I, I Will Begin Again
Count Me Out
The worst New Year’s Day I ever spent was maybe 2009, somewhere around there, in my rent-stabilized apartment in Greenpoint where I lived for 12 years. A classic railroad, four rooms in a row, the last one the only room with a door. My roommate got that one. My room was in the hallway off the kitchen. My room was the hallway off the kitchen. I shared it with my pit bull Trinity. I had a bed and boxspring on the floor and a tiny pink chair the previous tenant, a heroin enthusiast, left behind when she was evicted, along with a freezer full of cockroaches.
I also had a flat screen TV, which for that time, was pretty fucking fancy for me. The TV was a Christmas gift from my sisters, they had gone to Walmart at midnight after Thanksgiving dinner for the big sales. Customers just stood by what they wanted to buy for a few hours until the registers opened. To my knowledge, no violence transpired. That year was a very Flat Screen TV Christmas, and I felt wildly absurd for having one. We had cable because my roommate needed to know how the Wire ended so he paid for it. A few months later that television was stolen, along with $72 of loose change, in a break-in.
My first flurry of years in New York were hard, there wasn’t a lot of life affirming activities or people available for me to choose from that day. Nothingness felt like the greatest, most affordable and achievable gift to give myself that day. I was prone to depressing tv and movies in the morning. I liked the tone it set for the day. This particular morning was no different, except I knew the world was full of people milling around, soaking in their last paid day off and planning their new selves for the year. Count me out. Being a cook meant my life was opposite of most people’s lives, and sometimes that felt like in opposition. Why would I want to be out when they are also out? After walking the dog and making coffee, I went back to my little hallway with the TV at the foot of the bed, the only place it could go, and turned it on.
Somehow I landed on an episode of the Biggest Loser, a reality competition show where all of the contestants are fat, and whoever loses the most weight wins a big check. It’s really a show about public degradation, humiliation, suffering and pain. The contestants all live together on the Biggest Loser Ranch, they work out for hours and hours a day and completely alter their eating habits. There’s a lot of crying. There are two different team led by trainers: Bob Harper, the “nice” trainer, or Jillians Michaels, the utter sadist. Spoiler alert—they’re both awful.
I watched an entire season, a goddamn marathon, of the Biggest Loser on New Year’s Day. I did it to myself.
It began with one episode, and then I couldn’t tear myself away. Not because it’s a great show, or even a good one, but a binge is a binge is a binge, inertia is powerful and I’m a sucker for narrative.
The Biggest Loser eventually went off the air after exposés about the harmful environment behind the scenes; contestants encouraged to starve themselves (the whole show is done under the guise that it is safe and doctor-recommended) and the distribution of Adderall and “yellow jackets” (another great show!) that contain ephedra extract the FDA banned in 2004. Yep, they gave them speed to lose weight. