuality. Without the notion of spoiled identity in place, the mythological frontier as a site of redemption for the repentant fat body could not operate.
Richard Slotkin identifies four major components to the frontier myth as it functions in American culture: separation and regression (separation from the parent community and regression to a natural state), progress, and conflict (with enslaved Africans or Natives at each stage of Western expansion). Progress is characterized in differing ways: “The Puritan colonists emphasized the achievement of spiritual regeneration through frontier adventure; Jeffersonians (and later disciples of Turner's ‘Frontier thesis’) saw the frontier settlement as a re-enactment and democratic renewal of the original ‘social contract’; while Jacksonian Americans saw the conquest of the Frontier as a means to the regeneration of personal fortunes and/or of patriotic vigor and virtue.” Slotkin posits that by enacting these components (separation, regression to a primitive state, and regeneration through violence) one could achieve “the redemption of American spirit or fortune” (12).
In the context of the television show, this notion of escape to the West is clearly in the foreground. The contestants must leave their families, friends, and jobs behind as they travel to a ranch in California where they live with their trainers for four months. The ranch features Southwestern-style structures that evoke the West in the American imaginary as a place to rebuild oneself or one's relationship with America. In The Biggest Loser, however, there is a further complication: in addition to providing a site of escape, the ranch offers a decontamination zone, where the fatness of the contestants is contained, away from the larger (and supposedly thin) populace. At the completion of the filmed episodes, the bracketed space of the ranch functions as a way of reintroducing or reintegrating the reformed “outsider” back into mainstream culture.
Kathleen LeBesco argues that despite those that decry the decline of morality through the decentering of religion from American life, a renewed discourse that offers the means by which to arrange one's life, to judge one's own actions and those of others, has appeared to fill the vacuum. The discourses of health and morality have become so entwined as to be found in venues as diverse as the rhetoric of food-as-sin advertising to statements concerning the “deadly fattening of our youth” (Greg Critser quoted in Campos 235), which Paul Campos names as a site of the moral panic induced by our cultural fear and hatred of fatness.
Sloth and gluttony are the characteristics most often to be found in the representation of fatness as moral failure (LeBesco). Both are present in the narrative of The Biggest Loser: contestants often comment on how much more active they are now, which allows the audience to imagine the contestant as the slothful fat person he or she was before arriving at the ranch. As the season moves forward, the show juxtaposes the trimmer bodies of contestants with their earlier, fleshier selves using as flashbacks black-and-white footage of contestants moving in slow motion, thus furthering this perception of the slothful, corpulent body. Gluttony is also demonstrated in the competition for weight loss, particularly in the temptation challenges. This allows the audience a certain viewing pleasure, as their assumptions concerning the gluttonous consumption of the corpulent is confirmed. Contestants are also asked to use their inherent greed for good instead of evil by turning the desire for food toward a more patriotic end, the lust for money and entry into the system of privilege attributed to the thin.
Representations of fat people operate according to mutually exclusive superlatives (Goodman 137). For example, fat women are seen as either “passive or rebellious, childishly compulsive or maternal, out-of-control or overcontrolling or domineering” (Goodman 138-139). The extremes concerning the desire and desirability of the corpulent woman, the notion that she is either asexual or hypersexual, finds a place in the representation of fatness in The Biggest Loser. The television show, despite the announced existence of the contestants’ loved ones—family members, spouses, and children—participates in the construction of fat women (and men) as asexual by employing these relationships as rewards to be earned through effort, endurance, and ultimately weight loss.
While on the ranch, contestants are separated from family and friends and thus are removed from any preexisting romantic relationships. It is not until the contestants leave the ranch, either through elimination or through the “reveal” of the final three contestants to their family members after four months on the ranch, that we see them in the context of romantic relationships. Even phone calls home while on the ranch are allowed only when won as a challenge prize. Unlike other reality television shows, such as Beauty and the Geek, which seem to encourage dating between contestants, there has never been a publicized romance during the filming on the ranch.1 Several of the contestants have been involved in romantic relationships, however, which actively dispels the construction of the spoiled fat identity. By denying the audience the ability to view a fat person in a romantic relationship, The Biggest Loser maintains the notion that fat bodies are undesirable, unlovable, or somehow spoiled. This echoes the discourse of the ranch as a decontamination zone, where the ranch manages this transgressiveness by isolating the potentially dangerous sexuality of the corpulent until they can be “cured” of their unlovability and be returned to mainstream society.
