Why we're actually upset about The Biggest Loser's Rachel Fredrickson

You've probably heard some of the media outcry over The Biggest Loser's Rachel Fredrickson's weight loss. She dropped from 260 pounds to 105 pounds, losing 60% of her body fat. It's caused a lot of people to wake up about the show's dangerous message: that fat shaming is acceptable and even encouraged and that the ends justify the means - even when those means involve dangerous dehydration, brain-washing, and eating disorder mentalities. 

Biggest Loser winner Rachel Fredrickson

But I don't think the general public is actually concerned about her weight. I think that people are upset with being forced to come face to face with what the brutal work that a woman has to do to meet the standards of our skinny-obsessed culture. Rachel Fredrickson has ruined the fantasy that rail-thin women are the norm and that if you're not lucky enough to be born that way, it's not too much work to get there. She's shown just how much work it is. And to deal with this discomfort, we claim that she's too skinny, has gone too far, that we're "worried" for her. But she looks like pretty much every runway model I've ever seen - but now that the curtain has been pulled back on what it takes for her to look like that, America is freaking out.



It's not about the fact that she lost a ton of weight. We don't like how she lost the weight. We don't like that we saw her looking somewhat more "normal" during make-over week and then got to compare it with the "skeletal" version of Rachel. It ruins the fantasy that thin women just magically come like that, that skinniness is effortless or at the most comes with a little help from yoga and a few hours per week at the gym. But not that many hours. While some women are legitimately very thin without trying (I have a few friends who stay super thin no matter how much they eat, and hate the accusations that they have some type of eating disorder - let's be fair, many women are just naturally thin) society likes to imagine that the women who have to work at being skinny don't have to work all that hard. Or that the work to be skinny (not to be confused with the work it takes to stay healthy - these are two totally different things for most people) is somehow fun and rewarding for internal reasons.

We don't like having to learn about what it takes for women to get to this point. We don't like listening to her talk about walking on a treadmill all day as she works and going to up to four different work out classes per day. It makes us extremely uncomfortable to hear about the things that women have to do to meet the standard that's set by our thin-obsessed media.

The thing is, we aren't objecting to her new body. We're objecting to the way that she got and is maintaining that new body. The discomfort with her weight loss tactics are masked with "concern"  that she "may have gone too far." Because working out that much and losing that much weight that quickly is abnormal and weird, right? Women who lose a lot of weight do so in a healthy and safe way, right? Women who are so skinny they seem unhealthy are naturally like that, or don't work that hard at it, right? It's not dangerous for women to be that thin, is it? How else are we supposed to enjoy our TV shows, our movies, our ads and runway shows, unless we delude ourselves into thinking this way?

Rachel Fredrickson has shattered these delusions. She's shown what it takes for most women to get to a point that society deems acceptable. Her new body type is what modeling agencies and the general public not only accept but venerate. And now we've had to look at the process it takes to get that body in the eye, and we don't like what we see. We would rather have stayed in a world where thin women simply are, where skinniness is effortless, and where it certainly doesn't come with very real health concerns. We would rather think that the rail-thin women we see on television are the standard, and that there's something wrong with everyone who doesn't look like them - that skinny women are the default and that women who score "good" or "average" on their BMI (or whatever else can supposedly give a concrete answer about if we're overweight or not) or are overweight are the outliers, that they're doing something abnormal and need to do a little work to fix it. Like maybe an afternoon or two at the gym, or running a few times a week.

Rachel, I'm glad you're out there in the public eye, giving interviews about your weight-loss process. I hope that no matter your weight, you're healthy and confident, and I hope you continue to show the work that most women have to put in to be super thin. Soon America will try to retreat back into its delusion about how women get and stay skinny. Let's continue to tell the truth - let's make sure they don't succeed in living in a fantasy land full of effortlessly thin women.