Years ago, my favorite part of the Drew Carey show was the opening credits, which featured Drew, who is fat, dancing.1 (Apparently Carey liked dancing — dance scenes were crowbarred into the story of several episodes, e.g..)
So if there’s a show featuring fat people dancing, I’ll give it a try, even if it’s a goddamn fucking weight loss show.
The dance part of the show is entertaining enough. The dancers aren’t as good as the dancers on So You Think You Can’t Dance (most of whom are professional dancers), so the choreography can’t be as interesting or challenging. But it was fun and perky, and often a lot of fun to watch.
So what about the fat politics? Well, for the most part, they’re awful. Being fat is constantly spoken of as the opposite of being healthy; that dancing, moving and eating well could be a good thing even for people who don’t lose weight isn’t even on the radar here. And, of course, the contestants are graded (or eliminated) based not only on how they dance, but on how much weight they lose. There are lots of tearful confessions connecting life goals (teaching their kids well, getting a girlfriend or boyfriend, etc) to losing weight, and the inevitable close-ups of the fat people eating fries, donuts, and the like.
So does it “work”? Do they lose weight? Of course they do. These fat people, for the weeks they’re on the show, are essentially full-time weight losers, in the most unrealistic environment imaginable. They don’t have jobs; they don’t take care of kids. They have a nutritionist, a work-out room with a dedicated trainer, and when they’re not in the work-out room, they’re dancing.
Like most weight-loss plans, it’ll work… for a while. The dancers will lose seemingly incredible amounts of weight — I’m guessing the ones who make it to the end will be 50-100 pounds lighter than their starting weight. But it’s not sustainable. Because, for the vast majority of fat weight losers, nothing is sustainable. Weight-loss plans don’t work. 2
And because this show is teaching contestants to measure victory mostly by their waistlines — not by a sense of accomplishment, or joy in movement, or good health measured in any way but weight — I worry that this will actually be bad for the dancers, in the long run, if they gain weight back and it makes them feel they’ve failed.
But it’s not all bad. Inevitably, despite itself, the show includes fat bodies moving, fat bodies being sexy, fat bodies being competent. Fat bodies, in short, dancing. It’s impossible not to notice that some of the fattest dancers, like Mara, are also the most talented. Heather MacAllister once said:3
Any time there is a fat person onstage as anything besides the butt of a joke, it’s political. Add physical movement, then dance, then sexuality and you have a revolutionary act.
I wouldn’t call “Dance Your Ass Off” revolutionary, or even really fat-positive. But it has fat-positive elements despite itself.
- Actually, the show had a bunch of opening credit sequences over time, but at least a few of them were dance numbers. [↩]
- The show includes a professional con man — I mean, weight-loss doctor — as part of the cast. I’d really like to see a complete accounting of all his patients from prior to 2004, and how his services have helped them in the years since. [↩]
- Yeah, this is the second time I’ve quoted this in a month. [↩]
Maybe it’s just all the time I’ve spent around fat acceptance folks, but I don’t see one person in that picture that I would look at and think “fat” as an important descriptor. They look like
normalaverage-ass people to me (well,normalaverage-*sized* people — I don’t generally see that great of clothes in my every-day life).Edited because “normal” is a crappy word and I do not want to imply that anyone who is not of similar size to the people in the photo (including me) is somehow “abnormal.”
@Julian
That’s pretty much what I was thinking.
The photo may not be accurate (because of angle? Photoshopping? Not sure). Watching the show, the competitors vary from a little fat to very fat. Here are a couple of videos of a couple of the fatter competitors:
And here’s Shayla, who is one of the least fat:
So that’s about the range.
I find it interesting that they are all on these incredibly strict diets, and talk about working out 5-6 hours a day (on top of their dance practice), which is completely unrealistic for anyone in the real world, and yet, their weight loss isn’t all that much, really. I mean, it is a lot, but it doesn’t seem like a lot based on what we’ve come to expect from the miracle diets and all. The most anyone has lost on the show is 22 lbs. after 3 weeks. Some have lost less than 10 lbs. after 3 weeks. And people are more likely to be losing more weight in the beginning than at the end. So, I’d be surprised if anyone actually lost 100 lbs. or more.
If they are doing something in their workouts besides cardio (e.g. spinning at low resistance, walking, dancing), they’re probably building muscle, and muscle weighs more than fat. That actually makes me less anxious about whether this is good for their health, because if the pounds were just melting off, I’d worry that the program is mal-nourishing them. If they are working out a lot but losing the weight slowly, that’s hopefully indicative that they’re replacing fat with muscle.
A friend of mine is working on a pilot for a reality show that’s a muscle-building competition. The contestants will be people who are basically skin-and-bones, who compete to become the strongest. They’ll definitely gain a lot of weight during the show.
Looking at the group shots in the videos, my impression is still very much “average looking people” and also “cool dancing!”
Yes, the donuts shots feel very…gratuitous.
I remember seeing a segment on an episode, where one of the woman wore cut-off jean shorts. I was like, “OMG a fat person in cut off shorts, and she looks HOT!”
I think anytime someone is working toward a goal and making progress that is a good thing. I like that these people are moving and losing, my complaint is the tacky and trashy outfits that they are wearing. I feel almost like the show is almost making fun of the contestants by not dressing them in a more classy and elegant style.
I have the utmost respect for all artists, especially dancers. I have many talents, but not those particular ones! However, I have an aesthetic eye, and it was NOT trained upon Ruben. It would never be. What horrendous claptrap he wore for costumes. The male form may not have been represented very well either, despite very well executed footwork. I absolutely love Shayla and Mr. Lucky and Mario and Pinky. If you want real respect from the public, please don’t shove Ruben’s footwork down our throats.
P.S. Why do I keep getting messages that I might be bounced off of this website based upon username and password? It’s happened only about 150 times. Why????