In a preseason interview the two trainers, Bob and Kim, discussed their approaches to weight loss:
BOB: And I think that my approach has always been the same, which is work it from the inside out. I get people to realize that it's how they feel on the inside. And when they feel good on the inside …
KIM: Exactly.
BOB: … they are going to look great on the outside. The body is going to follow where the mind leads them. (Harper and Lyons)
The notion of a thin person trapped in a fat body that forms a fat person's false double-consciousness, which exists solely in the construction of fatness itself, is one of the most often reoccurring tropes in the dominant narratives and representation of fatness. This thin persona locked behind walls of fat is assumed to be the “true” or “authentic” identity of the corpulent. The Biggest Loser relies heavily on this trope in its call to free this supposed authentic inner being, as is evidenced by Trainer Bob's reference to his inside-out technique, whereby “fixing” the fat person's mental state will result in weight loss. This notion of repair points to one of the ways in which fat is pathologized: fatness is an expression of a broken or somehow damaged mental state that requires mending. Once the “fix” is complete, the authentic (i.e., thin) self can emerge, healthy and happy. In the last episode before the live finale, the trainers take their team members to face their former selves. Dramatically revealed life-size cutouts of their bodies at their starting weights reduce several contestants to tears. Kim's words to the contestants Kai and Wiley (“You can't hide behind that girl anymore … no more” and “Say good-bye to this Wiley … and hello to the new Wiley”) reveal both that the emergence of a “true” self has occurred and that the fragile and flawed states of “fat Kai” and “fat Wiley,” their former selves, have effectively been slain.
What makes this particular occurrence of the discourse of fat double-consciousness different from other expressions of the notion, however, is its connection to the savage-civilized dichotomy of the frontier. Here, in the narrative of the television show, the drama of the frontier is both inscribed on the fat person's body and played out within that body's interior. That is to say that in this drama, the fat person is both savage and civilized. This mirrors quite markedly Richard Slotkin's interpretation of the hero of the frontier narrative: “Because the border between savagery and civilization runs through their moral center, the Indian wars are, for these heroes, a spiritual or psychological struggle which they win by learning to discipline or suppress the savage or ‘dark’ side of their own human nature. Thus they are mediators of a double kind who can teach civilized men how to defeat savagery on its native grounds—the natural wilderness, and the wilderness of the human soul” (Slotkin 14).
Whereas the ranch acts as the site of escape where the work of regeneration can begin, it is the body that acts as the battlefield upon which the figurative West is won and the psyche in which the fat person and his or her authentic self, the thin person, make war in a schizoid battle for supremacy. Trainer Bob frames the struggle to free imprisoned fat people in the rhetoric of warfare: “I think using the fifty states is such a great metaphor, with The Biggest Loser showing we are battling this fight of obesity across our continent. And we are looking at people, one from every single state, and we are just trying to make a difference. We are trying to do something and pull this war on obesity down. We are trying to do something” (Harper and Lyons). The outcome of this terrific battle is predetermined by the show's format; after all, who would tune into a television show about fat people who could not or refused to lose weight? Indeed, this is what Trainer Bob's pre-season 3 interview proclaims: “I think what you're going to see in season 3 is just more of the same: big people trying to gain their lives again, gain control of their lives again and lose tons of weight in the process” (Harper and Lyons). Not only does Bob refer to the struggle to wrestle control from a supposed inner savage, but his slip that they will “gain their lives” implies that they are not in control of their lives, not even in possession of their own lives.
Just as the hero of the frontier narrative offers a lesson to Everyman about how to conquer the “wilderness of the human soul,” the “victor” of the battle between the barbaric fat woman and her civilized inner thin woman carries this instruction back to refined society. This is demonstrated clearly in the episode in which the three remaining contestants prepare themselves to leave the ranch. In the episode, two of season 2’s contestants, Matt and Suzy, return to the ranch to give advice to Kai, Erik, and Wylie about how to maintain their weight loss after the show ends. As they leave, Wiley comments that Matt and Suzy have “passed the torch” to them and that they would soon be “go[ing] home and becom[ing] ambassadors to our states.” In the process of becoming “ambassadors,”2 the contestants attest to and reaffirm the effectiveness of the dominant narrative of fatness that prescribes diet and exercise as the cure for obesity, along the way supporting the underlying notions that fatness is a voluntary condition and that that condition is predicated on a particular laziness inherent in the corpulent body.
