So I recently had a discussion with my old roommate about the trends of reality TV and how it has gotten progressively worse year after year. And I don’t just mean the premises are bad, the plot is unoriginal, or that we just see a copy of a copy of a copy of a show that we stole from another country. No, I mean that reality TV has now decided to convey a whole new layer of bs to its home audience. And not only is it annoying, but it is a dragon punch to the balls of logic and good old fashioned responsibility. And yes, I’m talking about the glorification of the obese.
Now look, I understand that many factors go into being obese. I used to be big myself. But I took responsibility for my own actions and lost the weight (guess what?) without the incentive of a crap ton of money. Look at where we are now as a society. Between 1980 and 2000, obesity rate in adults doubled. So what do we do about this problem? Do we regulate our fast food industry more? Do we try to use our many facets of media to educate people of the dangers of obesity? Or do we put these irresponsible, overweight people on television and promise them a lot of money if they do what they should do on their own anyway? I’ll bet that you can guess which one we do.
This is very upsetting to me. We used to use reality TV to award people for extraordinary things. You survive on a desolate island for a month, here’s a million dollars. You face three hard, sometimes disgusting challenges, here’s $100,000. You put up with Chef Ramsey’s belittling for so long, here’s a restaurant and a chance to be successful. I am okay with all of this. But somewhere along the way we decided that people should no longer do extraordinary things for money. Now we should reward people for doing what they should be doing on their own: losing weight.
Losing weight gives you more self-worth, a healthier, longer life and the ability to just do more. Why do you need money on top of all these incentives? Why are we giving it to them? While we are at it, why not pay people to start taking care of their kids? We can film people being good parents and then pay them for it. Or we can make a new hit show where we pay people to obey laws. That would be great wouldn’t it? I’d watch it.
Although this current trend bothers me, what bothers me the most are the kids. You have shows like Too Fat for 15. Ignoring the fact that almost none of these kids are 15, we get to the heart of the issue: The parents are to blame! Yes, the kids chose to eat nasty, disgusting combinations of food and ignored the fact that they were getting huge. But the parents allow them to eat. The parents are the ones feeding them. The parents are the ones who should have sought out help a long time before. And oftentimes, the parents are huge as well. This is troubling that we now have so many shows about kids who are dangerously obese. That’s why I am proposing a new show. A show called “Take Some Damn Responsibility.” In this show, you follow the parents and their overweight kids. We do not help them to be better parents; they should just do that on their own. We just set the goals for them. We tell them, “Hey, your kid needs to lose about 75 pounds by the end of this summer. That’s five to ten pounds a week.” And now it is up to the parents, not anyone else, to get their kid to diet and exercise and stop feeling like crap all of the time. And now I know, this sounds a bit boring. ‘Where is the incentive?’ you ask. Here’s the incentive: if your kid isn’t healthier and a lot less close to death by the end of the set time, you lose your kids. Simple as that. Let’s face it, the parents have gotten their kids to the point where they can die very early. So if they can’t get them away from the edge, they aren’t fit parents. How’s that for an incentive? The reward is that your kid will live, you shouldn’t need any monetary incentive on top of that unless you’re pure evil.
So there you have it, that’s my plan to fight our frighteningly uphill battle against childhood obesity. This will not only help these kids, but many others as well. This will refocus our blurred vision of who needs help. We can then hopefully revert back to the kind of shows that helped kids who really needed it. The kids who are stuck in gangs and abusive homes. The kids who are failing at school and suffer from emotional or psychological disorders. Maybe we can again focus on helping kids who have problems outside of the fact that they are just lazy, irresponsible and like to eat way too much.
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