Looking for Love? Gain a Few Kilos and Get On “The Biggest Loser”
Forget Match.com, eHarmony, JDate, or even specialty sites like SugarDaddie.com, OnlineBootyCall, ChristianCafe, Meet-An-Inmate, WhiteWomenBlackMen, or VeggieDate. The most successful way to meet your soul mate these days seems to be going on reality TV. Don’t bother with those shows like The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, or (God forbid) I Want to Marry a Millionaire. So far, those shows have produced approximately one couple that has lasted. Now it seems that the camaraderie that is created when your enormous rear end is sweating it out alongside the enormous ‘moobs’ of a teammate breed something besides sweat: love blooms on the StairMaster. It’s just hard to hear it over the huffing and puffing.
If You're Willing To Subject Yourself To This, You Deserve To Find Love.
Season 2 of The Biggest Loser, America’s most humiliating weight-loss program, gave us the romance of Matt Hoover and Suzy Preston, with Matt offering Suzy an engagement ring on live TV. They now have a child together. After season 3 of the sadistic spectacle, at the inevitable reunion show that follows all reality series, Marty Wolff proposed to co-contestant Amy Hildreth, and the two exchanged wedding rings in March of 2008. Season 7 gave us Nicole Brewer and Damien Gurganious who entered the competition as a couple, emerging thinner and even more committed to each other. They married in August of this year. Alexandra White developed a crush on Antoine during Season 8, and the two spend their dates doing outdoorsy, calorie-burning activities near their New York-area homes. And now we have Rebecca Meyer, loser of more 100 pounds, gaining a boyfriend in Daniel Wright. She revealed their romance on the sinking ship that is the Jay Leno Show. Oprah must have been booked.
Lucky for Rebecca that formerly 454-pound Daniel, the heaviest contestant ever to appear on the show, was brought back this season for a second chance after being booted off only 60 pounds into his slimming process last season. The two fell in love over cravings for real food and a shared, thinly-veiled resentment for their way-too-cheery trainers Jillian Michaels and Bob Harper. At least this season, the fantastic plastic duo started off human by dropping so many F-bombs in the premiere episode that producers feared that the show had lost its “uplifting” reputation.
Seriously, do we watch shows like The Biggest Loser or Beauty and the Geek or Celebrity Fit Club (or Celebrity Rehab and on and on) to be uplifted? No. We are all semi-sadistic creeps who enjoy watching other people suffer and humiliate themselves. The success of shows like these is not because viewers find inspiration in them. It’s because we can feel better about our slightly smaller behinds as we sit in front of the TV eating kettle corn. We like watching contestants’ eyes grow big as saucers when presented with the possibility of eating pizza or cake or frosting-topped deep dish. We aren’t sure whether to cringe and cover our eyes or sit up straight and pay attention when the contestants take their first belabored steps onto the cattle-ready scale. We can’t help but peek between our fingers as we cover our faces, watching pre-exercise women in lycra shorts and men with their moobs out there for God and everyone to see.
But as far as finding love goes, a few months of grueling workouts and endless degradation on the scales goes a long way.
Alone, a person can eat an entire chocolate cake. In the presence of a love interest, that same person will eat like a bird. A hungry bird. A bird that craves pork ribs and ice cream sundaes. Bonded by torture and held together by the ongoing battles against gaining it all back, contestants from The Biggest Loser are mating like crazy. And they don’t have to panic over the moment when their new loves learn that they used to be fat.