3-The Story of…the Body’s Fat Cells Was Like A Bollywood Epic

That quote made sitting through the six hours of documentaries that comprised National Geographic (Canada) Channel’s “Fat Day” all worth it.

Now let me apologize for the delay in getting this entry finished and posted. I’m sure some of you have already decided that I’m just some flash-in-the-pan, fly-by-night blogger who only has something to say for a couple days and then gets bored with the topic and goes back to whatever held their interest before. I tell you, it’s not true; I’m just slow and I have 15 pages of notes to whittle down to bring you something cogent and relatively concise. While I can assure you that concise didn’t end up happening, I hope that cogent did. I promise, however, never to take 15 pages of notes again. I also promise never to try to report on six hours of television again.

So first the facts—eventually I’ll come back to that crazy Bollywood comment.

National Geographic Channel aired a six hour block of documentaries three times beginning at 12:00 noon December 30th and finishing up at 6:00am December 31st, 2007. While this makes for 18 hours of viewing rather than the 24 hours one might have assumed would comprise “Fat Day;” I can’t say I’m terribly upset, given that the channel only cobbled together six hours of content.

Below is a wee synopsis of each of the programs that aired in the order that they were presented.

America’s Fattest City
This doc follows five residents of Houston, TX—the fattest city in the U.S.—who generally don’t seem to care about their weight with the exception of one. They range in size from an 11-year old at 165lbs to a woman in her forties who weighs 625lbs. The myth of this documentary is that these people don’t care about their weight. While two of them don’t ever admit to having dieted, two of them do, and talk about their frustrations with the lack of long lasting results. One of them is having a gatric bypass by the end of the film. While it makes for intriguing copy to say these people don’t care about their weight, I’d venture to say they all do.

Frontline: Diet Wars
Stephen Talbot, who played a young friend of Beaver’s on the iconic “Leave it to Beaver” investigates all the biggest diet trends from The South Beach Diet, to Weight Watchers to The Atkins Diet. And then tries to lose weight himself.

Too Fat, Too Young
This title reminds me of cautionary films about the dangers of teenaged sex. This doc follows three children ranging in age from ten to sixteen, on their weight loss journey as they take three very different paths. Kari, 16, is an American girl who decides that a gastric bypass will be her way of dealing with her weight. Barnaby, a 15 year old boy, convinces his parents to let him go to a fat camp for five weeks. And Daniel, an adorable 10 year old boy, is part of a new program (not covered by the government’s health plan) that sets him up with a dietician, a nutritionist, a trainer and a professor. His plan is meant to be a long terms solution and when the doc ends he’s been working with them for nine months and there’s no indication that the program is coming to an end.

Diets from Hell
Honestly the most tedious of the lot to watch. This poor excuse for documentary film making tells us of some hellish diets. But while the title of the show would give you the impression that you’re going to be watching something about different diets that people have tried, it was basically a documentary about some dramatic eating disorders like addictive dieting, anorexia, over eating, and get this: eating in one’s sleep. Still, even with a show stopper like eating in your sleep, this doc managed to bore the hell out of me.

Fat Plague
Believe it or not, the Bollywood comment came out of this program. In this doc we are introduced to Dr. Nihkil Dhurandar—a man who proposes that obesity, in some cases, may be viral and that it’s catching.

Horizon: The Atkins Diet
Lastly, an entire hour devoted to debunking the myths surrounding the Atkins diet and discovering why it actually works.

And just for the fun of it I watched a couple more British docs on the W network called “The Truth about Size 0” (which actually means a British size 4 but I guess that doesn’t have the same punch) and “Extreme Celebrities.” Both sent British B-listers with already model-esque figures, off to do some crazy diets for two weeks to a month just to prove that those types of diets are bad for us. Really? We weren’t aware that starvation and bingeing are bad for us—in 2007, this was still a mystery to most of us? Who fucking allows this drivel to go to air! I haven’t had my intelligence offended like that in some time.

What I am not going to do here is give you a blow-by-blow of each doc. If you want to know the details of them that badly just stick around your TV next year right before New Year’s Day. I’m sure some network will find six hours of content geared to make you want to lose weight. If you’re really desperate, let me know and I’ll loan you my awesome VHS tape of the event. What I will focus on, instead, are all the things about each doc that the producers of Fat Day don’t want you noticing—like the marketing surrounding it, the visual and sound devices employed by the film makers, and the language used in the programs; all devices meant to instill a certain message, but hopefully in a way that you won’t discern. So off to the races, shall we?

The Promo
I have to tell you about the promo for “Fat Day” because the first time I saw it my heart rate went up. Based on when I started this blog I know that I was seeing the promotional ad for this block of programming at least a week before it aired but I have the feeling it was probably running before then. When I first heard it, I was actually angry, until I heard the last bit. But in hind sight I think I should still be angry. Here’s why:

You’re presented with a kaleidoscope type image of shots of KFC and Burger King signs, various fat persons just being fat, fat persons eating high calorie foods, shots of those high calorie foods all by themselves, fat children and a fat woman in a wheelchair in a hospital—you get the idea. And because it’s in a kaleidoscope every image is multiplied by five so it feels all the more pervasive. My favorite image, because of how cruel you’ll later realize it is, is one of a person pulling a pair of stretch pants over their ample belly. The voice over accompanying all these images is that of a man who clearly has little patience for the fat among us:

“Okay they continue to stuff their faces with crappy food. They’re a burden to our health care system. What the (bleep) is wrong with these people? I mean c’mon, how hard can it be to lose weight? How about injecting a little discipline into your lives folks? Put down the cheeseburgers and fries, eat a salad; then get off your butts and get some (bleeping) exercise!

Then the screen fades to black and the following sentence appears in white:

“If only it were that simple.”

Now, whizzing across the screen, diet books with horrifying sounding names (“Thin Within”) and bottles of pills and a logo for the FDA and a much more sane sounding man with the following things to say:

“From social pressures to biological costs, get the facts on fat. Fat Day, on National Geographic Channel.”

So while the first part of the ad made my skin crawl, and clearly that was the intent, I held out hope when I saw all those awful diet books and the pills and heard the words “social pressures” that “Fat Day” was going to add a little something insightful to the North American dialogue (or is it a monologue really) on fat. Oh how wrong I was. They might as well have left the second half of the ad on the cutting room floor for all it had to do with what actually aired.

I am naïve. I thought National Geographic would pull out some really insightful work on the topic of fat but it was all the same old, same old. It was all about what it takes to lose the weight with very little discussion of how the weight came about in the first place. And even where that was discussed, there was never any focus given to those explanations. The focus simply came back to the big three: less food, more exercise and how’s about a little surgery.

The Timing
Much as I want to believe that the National Geographic channel has my best interests at heart, I should have known by the timing of “Fat Day” that this was all a massive marketing gimmick. It just would have made more sense to me if they’d aired it on the 31st but maybe it got in the way of too much other programming. Or maybe they expect that even fat people have something to do during the day on New Year’s Eve so it’s best to serve up this programming on a Sunday when everyone, including fat people, tends to be sedentary. In any case, December 30th is still only 48 hours away from the great day of resolutions and most everyone can be counted upon to make a resolution about losing weight. So why not a little nudge right?

And if you’re going to appease all the advertisers filling the 138 ad spaces in that block of programming, you can’t be telling people that it’s just okay to stay fat and we’re going to sit and talk about why you are. Because if you do that, you miss out on the enormous amounts of cash the diet industry (an any other industry that wants to be associated with thinness) is willing to dump into advertising right around the new year. So National Geographic, like any other channel, decides they too, want a piece of the pie and you get a “Fat Day” that should have been called “Diet Day.”

The Visuals
The opening shots of “America’s Fattest City” were a perfect precursor for what to expect for the next six hours. There was one sequence in which every person about to be profiled in the doc was shown eating at some laughably unattractive moment. The inference of course is that fat people always look like this when they eat—and apparently thin people don’t eat at all, but they most certainly don’t eat like this. While this type of visual didn’t come up with the same frequency in every one of the programs, in the programs where specific people were being profiled, it was du rigeur that the “offending” party had to be shown eating. Interestingly in the documentary “Too Fat, Too Young” Kari, the 16- year old girl, is never really seen in an unflattering shot like this, but by the end of the of the doc I was left with the distinct impression that she might be trading in one issue with food—overeating—for another—anorexia. Maybe the film makers find anorexia more acceptable.

In “The Diet Wars” our correspondent, Steve Talbot, who is considered at the high end of overweight by the BMI chart, is shown eating plenty of times, but never in an unflattering way. Perhaps because he’s the correspondent and we aren’t supposed to have feelings of loathing and condescension for him. But perhaps also because he is repentant; he spends the entire doc searching for a diet to cure him of his near obesity and by the end has dropped 15lbs. It seems that as long as someone appears to care about their weight they are allowed to be shown eating food like normal folk.

In “The Atkins Diet” documentary these shots were almost nauseating. Taken against a black background, a round table piled with steaks, bacon, eggs and other meats and proteins was harshly lit. The fat group of men and women around this table were shown eating the meats, up close and in slow motion. No one looks good in slow motion (except Bo Derek in “Perfect 10”). It’s a known fact that political smear ads usually slow the film to make the victim of the ad look sinister. So even if you shot Kate Moss eating in slow motion it would look sinister. But when you put fat people in the shot it’s reinforces the idea that it is somehow wrong that these fat people are allowed to eat all these fatty meats and proteins and God forbid, lose weight. Ironically, though the voice over talks about these people losing weight, the unfortunate souls in those shots are all still relatively fat—reinforcing the idea that to eat this much of type of food, even when the Atkins Diet says you can, is at the very least, distasteful and at the worst, sinful.

My favorite, staple visual of these programs is the shots of headless fat bodies walking by. These unfortunate fat folks who’ve obviously never consented to having their images shown on TV are paraded in front of the camera wearing the most unflattering clothing to ever appear in any store. From too-tight shirts to wedgie-causing pants, there’s not a single one of these fat people shown well dressed. I worked in a plus sized women’s clothing store for three years and I can assure you there are plenty of women over size 14 or 16 who dress themselves very well. There are plenty of men who shop while being fat and still do a good job. Take Brian Clivas, a middle aged gentleman profiled in “The Atkins Diet” who even after having lost 70lbs is still way above the top end of Marks & Spencer’s largest pant size. He is as well dressed as any man at Christie’s or Sotheby’s. In fact he looks quite dapper. But I guess it’s okay to show him looking great because he, like Steve Talbot, is repentant and diets. Even when Brian is shown in just his under shorts the shot is more flattering than similar shots of the two thin semi-celebrities who were put through the diet ringer on the two W network programs.

I cannot resist talking about one particular headless fat man shot—the man is seen riding on a Segway. If you’re not aware of what the Segway is, it’s like a pogo stick on wheels and goes the way you want it to based on the direction in which you lean. A reporter on a local news station was shown trying to maneuver one at Disney in order to get around efficiently for the day. She’s thin. I guess it was okay for her to use one.

And then there are the food shots. In these documentaries food is constantly being shot in a way that makes it look unattractive. I’m sure most of us are aware of the tweaking that goes on to make food photogenic. The army of paints, waxes, and lighting that go into making the cover of a cookbook look good are phenomenal. Take that all away and food, photographed, as is, looks generally unappetizing. You’ll know this from staring at the shots of your favorite combo at your local kabob restaurant. They have probably not hired a really good culinary photographer to do their meal shots and so there’s a weird, sickly look to the food. Thankfully you can see the real thing right in front of your face and it looks and tastes a lot better than those photographs would make you think. Like the harshly lit meats of “The Atkins Diet” or the wide shot of all the fajita fixings on the table at a Houston restaurant frequented by one of the “America’s Fattest City” participants, the food always looks abundant in a bad way or frankly unappetizing—when there’s an unrepentant fat person sitting next to it. Cut to Steve Talbot eating dinner on his birthday after two months of dieting—that chocolate cake actually looks good; his Atkins dinner at TGIF looks good and appetizing. The message, over and over again: if you’re dieting and we can see the results (i.e. you’re beginning to look acceptable) what you eat is okay; and if you’re not it’s not.

Over the course of the day I began to realize that the visuals used in the promo were all lifted from the six programs shown that day and there was one that came to bother me when I figured out what it was. During the promo there is a shot of a seemingly random headless fat person pulling a pair of spandex pants up over their ample belly. And with the snide male voice over in the audio you’re left with the impression of someone who seems damn proud of their belly. How far from the reality. That shot is taken from a scene in which Daniel, (the 10 year old in “Too Fat, Too Young”), in an effort to lose weight, is getting dressed to go and do some exercise. Apparently even children are not safe from having their images used to further the idea that all fat people are out of control; even when the image is taken from a moment when they’re trying to get things under control.

The Audio
Polka music. Let’s just lay it out. Polka music is the best music to use if you want to make fun of someone. If you want to convey that George W Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” announcement on the USS Lincoln was all a sham, show the image with some polka music playing. If you want to keep us laughing about the models who have fallen on the runway, throw up the image (in slow motion) and play some polka music. If you want to make sure that we get that fat people should never be taken seriously, play some polka music.

Accompanying nearly every image of the headless, anonymous, badly dressed, fat person in this six hour block was some polka music. Or something heavy on the tuba in any case. It’s like we can’t talk about fat or see images of fat people without having to make a joke. And somehow this joke isn’t considered offensive—though it damn well should be.

I don’t know a single fat person who likes polka music. Maybe show some fat people and play something really cool by Radio Head. I wonder if people might begin to understand that no one has to be made to feel bad in order to talk about fat.

Then there’s your other most popular audio cue: the foreboding music. Whether it’s just one low note on the synth or the long held note on the violins, it’s all about freaking you the fuck out. It’s played at every possible moment: during talks about the rising statistics of obesity in North America and the UK; when the ten year old boy who’s being taunted about his weight at school declares that he’s wanted to kill himself; when the fat people in the black room filled with meat are eating.

And of course when people have lost weight, like Kari and Tiffany, after their gastric bypass surgeries and Steve Talbot, after two months of eating well and exercising, there’s the piano tinkle of quiet triumph. They’ve joined the ranks of the normal—heaven be praised.

The strangest audio cues of the day though, came from “Too Fat, Too Young.” The doc begins with the three profiled children, Barnaby, Daniel and Kari all talking about what they have suffered being fat and how much they dislike themselves as a result to the (appropriate) tinkling of emotional piano. But then the opening credits sound like something out of a 70’s cop show or an episode of the original Batman, with clashing trumpets and cymbals. It only gets weirder, with the voice over about Britain’s obesity epidemic set to some sort of guitar twanging funk piece. It’s like they think it’s serious but still kinda comical. Maybe the music was meant to be subversive. I think it’s a film maker unsure of what he/she wants to convey. Which is almost as bad as the film makers who are quite certain that they want you to feel bad.

The Language
“If you can call being fat an epidemic, it’s an epidemic.”
“So just how have these larger than life Texans ended up being so big…”
“Although obesity is raging through out the entire United States, it’s the southern states that tip the scales more than most.”
“…reveal just what it is about the Texan lifestyle and attitudes that’s turned this place into a land of giants.”
“…are often shocked by the sight of so much wobbling, waddling weight.”
“Britain is in the grip of an epidemic of childhood obesity.”
“These children are dangerously fat. Unless they get thinner they will die prematurely.”
“Can a pioneering new treatment help him escape the fat trap?”

There are two kinds of language that come up here. The shocked and bemused language and the scary language. “Larger than life,” “tip the scales,” “land of giants.” Are they kidding? I shouldn’t have been, having lived while being fat for some time now, but I was shocked by the condescending language used in “America’s Fattest City.” I was shocked by the disregard for the people being profiled. I was shocked that it was not enough to simply describe the situation but to use language that was clearly meant to poke fun at these people. The entire documentary had an air of “if these people don’t care to lose weight, we don’t have to take them seriously as human beings” and it came through most in the language. The second problem here is the fat that these people, did, generally care about their weight.

The scary language came up most in “Too Fat, Too Young.” And here I feel I need to insert a caveat. It’s not that I wouldn’t be concerned if my 15 year old son weighed 308lbs (like Barnaby) or that I’m not concerned about my own weight; I would be and I am. I just don’t think scary language generally motivates people to work on their weight in the long term. It has never motivated me (in the long term) and I would venture to guess, based on the obesity statistics floating around, that most people aren’t motivated that way either. So maybe a little less of the catastrophic language would be a neat idea. People don’t even talk this way about drug addiction anymore. But somehow we can’t manage to be more sensitive and logical when it comes to weight. Frankly the crytal meth will kill me faster than my extra weight—though admittedly if I was on crystal meth I would likely be thin…

While I found the overall message of “The Diet Wars” a bit preachy (eat well and exercise and it’ll all be okay—coming from someone who frankly wasn’t terribly overweight) I was relieved to sit through a program that didn’t talk down or try to scare fat people into submission for the most part.

