Who Knows Best: Fighting the Fat / Channel 4
Last night’s “Who Knows Best - Fighting the Fat”, on channel 4, was so awful I hardly know where to start.
The programme pitches supposed experts against one another like modern day gladiators. Last night’s challenge was about weight loss and pitched Paul the personal trainer (who thinks people are overweight because they are lazy and greedy and who shouted and swore his way through the programme) against Janet (who supposedly took a psychological approach).
Each contestant chose a willing victim for the other person to work with and the challenge was on - who could get their person to lose the most weight over a 6 week period? Paul was allocated Sarah whose favourite food was spam and egg pie, and Janet got Shareema who had a thing about chocolate do-nuts.
Surprise, surprise the outcome was that Paul’s victim lost 22lb and Janet’s only 6lb. Hardly surprising since Paul’s approach involved serious exercise bordering on torture, coupled with a strict diet. A perfect strategy for short term dramatic weight loss (and subsequent dramatic weight gain…)
The programme was pointless in the first place because it is not that
hard to lose weight over 6 weeks - you can do this using any
number of diets. The hard thing is to keep it off.
Also, how can you conclude anything from an experiment involving just two people? How silly.
The “psychological approach” was very disappointing. I suspect Janet may do a good job in reality. It may that the programme makers just wanted to make her look silly by concentrating on tapping meridians and associating do-nuts with vomit.
But it didn’t seem that Janet’s woman got away from the “diet mentality” of good and bad foods, and “naughty days”, so again it just looked like a diet and I suspect she put the weight back on. She said she was an emotional eater but the only strategy we saw for dealing with this was “tapping the meridians”. This kind of thing can help some people but they also need to work out how to deal with emotions in other ways, without using food. I’m sure Janet will have covered this but we didn’t see it.
So, a victory for Paul the sadist, but I don’t suppose viewers had any doubt about what will happen to Sarah’s weight when Paul is no longer kicking her arse, as he so charmingly put it!