Reentry from the frontier marks a moment of celebration of the victory in the war on obesity, as the society that had once been “escaped” welcomes the return of the newly thin. The finale's reveal of the thin body provides enormous pleasure for the viewing audience and acts as an integral part of this process of reinsertion of the “outsider” body. The finale's dramatic display of the contestants’ new appearances, wherein they burst through life-size pictures of themselves at their starting weights, initiates this moment of appreciative reception. Indeed, the live season finale acts as a sort of ticker-tape parade in which the victors are cheered by the audience and drenched in a sea of confetti; the fat savage is declared dead and the thin person released from P.O.W. status. The accompanying interviews conducted on national network television and local programming emphasize the reemergence of the body as a site of state and national pride. These expressions of pride are thinly veiled as references to the inspiration these dramatically changed bodies provide for the overweight viewing public.
An interview with a season 3 “at-home” contestant, Matthew McNutt, provides further insight into the extended reception of the newly emerged thin body as a source of local and state pride. McNutt was interviewed by 207, a locally produced Portland, Maine, television show, and the conversation between him and the interviewer, Rob Caldwell, makes clear the ways in which his body was transformed not simply from fat to thin, but from hypervisible yet anonymous fat body to local celebrity, which impelled him toward a renewed public ownership of his body. “A few days from now, on the first of January, countless people will make a resolution to lose weight in 2007. To get in shape we usually need some inspiration, and there is no better example than a modest guy from Boothbay Harbor whose story is now known around the country” (McNutt). McNutt's dramatic transformation and his public display of his “new” body can be taken not only as an inspiration for the “countless people” grappling with an inner savage, but also as a body that acts for the public as a marker of that savage's perpetual and definitive defeat. This is indicated by the often-stated phrase “I'm not going back,” which seems to act as a reassurance to the public of the stability of the newly freed and strengthened thin identity.
Despite McNutt's transformation and the fame it garnered, fat bodies are never entirely invisible. Melissa Jane Hardie notes that in the case of Elizabeth Taylor and her expanding and shrinking figure, hers is not simply a figure with “public” and “private” bodies; rather, “the public body, being, like all bodies, in the world, but also in the limelight, is also the body that betrayed her private habits (overeating)” (159). I complicate this by noting that like public ownership of the celebrity body, demonstrated by the public's fascination with famous figures such as Oprah Winfrey and Elizabeth Taylor, Americans’ fascination with nonfamous fat bodies carries with it an everyday celebrity in which the “public” body is always marked with the supposed knowledge of “private” habits. Considering that the fat figure is often relegated to an asexual and undesirable space, the fat person, particularly women, are shunted to the position of the “fat friend.” This unwelcome location, existing in relation to a thin subject, of not being the “star” of one's own life, is often cited in relation to the oppression of fat bodies. Indeed, we can see this rhetoric in the remark noted earlier by Trainer Bob that losing weight will allow fat individuals to “gain their lives.” Despite this lack of subjectivity in an individual's own life, the hypervisibility of the fat body is undeniable. Drawing on Michel de Certeau's notion of the everyday, we might say that hypervisibility operating in conjunction with a lack of subjectivity amounts to a sort of “everyday celebrity,” in which the mundane aspects of the everyday work in tandem with the spectacular aspects of celebrity to create a figure marked by a desire of the spectator simultaneously to control and to disavow its corpulence. One is compelled to look and yet cannot stand to be confronted with the “out-of-control” figure. This tension appears in an account of fat women by W. Charisse Goodman, who refers to this state as the “Full-Figured Phantom,” defined solely by her weight and the cultural assumptions attached to her size and transformed into “an almost mythically unnatural and repulsive figure consumed by physical and emotional problems” (2). This ghostly figure, denied subjectivity, is seemingly contradictorily (as indicated by the word phantom) embodied as resistance and yet disallowed material form. Just as maps and other official documents create a “nowhen” that denies the existence of modes of resistance in the practice of everyday life (Certeau), so too might medical mappings that describe the contours of the obese body reject the fat body that resists this reading as unhealthy and morally corrupt. Yet where the maps representationally immobilize resistance, the everyday celebrity, as a projection onto the discursive body, cannot fully erase the presence of the material body that evokes horror and disgust.
