Winning or losing?

There's been a lot of talk about the biggest loser recently. Not about Australia's biggest loser trying to 'change the health of a whole town'. But about Rachel Frederickson who won the most recent biggest loser in a state that could only be described as extremely underweight. If you haven't caught up with the controversy you can read more about it here. 

Anyway, I thought I'd also put in my 5 cents.

Firstly, The Biggest Loser is what it is, good (or bad depending on your view) and ultimately successful (for now) entertainment. Rachel Frederickson, who describes herself as competitive, was just doing what she had to do to win a competition. One commentator noted that her final result was probably not as underweight as most of our Hollywood stars. 

What concerns me, is that is is an indicator of how much the health and fitness industry has changed its emphasis from 'good health' to 'perfect looks'. 

Everyday I see clients who are not in optimum health. Some struggle to  get up from the floor, others have bad back or knee or neck pain. Others I see are in reasonable health, but they want to feel better, correct their posture, or they have fitness goals and need motivation to achieve them. And it's here that the health and fitness industry can do what it does best, make a difference to people's quality of life. But, instead, we seem to have become stuck into helping people achieve an ideal of perfection, and not even their own ideal, but one that is so prominent and insistent that we (and I include myself in this) are so quick to adopt it as our own.

As a personal trainer with my own business, I'm naturally in the business of having to sell my services.  It saddens me that nine out of ten people don't want to train to a health and fitness goal, but rather to the unhealthy ideal. It becomes, therefore, much easier to sell to this ideal.  It's a hard thing to admit but selling to this ideal and buying into this ideal makes me just as responsible as The Biggest Loser for the fact that Rachel Frederickson has ended up possibly as unhealthy as she was when she started. 

Quite a bit has been written about trainer Bob and Jillian's faces when Rachel revealed her 'transformation'. I'm wondering if their look of shock might have partially been some realisation of the role that they themselves have played (as part of the health and fitness industry) in promulgating an unhealthy and unrealistic ideal.