The childhood media that made us feel fat

Content warning for discussions of weight loss, fatphobia, and disordered eating.

Morgan Spurlock in "Super Size Me" (2004). Source: MUBI.

If you were a kid in the 2000s, your TV or computer was probably telling you to lose weight.

There were a few statistics about obesity in the early 2000s which scared the living daylights out of middle-class Americans. This sparked a global media phenomenon concentrating on weight loss, particularly for children. School lunches became a top priority for politicians and celebrity chefs, and ‘junk food’ was a major talking point.

Fast food consumption was the focus of the smash-hit documentary Super Size Me in 2004, in which director Morgan Spurlock undertakes an experimental “McDiet” for a month to investigate obesity in the United States.

Spurlock ate at McDonald’s three times a day, for single every meal, had to ‘super size’ his meal if invited, and could not consume any other food or drinks. He force-fed himself on some occasions and ate about 5,000 calories per day, double his regular intake.

He gained nearly 11 kilograms and it took over a year to lose the weight he’d gained. But while the results of his experiment captivated the world and temporarily scraped some profits off McDonald’s, the parameters of Spurlock’s experiment had been flimsy from the beginning.

Average daily caloric intake was indeed on the rise in the United States, but not by an exorbitant level: only by a hundred or so calories compared to the early 1970s. Fast food companies were growing in power and scope, but there were very, very, very few people – if any – who ate McDonald’s for every single meal, every single day.

Spurlock also obscured his history of alcoholism which may have affected his results. His overeating and limitation of other foods were entirely self-inflicted. What Spurlock really proved was that fast food companies were targeting vulnerable consumers and obscuring nutritional information – but that was not the message he presented, and it’s not what people left Super Size Me remembering.

Super Size Me led to a slew of copycat documentaries and reality television shows which ditched corporate criticism altogether to focus entirely on demonising fat people. The diet-swapping show Supersize vs. Superskinny always began with a “feeding tube” demonstration presenting the disordered eating habits of the thinner contestant in a more favourable light.

A young women, who wished to remain anonymous, watched Supersize vs. Superskinny on YouTube when she was about twelve years old, still remembers watching the show.

“I remember really vividly, watching that, seeing what the really skinny person would eat and basing my own diet off of that,” she said.

One of the worst offenders in weight loss media was The Biggest Loser, a pure-and-simple competition to lose the most weight possible. It became extremely successful, earning staggering viewership at its peak in the mid-late 2000s and inspiring international spin-offs.

A cash prize of $250,000 is a powerful motivator. Contestants exercised for up to six hours per day and severely dehydrated themselves. The winners routinely dropped half their body weight – or even more – by the season’s end.

Season 18 of 'The Biggest Loser". Source: USA Network.

The show followed in Super Size Me’s footsteps by portraying weight as the ultimate measure of health and generating a moral panic around eating behaviours.

Em Baunton, 25, remembers watching The Biggest Loser as a child. Looking back on it now, she said the show had a misguided approach.

“There are so many other factors that come in – like environmental, cultural, and behavioural. They never really addressed that. It was more just like, ‘oh, self-control and morale’.”

Losing so much weight in such a short period of time is painful and physically destructive. Once their season was over, many Biggest Loser contestants had weakened hearts and wrecked metabolisms. A runner-up, Kai Hibbard, said in 2010 that she was, “still afraid of food” and “still pretty messed up from the show.”

Baunton said that The Biggest Loser, “was just so rooted in, like, shame and fatphobia… it makes me wonder – what did it do to me, mentally?”

Ben O’Connell, 24, also watched The Biggest Loser growing up and said that it had an, “incredibly damaging impact on the social issue their entire show revolved around.”

“Glorifying weight loss for television was something I didn't think twice to consume as a kid and looking back – sheesh, it wasn't healthy at all.”

Even when weight loss wasn’t the topic at hand, reality television shows still placed considerable emphasis on a Eurocentric ideal of thinness.

In twenty-four seasons, America’s Next Top Model only had one plus-size winner – though she was still about two sizes smaller than the average American woman. Project Runway didn’t include plus-size models until the late 2010s.

Gok Wan’s How to Look Good Naked and Trinny and Susannah’s What Not to Wear were more about fashion than weight loss, with Baunton calling them a “more tame” variation of weight loss programming. However, fatphobia was still rife, praise was showered on the “flat tummies” and “slim legs” the contestants had been “hiding away.”

According to these shows, it appeared that obesity was an issue entirely rooted in willpower – and one that should be solved by ‘fixing’ our behaviour. This idea extended even to children.

 n 2006, Nintendo released the Wii game console. If you were too young to remember just know that the Wii was that girl. Like its main competitors, the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360, the Wii was an excellent console with great games; what really sold it to the public was its initial release bundle with the game Wii Sports.

Wii Sports played up the motion-sensor capabilities of the Wiimote, and had five excellent games: tennis, boxing, baseball, bowling and golf. To play Lego Star Wars for the PS3, it was best to play seated, whereas playing any of the games in Wii Sports was difficult without standing up and working up a sweat. Honestly, the experience was not complete unless you accidentally smacked your brother in the arm at least three to four times.

In the eyes of parents, the Wii promoted physical movement and exercise. This was encouraged by the 2007 release of Wii Fit, which was sold with a balance board – a weight scale.

The Wii Fit balance board. Source: Nintendo.

At the start of the game, the player would input their birth year and height, then stand on the scale. They’d then be told their Body Mass Index (BMI). There are a million issues with BMI, especially for people who are already muscular. Or people who are, you know, children.

 It’s highly inadvisable to create an exercise plan on BMI alone. Nonetheless, when the player had a BMI of 30 or higher, the game would call them “obese” and play a disappointed bmm-bmm-bmm sound.

 TikTok has dozens of videos by adults remembering their experience with the Wii Fit scale, calling it “the OG body shamer” and “a different kind of trauma.” A troubling amount of people saying it was the starting point for their eating disorder.

 It’s difficult to understand the complexities of biology as an eight-year-old. Children are also rarely in control of their diet – and I posit that there are far better ways for them to spend their time. But what we hear as kids can stick with us forever.

 All of these examples seek to ‘fix’ us when it was the systems that needed fixing. It’s often easier, faster and cheaper to heat up processed food than to make something from scratch using fresh produce. Have you seen the price of a single capsicum lately?

 If you have a 9-5, or multiple jobs, or kids, getting food on the table at all is usually the priority – not ensuring it has the exact caloric and vitamin requirements advised by the leading health organisation. Weight is mostly genetic, it has far less to do with our health and wellbeing than we used to think.

 As we moved into the 2010s, research came out revealing what weight really does mean for our health, what health means for the world in general, and how the pressure to be thin can limit quality of life. Morgan Spurlock also turned out to be the actual worst (though he did direct One Direction: This Is Us.)

A page from Trinny and Susannah’s 2002 book “What Not to Wear”.

But we do indeed live in a society where fatphobia still pervades, even if The Biggest Loser is off the air. An anonymous young women, said that the 2000s weight loss obsession is still with us, but can now bypass the limitations of the living room and get straight to younger consumers through TikTok ads and sponsored posts on social media.

“I think it’s honestly become a bit more predatory… they’ve skipped the whole family thing and they’re like, ‘we’re gonna target the kids directly through their favourite YouTubers’,” she said.

We’re always a bit too concerned with what other people eat and how it compares to our own habits. But weight and health are not synonymous, and they never have been. The weight loss media boom should stay where it is – in the 2000s. There are so many better ways to spend our time.