Sunday, September 19, 2010

British Reality Television Show

In the October/November issue of Metro Source New York, Paul Hagen writes about a new London reality show on diets. I like some reality shows, like of course Dancing with the Stars :), but others seems to have us be voyeurs in the calamities and miseries of others. That is how this show sounds. People are put on three extreme diets ad endure things like freezing showers, in attempts to lose weight. As I have written, you don't need to be on a diet to lose weight. This is often extreme to yo-yo dieting and to really knowing how to eat a healthy, balanced diet.

This show may lead to the impersonalization that sometimes occurs from too much violence on television, emailing or texting instead of calling and getting together. It also done nothing for the participants or audience to learn to have a healthy lifestyle.

The diets are: a. A Victorian diet of protein that includes weird animal body parts; 2. a 1920's diet of severe caloric restriction; and c. a Edwardian era diet where you have to chew each bite 30 times, lift their heads back and swallow what goes down, and the spit out the rest. The bites and spitting out are counted. This is insane, and more a means to humiliate people and for those, perhaps with low self-esteem, to earn a little cash.

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