How Reality Shows about Weight Loss Can Hurt Your Progress, By Jo Ann LeQuang

Lose Big?

You have to lose weight every single week—and many pounds each time—to be successful. In the real world, healthy weight loss is more modest and much slower. Losing one to two pounds a week is actually a phenomenal result, even though that kind of weight loss might get you booted off TV. In real life, there are some weeks in which you may not lose weight at all, either because you plateau (you stick with your program but the scale does not budge) or you mess up (you go off your program). Either way, stick with it. If you plateau, the weight will eventually start to come off. And if you mess up, just get right back with the program. You do not have to lose big week over week to succeed.

Real Life

Everyone in your life is focused on your weight loss. For reality show stars, everything really is about the weight loss. The rest of us have families and jobs; we have chores, meetings, responsibilities, doctor visits, bills, and a social life. In the real world, a healthful weight loss program is something integrated into any already super-busy lifestyle. This means you won’t always have time to whip up extravagant diet cuisine for dinner, get a spa massage after your ultra-mega-workout, or have family and friends cheering you on. In real life, we have to shoehorn exercise into an already overbooked day and we have to stick to our diet even when our family and friends are out getting ice cream. That means our weight loss results are not as dramatic as those on TV!

Exercise

Exercise is grim torture that makes you collapse. That’s the way some of the reality show exercise looks to me! And most couch potatoes harbor in their hearts the notion that physical exertion has to be a brutal, mind-numbing pounding that will surely reduce them to tears. If going to the gym like a death march, you are not going to look forward to working out and you won’t maintain it after you lose weight. As far-fetched as this sounds, exercise should be enjoyable. Try to find activities you enjoy (for instance, swimming, walking, golf, dance) and get disciplined about incorporating as much exercise as you can into your day. If you don’t like any exercise, then start with a simple program at a local gym until you build up enough strength and endurance to find physical activity you do enjoy. Do not assume that you have to do a thousand leg lifts or run a marathon to get a workout. That’s good TV, not a good exercise program.

The Positives

Weight loss TV shows do benefit us, because they can help motivate us in our lifestyle changes. And the rapid results that these programs depict help us understand the relationship of cause and effect. In other words, they fast-forward from the “before” to the “after” state. But do not assume that these TV programs can be applied directly to your weight loss efforts. The people on these shows have nothing else to do all day long but concentrate on losing weight, and they lose weight in the artificial environment of a TV show. Your weight loss program is going to happen in real life. The best things you can learn to lose weight and keep it off for good are how to eat sensibly and exercise regularly while going about all of the joys and aggravations of a normal busy life. And normal life is not what reality TV is about!