The thing that bothers me most about Insatiable, and maybe this is my personal experience showing, is that it’s not even a good depiction of what weight loss looks like. It’s a toxic depiction of the societal ideas we all think are true about weight loss but aren’t. This idea that if you just don’t eat for a few months you’ll get the thin body you’ve always dreamed about. And in the case of this show, literally become a beauty pageant queen. Become a person capable of doing all you’ve never been able to before.
That isn’t how weight loss works at all. And the idea that the show center’s it’s entire plot around this idea is toxic as hell. It doesn’t matter that the main character doesn’t intentionally pursue weight loss, or that it’s supposedly supposed to be satire. The show upholds the idea that this is what weight loss looks like and therefore almost by definition will encourage people to pursue it. It maintains the false truth that simply not eating much for a few months can cause you to easily loose a bunch of weight and have the body you’ve always wanted.
Let me stress this. THIS IS NOT HOW IT WORKS.
For starters, starvation, even mild starvation where you still eat some food, is immensely stressful on the body and mind. You will be constantly ravenous, unable to focus, weak, and crazy. In order to maintain the type of weight loss pictured in the show, your entire life would be consumed with calorie counting, exercise, and a constant state of exhaustion. You won’t be the person capable of doing all you’ve never been able to. You’ll be struggling to do anything but take care of your weight.
Perhaps more importantly, when you lose a large amount of weight, like pictured in the show, you don’t end up with the body of Debby Ryan or any person who’s been thin their entire life. You end up with a body that looks starved, deflated, and unhealthy. You will have large amounts of of loose, hanging, skin. If you weren’t confident rocking a bikini before you’re going to be even less confident after. Fat bodies are stigmatized, but the true bodies of people who loose large amounts of weight are practically forbidden. Invisible to nearly all of society. You don’t get to escape the history of your body. And so much of the appeal of dieting, starvation, eating disordered behaviors is in the notion that you’ll get to do just that. By selling the notion that a person who has spent a lifetime as fat can indeed leave their body and get a completely different one that will be highly valued by society, the producers of Insatiable are literally selling eating disorders. They’re selling diet culture. Whatever they say after that is irrelevant, the show’s premise is built upon a structure of the toxic, untrue, messages that have been circulating for decades. If people understood that what culture and the show promises is an illusion, they’d be much less likely to pursue it.
Indeed the whole idea of weight loss at all is an illusion, not just the body people are promised they’ll get. Even if you do manage to lose the weight, and I don’t suggest you try given the extreme, dangerous, lengths it takes to get there, the odds are virtually certain (95-99% depending on which study you look at) that you will regain that weight and more within a few years. It’s not a matter of willpower, or discipline (which ideas of course the show also sells). Your body will biologically fight you. It will slow your metabolism to a crawl, give you insatiable cravings, and the harder you fight the more pain you’ll feel. Your relationship with food will be wrecked for years, your body will have been through severe trauma with all sorts of long-lasting side effects, and the emotional toll from the loss of control and the realization that years of your life were wasted on something pointless will be crippling. Perhaps the only people who indeed are able to keep the weight off are those that have been so traumatized and terrified that they become physically unable to eat almost at all or else become obsessed by fitness - and of course they will run into all sorts of health problems soon thereafter and if serious enough will die.
Intentional pursuit of weight loss is serious business. It’s not something to joke about or take lightly. We should not even be flirting ironically with the idea that it is a normal, easily achievable, desirable thing. Even when talking about more mild weight loss and gain - there’s ample evidence that many of the negative symptoms associated with higher weights are actually caused by chronic dieting and weight cycling. The idea that intentional weight loss is achievable, easily achievable, by everyone, and that it looks like getting the body of a naturally thin person and/or supermodel is downright evil. This idea is pervasive, embedded in our culture and it gives people eating disorders. It says to anyone who has experienced first-hand the discrimination, mockery, harassment, and trauma of being in a fat body in a society that hates fat bodies more than nearly anything else that there is a way to escape. It says to anyone who fears one day experiencing that violence, that there is a way to protect themselves. This idea hurts people. This idea destroys people. This idea kills people. A lot of people. Anorexia is the most deadly mental illness. Weight cycling leads to all sorts of health issues. The weight and stress of constantly fearing for your personal emotional and physical safety due to stigma has been proven to cause all the serious health conditions upon which fatness has been blamed. Any show that reinforces these toxic, deadly notions is dangerous. I guarantee that there are people, kids, children dammit, who are going to watch this show and be inspired to try to loose weight. They are going to see in the first few episodes just how much people like them are reviled, they are going to see first-hand the show say that they personally are disgusting, have a problem- fat cow’s greedily slobbering up chocolate bars and donuts dripping lard. And if that doesn’t cause them to hate themselves and try to loose weight, then certainly the attention Patty gets after, her newfound social standing, and ability to get revenge only now she’s thin will. Show’s like this, messages like this hurt people. There are children that WILL get eating disorders because of this show. This is not hyperbole. I am not exaggerating.
Kids. Will. Get. Eating. Disorders.
Because of this show. It will be the straw that breaks the camels back, the thing they see when already weakened, or worse the thing that introduces them to the way the way the world sees them and “the way” to get out of it. Such filmmaking is irresponsible, oblivious, diet-fodder. You cannot operate on the pretense of satirizing culture by just creating another example of it. Kids will get eating disorders because of this show. Therefore, kids will die because of this show. Because of this culture. Because of this careless, thoughtless, fatsuit-porn created by people who clearly have never thought to spend one second researching the literature, learning about fat peoples’ experiences, or pondering the consequences of their actions. Such recklessness is inexcusable and God I can’t understand the gall it takes to market it to teenagers. I hope beyond hope that Netflix will see and attempt to understand the outrage that has been pouring out. That the writers and producers will attempt to understand what fatphobia actually is and not what they think it is. “Fat-shaming” has been made out to be some superficial liberal snowflake cry for those that are too sensitive. That’s not what this is. Content like this has real, lasting, devastating consequences. It informs what we think about ourselves and what we think is true and normal and how reality operates.
The world does not need more of this.
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