We watch... so you don't have to.
Celebrity Fat Club
Let me start by distancing myself from the show I'm about to discuss. I do not like Celebrity Fit Club. I do not like the way the show buys into our culture's unhealthy obsession with conforming to what is, for most people, an unreachable ideal. I happen to believe that obesity is a disease. It wouldn't surprise me if, within the next decade or so, medical researchers discover that obesity is caused by some infectious agent, a virus maybe, much the same way medicine thought -- for thousands of years -- stomach ulcers were caused by stress when they're actually caused by bacteria and can be treated with antibiotics. I firmly believe that obesity is a currently untreatable disease and that it's not the fault of the fat person that they are fat. I firmly believe this for anyone my size or smaller. Anyone fatter is a disgusting pig with no self-control.
So I do not like Celebrity Fit Club, now in its third incarnation on VH1. Yet I must admit to some familiarity with it. In this show, presumably washed-up and putatively entertaining actors and other Hollywood detritus decide to lose weight and get in shape on national TV while a large, scary, hairless man berates them. I know about this show because, I admit, I have watched it a few times: I watch it when it's on and my TiVo is empty and I don't feel like putting on a DVD. But I won't say I like it -- I firmly agree with Heather Havrilesky in Salon when she writes that we need to differentiate between shows we watch because we get sucked in and those we actually enjoy. Celebrity Fit Club 3 sucked me in, and I have some observations.