This everyday celebrity attributed to the fat body and the conquest of the inner savage that occurs in the contestants of The Biggest Loser mark yet another way in which the mythology of the frontier circulates within the discourse of fatness. As I have already noted, the frontier functions as a site of separation and escape. Brian Roberts traces the trail of the forty-niners as they traveled from their middle-class homes in the East to their hoped-for fortunes in the West. Aboard ships these men took to their journals and created elaborate worlds of play for themselves, wherein “juxtapositions of nature and civilization, between the homes they left and this new, natural world of ‘fantastic’ shapes and things, were a continuing source of pleasure” (112). The gold-seekers he speaks of were taking delight in the escape from societal demands and expectations, using the in-between space of the ship en route as a site in which to re-create themselves and (temporarily) redraw gender performances (men performing the “woman's work” of washing clothes or transvestite “ladies” performing in ship dances). The ship itself functioned as transitional space between East and West, but it also formed a conduit in which the mythology of the frontier could begin its work even as the ship docked in an eastern harbor. That this world of play aboard the ship occurred before the forty-niners reached the frontier serves to illuminate the power of the frontier mythology as a site of modification, alteration, or release that can be indulged in without a geographical separation. This same flight occurs in the corpulent body in The Biggest Loser: the contestants escape not the middle-class societal expectations of success and manhood experienced by the forty-niners but rather the corporeal map of everyday celebrity, in order to free their inner thin persons, recover subjectivity in their own lives, and thus gain the ability to map their own bodies. Performing this remapping in the televised space of The Biggest Loser, however, produces a shift from one type of public bodily ownership, that of everyday celebrity, to public ownership of the spectacular celebrity body; the disgust associated with the state of everyday celebrity evolves into pride in the symbolic defeat of the frontier's savage. This transformation is quite precarious and is heavily invested with emotional baggage.
McNutt's trip from quasi-anonymity to celebrity is marked by fear and shame as his motivations. “When I first came home I was motivated purely by the sheer terror that in September my town was going to find out I was a part of Biggest Loser and all my starting weight, starting photos were going to be out there. And I've got to look different!” (McNutt). Should he have returned to his state not having lost a remarkable amount of weight, he would have “let his state down” and failed to live up to the frontier's potential to facilitate a dramatic transformation of self. This would serve not only as a moment of shame for McNutt, but also as a moment in which the myth of the frontier might be exposed as an illusion.
In discussing how much weight McNutt had lost, Caldwell noted, “You lost 176 pounds in all. Just to put that for what it's worth, not to be totally self-centered here, but that is three pounds more than what I weigh. So you lost, in effect, me” (McNutt). To which McNutt responded, “Yeah, I've been getting that from a lot of people.” This seems to perform double duty in terms of significance. Not only have several people, in mentioning that McNutt has lost “them,” expressed the notion of the doubly present fat person (an entire person—presumably the fat “savage” identity—is lost in the struggle to free the thin identity trapped within), but they have also articulated a particular ownership of his body by way of imagined participation in his weight loss. This sentiment of public participation and ownership of the corpulent body is reflected in the theme song's opening line, “We need a change.” Not only does the lyrics’ insistence on a collective serve to indict the viewer for his or her own risky health behavior, but it also encourages the identification of the viewer with the contestants as they move toward the release of their inner thin persons.
A follow-up show that aired September 4, 2007, revisited former contestants from the three seasons of The Biggest Loser. The show featured only nine of the ninety-four contestants that had been involved with the show. Among these returning former contestants were several who had changed their careers and were working as personal trainers, motivational speakers, or nutritionists. This return of triumphant inner thin persons served to reinforce the defeat of the inner savage as permanent. Their new careers as instructors in exercise, nutrition, and self-esteem simultaneously buttressed the notion of the knowledgeable victor returning to the refined society he or she had escaped. The reunion show acted as a further indicator of the effect of fame on the private sphere of their lives, opening up further public ownership of their transformed celebrity and celebrity-transformed bodies. Marty proposed to his season 3 fellow contestant Amy on the reunion show just at the moment she stepped on the scale to be weighed for the audience. This act not only reifies the notion of the “unlovable” corpulent body, but also fulfills the promise that weight loss will cure this condition: after a dramatic weight loss, love is sure to follow.
