Kirstie Alley and the Big Life

I stumbled upon yet another reality show the other night. It was called, "Kirstie Alley's Big Life."

All I could say was, "Wow..."

I remember Kirstie Alley from Star Trek II and Cheers. Other than that...not much. I've seen her on the cover of the occasional tabloid with headlines discussing how she gained weight and lost weight and gained more, as well as a headline declaring that she had been dropped from Jenny Craig as a spokesperson (they wouldn't come out and say it's because she regained weight).

I remember hearing the news in passing and scanning headlines on tabloids, but I didn't pay attention to it. Most of that gossip just sort of floats around out there like turds on sewage wastewater, waiting to be processed by a bored public that tries to feel more connected to those they admire by reading about the flaws in those making a metric crap-ton more than we do. So I wasn't prepared to see just how Kirstie Alley has changed since her days on Cheers.

Just...wow.

And the series didn't leave a good impression.

I must have seen an early series episode; she decided to test her new weight-loss program on her "handyman" and enlisted him to work with her. It kind of reminded me of the handyman on "Murphy Brown." He always seemed to be paid to just hang around more than actually do anything, and I guess it's a double-paying job when you're hanging around in front of reality show cameras.

My first thought; how can you shill your own weight-loss program when you're really not looking like you could be a successful poster child for your program? She's overweight. She puts it out there (c'mon...it's called "Big Life," and I believe she had a show called "Fat Actress" before that).

Second, the show had her deciding to get more exercise. Exercise will help her lose weight. They had an entire episode dedicated to interviewing personal trainers to come in and help her and her handyman lose weight.

Ugh. I so hate that.

I've railed against it before. Exercise is good for you, but it will not be your magic key to losing weight. Yes, you may lose a few pounds. But I'm willing to bet that much of that is because exercise fills time you otherwise would use eating.

When I'm on the treadmill, it takes an hour to burn 500 calories at an easy pace. An hour. A plain cheeseburger from McDonald's takes five minutes to eat (or less) and is 300 calories. Yeah, five minutes to take in 300 calories takes at least half an hour to forty minutes to burn off.

So if your lifestyle has you eating two thousand calories a day more than your body needs, can you fill in four or five hours a day with exercise to get your caloric intake to a manageable level?

I'll say this again; exercise will let you eat what you want as an obese person to achieve a skinny body if you become a professional trainer. You'll spend eight hours a day sweating calories from your pores. You'll have a huge calorie deficit. Most of us have jobs that don't involve wearing sweats for the majority of the day, however.

Second thing I'll say again; the "easiest" way to lose weight is to change your food lifestyle. That cheeseburger from McDonald's isn't really all that bad compared to most fast food fare; the average McMeal of a Big Mac, large fries and large Coke comes to 1,350 calories. That's over half the calories the average person should be eating in the course of the entire day compressed into one meal. And I don't think it's all that unusual for someone to have a meal like this.

Exercise isn't bad and I'm not advocating not exercising. Exercise makes you stronger and healthier in a number of ways. I'm simply saying that exercise isn't a magic bullet for losing weight, and unless you do a LOT of it, it won't make a huge difference in your weight loss routine. Want a big difference? Don't eat so much. Not eating that 540 calorie Big Mac will save you over an hour on the treadmill.

Forget how this relates to Kirstie Alley? Her show, or the episode I watched, seemed entirely endorsing the idea that if you have a personal trainer (because every fat person can afford one of those, along with your own personal home gym) you would lose weight. She mentioned the idea that she needs to change her lifestyle, but in the same session of marathon Big Life episodes she called her handyman one night to ask if he'd like to come over to eat something.

Um...

Now she has released her Certified Organic Weight Loss Program  (no I don't care enough to put in the actual name because it's yet another program dedicated to miraculous weight loss if you follow the magic "system"). Does it work? I don't know, but it seems clear that her show is less about the life of an actress who is no longer in the headlines for her roles and instead is on the tabloids because of her size and is instead a show cashing in on the public's fascination with reality shows to help promote her program. Good marketing, I suppose. But I think it's bad that it's promoting yet another "system" to an American public that desperately wants to believe all ills have a simple, singular magic bullet cure.

It's reported that she's lost 20 pounds since January (and now it's March) on her own diet program. That's great for her. The key is finding out if her system continues to have positive effects after five and ten years...