The Ads
Of course you can’t talk about six hours of programming about fat people and dieting without looking at who’s sponsoring the entire sordid mess.

While it’s not surprising that there were ads geared towards weight loss the surprising winner for ad most aired was a 30-seond spot for Braun’s Pulsonic shaver. It came in at 18 airings in the six hour period. Now while the two ads running for Curves came in at a distant nine showings, (second to a Benilyn ad at ten showings) the Curves spot was nearly double the length of the Braun ad at about 58 seconds. So in the great big scheme of things Braun and Curves got the same amount of air time. Apparently Braun is just as concerned as Curves that you get thinner. Who would have thunk it?

An interesting twist was an ad for Thermacare back wraps that appeared a few times. For months, I’ve only seen a Thermacare ad profiling a couple on vacation during which the husband suffers from back pain. The one airing on Fat Day, however, featured a woman dressed in active wear trying to get in shape and paying for it by having her back go out. An interesting new year’s twist.

Interspersed through out the day were these little blips called “Fat Facts.” These ranged from the inane: “a single pound of fat contains 1.6km of blood vessels” to the so relevant and un-pursued for the rest of the programming that it hurt: “healthy foods often cost more than foods high in fat, sugar or starch.” If even one documentary had run with the concept of good food costing more it would have been really, really interesting. Alas it was not to be.

Honorable Mentions and Poignant Moments
“As it turned out the true story of how the virus woos the body’s fat cells was like a Bollywood epic.” That was the full quote that got me through. It was taken from the doc “Fat Plague” where it’s theorized that people might be catching obesity when someone next to them sneezes. Dr. Dhurandhar is years away from ever proving that this is happening in humans and it’s completely likely that he never will. There was no less than six minutes of that doc taken up with Bollywood-type actors and actresses dancing and singing the story of the adenovirus AD-36 attacking the body’s pre-fat cells and making them fat. While I’m not holding out hope that they’ll find a cure for my weight gain, it was a lot of fun to watch.

Creepiest moment: a group of children are shown pictures of three people who look exactly the same, are dressed the same and are performing the same activity. The difference between them is that one is thin, one is medium sized and one is fat. Without fail the children all chose the fat figure when they had to decide which one of the three was deceitful, ugly, scared, lazy, stupid or selfish. Even Daniel, the overweight child being profiled made the same choices. I guess I shouldn’t be wondering why film makers can’t manage to step away from the visual and sound conventions of showing fat people when we all, apparently, think ill of them.

Most poignant moment of all: Diane, the woman from Houston weighing 625lbs talks about her first diet: “My first diet; I was eight years old. At eight years old I weighed 133lbs. And I can remember that very clearly. It took me a year to lose 30lbs and two weeks to put it back on. That’s all it took. Since then I’ve been on that same program five other times; never successfully obviously. Matter of fact I’ve even gained weight on it a few times.”

There was a woman in the UK, Lisa Kirsch, (profiled in “Diets from Hell”) who is a size 14 but cannot stop dieting. And frankly I don’t feel for her. Lisa doesn’t look overweight. Men don’t expect her to be grateful for a date—in fact she’s married with two children. She doesn’t get stared at in the street. No one has ever called her orca (I actually got that one once—and I was 20lbs lighter than I am now). Her issue is all in her head. None of it is showing up on her body and so she’s got a leg up in my books. She just has to fix what’s going on in her head and she’s good to go. Diane, on the other hand, like all recognizably fat people and even more at her weight, must deal with the shit that goes on in her own head as well as the unwanted opinions of others. She has had a gastric bypass and had to have it reversed. She’s quit trying to lose weight and I don’t blame her. And while the documentary in which she appeared, was supposed to show the humanity of a woman like Diane, all those awful shots of her in comprising positions, are really about the spectacle of a woman like Diane. I guess that was the problem with the entire day of programming. I walked away from it wondering how much longer will it take before we hold ourselves, as a society, responsible for making a spectacle of anyone?