Just as the narrative of the frontier naturalizes the oppression of Native Americans and justifies the removal of their lands, The Biggest Loser performs similar work of naturalization, in this case by the construction of fat as unhealthy and of collateral notions of thinness as the only desirable and desired body shape, a construction that occurs partially through the obfuscation of dieticians’ and physicians’ presence. Their absence silently reasserts the idea that fatness is unhealthy and that the loss of a significant amount of weight will confer the supposed health of the thin on the newly restructured body. After all, we do not need to be reminded of what we already know, so the presence of the physicians is unnecessary; their limited presence acts only as an authenticating backdrop against which the process of weight loss is deemed safe (despite the knowledge that yoyo dieting puts tremendous strain on the cardiovascular system, the health of which is a key indicator of longevity) (Campos).
When discussing the interplay between savagery and civilization, it is important to recall that the savage in frontier mythology is always racialized. In examining the racialization of the savage in conjunction with The Biggest Loser, two issues present themselves: the ways in which fatness and thinness are racialized in American culture and the naturalization of Eurocentric beauty ideals that the show performs.
Asking a person to lose weight to become more attractive adheres to Eurocentric beauty ideals, which, connecting patriotism to this process, reveals that this constructs the true American not only as a thin American, but as a white American or an American who can best conform to Eurocentric beauty ideals. Part of the process of containment and despoiling of the fat identity involves adherence to beauty ideals. Like most television programming, The Biggest Loser features few people of color. Success on the show depends on a body that can achieve the dramatic results demanded by the producers. The discourses of beauty and attractiveness present in constructing the fat identity as spoiled work then as a privilege, or bonus prize, to the contestants as they lose weight. The contestants who are able to lose the most weight in particular areas of their bodies (for women in the hips and thighs), those who can most closely approach Eurocentric beauty standards, are of particular importance in the notion of the infinite malleability of the human body.
When these naturalization processes collude with the narratives of pride for both the state and nation, what is achieved is the transformation of hegemonic body norms into more than a simple aesthetic. It becomes a moment in which notions of progress and patriotism police the borders of the body and call on the American public to perform their patriotic duty by conforming to this particular bodily aesthetic. This television show is not the only example of the phenomenon; indeed, the Presidential Fitness Challenge performed the same work for years before the creation of The Biggest Loser. The Presidential Fitness Challenge operates on a smaller scale, however, despite its national coverage. Where The Biggest Loser awards a cash prize and elevates the winner (and to a lesser degree other participants) to celebrity status, the presidential fitness test (despite its inclusion of high-profile figures such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and the president of the United States) amounts to little more than an elementary school gym teacher awarding certificates. It is the hypervisibility of that union of patriotism and health in The Biggest Loser that makes it such a dynamic text for examining the expression of patriotism through conformity to bodily borders.
The Biggest Loser employs the lasting American myth by “discovering” that the frontier does not exist simply in a particular space and time; it remains forever open and is the site of daily battle with our own “inner savage.” In this narrative of displacement, containment, maintenance, and reinsertion, the normative body and the beauty ideals of dominant culture are further naturalized and reproduced through this wholly American myth of the country as a nation of continual progress, continually remaking itself in its own image.
1. Two contestants from season 2 of the show, the winner Matt and the third-place runner-up, Suzy, did date after the end of filming, and they were married in September 2006. Also, Marty proposed to his season 3 fellow contestant Amy during the reunion show that aired in September 2007, although their relationship was not publicized during filming.
2. The term ambassador and the notion of the Everyman status of the contestants bring an opportunity to discuss briefly the eliding of class issues in the framework of the show. Contestants are rarely seen without their team sweatsuits, shorts, and T-shirts, which obfuscate any potential class difference between the contestants. Though clothing and other class markers inscribed on the body are not the only ways in which we determine class, they are the most highly visible and are often used to determine class status. This erasure of class markers contributes to the maintenance of class invisibility and a continuing construction of American identity as decidedly middle class. Indeed, exercise often requires a certain amount of leisure time that is not always available to the working class, but in the framework of the show this fact is underemphasized, particularly when it comes to the fifty-state model of season 3. The thirty-six at-home players were asked to lose as much weight as possible without the benefit of leaving their jobs and family obligations to focus solely on weight loss. This supports the notions not only that the body is infinitely malleable, but also that the thin body is universally accessible.
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