For your viewing pleasure

By Patrick D. HAHN

The Baltimore Sun

The scariest thing on television these days isn’t “The Walking Dead,” it isn’t “The Hunger,” it isn’t “Sleepy Hollow.” For real bone-chilling terror, try the new Arts & Entertainment series “Fit to Fat to Fit.”

The theme of the series is pretty straightforward: A professional trainer stops exercising and begins overeating on a massive scale in order to put on anywhere from 45 to 75 pounds of excess weight. Then the trainer embarks on a rigorous program of exercise and sensible eating, alongside a client who has been suffering from morbid obesity for a long time. The trainer gets back to his normal weight, and his client loses a huge amount of weight as well, and both live happily ever after.

Watching the first half of this process is like viewing a train wreck in slow motion. We see these men with exquisitely sculpted physiques grimly shoveling in food, long past the point of satiety, to the verge of nausea.

One stares into the camera, and moans, “My kids are wanting to play with me and I can’t because I am still trying to digest seven pizzas.” A second intones, “I am just feeling super full. The nausea is coming in waves.” A third tells viewers “I developed a fatty liver and the kidneys of an alcoholic.” And, predictably, their stomachs bulge, their muscles slacken and disappear beneath layers of fat, and their once-lively faces become bleary-eyed and joyless.

As I was watching this travesty unfold, I kept wondering: Where have I seen this before? Then the realization hit me: My God, this is “Harrison Bergeron” come to life!

“Harrison Bergeron” is a science-fiction dystopian short story written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. back in the 1960s. “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal,” it begins. “They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way.”

Move more, eat less

What are the producers of the “Fit to Fat to Fit” series trying to prove by paying these physically strong, healthy trainers to abuse their bodies and put on dozens of extra pounds? We already know that sloth and gluttony make a person fat, and that the only cure is to move more and eat less (as the series itself resoundingly demonstrates). The trainers know this better than anybody, which is precisely why they exercise diligently every day. So what is the purpose? So the trainers will know how it feels to be a fat person?

The impulse to let someone “know how it feels” is not a noble impulse. To the contrary, this impulse is the root of much of the world’s evil. Rather than expecting the trainers to drag themselves down to the level of their obese clients, those clients ought to be striving to ascend to the level of the trainers. To do the reverse is a complete perversion of the teacher-student relationship.

The message behind the series seems to be that it is something other people do or don’t do that determines whether obese people get down to a healthy weight.

There’s no denying the clients on this show get serious help, both on and off camera, and that they lose serious amounts of weight. They’re putting in the work after all. But all that’s been done before on TV. And you will notice there is no control group of clients who are given the same assistance without the gimmick of having the trainers wreak havoc on their own healthy bodies. That’s the draw here – the train wreck – along with the suggestion that it’s someone else’s fault you’re fat.

Patrick D. Hahn is an affiliate professor of biology at Loyola University Maryland. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.