This week brought another episode of "Dance Your Ass Off," and everybody danced disco, which was kind of fun. Everybody also showed a distinct loss of momentum in the real point of the exercise, i.e. losing weight.
What this says to me is either that the nutritional and fitness guidance these contestants are getting is much less tough-love than on The Biggest Loser, or these contestants are much less compliant. I wonder if the nutritionist, for example, is telling them the awful truth: in order to lose a lot of weight fast, you need to severely cut calories. Basically, in order to maintain a weight of 300 pounds, you have to consume 3000 calories a day. If you weigh 300 pounds and you want to weigh 200, you need to cut your consumption to 2000 calories. You have to feed the body you want, not the body you have.
As to exercise ... there's an awful truth here, too. The average person - that is, the person who is not an elite athlete - can't eat 3000 calories a day and burn off 1000 by exercise, not sustainably. If you are 100 pounds overweight, you are not going to be physically able to burn that many calories through exercise on a daily basis without serious risk of injury. The exercise that these contestants are doing should be focusing on correcting body mechanics and supporting the activity of dancing. The show doesn't air enough workout footage to see what they are up to, but if much bigger weight-loss numbers don't post next week, I'd say they're not airing it because they don't have it.
Weight management is really simple: the crude formula requires 10 calories per pound of weight to maintain; to lose weight, calorie burn has to exceed calorie intake. To lose a lot of weight, let's face it, you're going to be hungry a lot of the time. (But keep in mind, people often mistake fatigue or thirst or boredom for hunger.) Likewise, fitness is really simple: use it or lose it, and the more you move (with more intention, with more variety), the fitter you will be.
But simple is not the same as easy.
I still think framing a weight-loss contest around dancing was smart, but it won't be a repeatable experiment if they don't get the results they want. Ultimately, I don't think the contestants really want to come on TV, do a couple of dances, and then go home having lost ten pounds. And I don't think the producers really want to give their sizable prize to someone who dances well but still is 100 pounds overweight.
I am hoping that the contestants have had a little prayer meeting with their coaches - and, ideally, a psychologist. Getting to 100 pounds (or more) of overweight doesn't happen overnight, and it can't be reversed overnight. A couple of these contestants have shown signs of understanding that their own behavior is responsible for the overweight, and - even more importantly - of understanding that they can identify and change their unhealthy behaviors.
Other contestants don't seem to have a clue that they have the power in this situation; they seem to view the overweight as something external to them. It's like the contestant featured in promos for the new, horrible version of The Bachelor, "More to Love," who says "I want to be loved for me." She's all teary-eyed and in total denial that those extra pounds ARE HER. That's her body, which she created, which she hates and wants to be loved in spite of.
It's a totally unrealistic and damaging way to view the body, which is the source of all our pleasures in life. Think about it: vision, scent, hearing, touch, taste, movement, sex, appetite, breath, intelligence: all functions of the body. Is that not worth doing some work for?
It is always possible. It is simple. It just isn't easy. It takes work. "It" is health and fitness, and everyone has the power and potential to be a more fit, more healthy version of themselves. Even Lance Armstrong, who never exactly got out of shape, had to go back into training to enter the Tour this year.
We shouldn't let the fact that something is difficult determine whether we make the attempt. Learning to manage calories is a lot less difficult than learning to dance. If learning to manage calories makes it possible to dance ... well, I'd be pretty motivated. I hope these contestants are, too.
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