Understanding Weight Gain: What Reality Shows Miss

A clip from some reality show passed through my social media feed. I’m not sure what it was as I didn’t look for it and it didn’t have any details. But it was one of those shows where they try to help overweight people who want to lose weight figure out why they are putting on the weight and try to help them lose it.

They basically set up cameras supposedly hidden cameras, but they look rather obvious if you ask me, in and around the peoples houses and places they usually visit throughout the day. They also seem to have undercover individuals following them, all to catch them and see what these participants eat in a day.

Before the reveal at the end of the clip, we obviously see little snippets of the life of the participant. The participants also talk to the cameras here and there to kind of give their story to the audience and let us in on their thoughts and way of doing things.

In this clip there were two participants, a man and a woman, who were best friends. Both explained their eating habits as we watch them cut up some vegetables or go about their daily lives. The man explains how he sometimes only eats one big meal, a big breakfast, a day, and doesn’t always eat any more than that. And he questions to the camera why it is that he is putting on weight.

The woman explains that people think she’s always having a fry up. But she reveals that she doesn’t fry her food and doesn’t even eat or use butter. She usually eats healthy food and lots of salad and vegetables. She goes on to say that she owns a diet business, and her friends tell her that if she has all the diet products, it should be easier for her and to herself she thinks that she can’t understand how she is always putting on weight.

It wasn’t really clear what kind of diet business she has, but my assumption is that it was a diet supplement business judging by how she described having products and it should be easier for her. Either way, I find myself fascinated that an individual with a diet or diet supplement business doesn’t understand the basics and that is evident by how she can’t seem to figure out why she’s putting on weight even though she doesn’t use butter and eats lots of vegetables.

I watched the video until the end because I wanted to see how they concluded it. And of course it ended with the big reveal and explanations of what each participant ate in the week while they were being followed. It was mind blowing. The tables with all the food laid out was enough to feed a family of four for a week on each. But the man says he often only eats one big meal, so how does it add up to this much?

It could be just something he was saying to the camera to make the story more dramatic or maybe help us understand why he’s confused. It could also be that he actually doesn’t compute the meals he’s eating or does but to make himself feel better he is in denial of how much food he consumes throughout the day.

Truthfully, we all may go about picking on different foods throughout the day and snack here and there. It all adds up. One may not actually realize how much they are consuming here and there between meals. And often we may even disregard it as caloric intake because it isn’t a meal. It could be a cheese sandwich, but if we consider it in our mind as a snack, we won’t count it if one isn’t calorie conscious.

When they showed what he ate, they showed the breakfast that he mentioned. It was a huge sub filled with sausages and other meats, carbs and sauces. They asked him how many calories, he thought it was and he said maybe four or five hundred. He was so surprised when they told him that the sandwich alone was over sixteen hundred calories. It shows that we often aren’t aware how many calories we are consuming when we think oh it’s just a sandwich. It can’t be that much.

With the woman, they showed one meal she ate. IT was several hors d’oeuvres and entrees and topped it off with a cake for dessert. The meal they picked though, she explained, was when she had had enough of the cameras following her and just decided to eat out for comfort. She’s a comfort eater. It is also apparent from the video that she didn’t realize how much food it was at the time and was able to put it away easily.

My point is that we often don’t even realize that we are consuming calories or tell ourselves that these calories don’t count because they aren’t a meal or it is just a mouthful. But several mouthfuls add up. More often than not the things we eat have more calories than we think or expect. So it’s not that surprising that when you add it up or put it all together on a visual display, well it is a lot.

I don’t really like these kind of programs because I don’t think they achieve anything. In fact, it’s actually obvious from the video itself that they are much more careful what they are eating specifically because they know the cameras are watching. They actually crack a few jokes about it when ordering food, like hide the chips so the cameras don’t see it. Also, the fact that one can be selling diet supplements while not knowing the first thing about how calories work is also pretty disappointing.

My take from these rather pointless and ridiculous programs is that there is still so much bad information and knowledge or ignorance about health and healthy eating out there. Something which should really be addressed if we want people to be healthier. They should also stop making these programs because all they really do is make the participants stop eating junk for the week the camera is watching without educating them on the subject and without helping them build the habits required to make the changes in their lives for the better and for the long term.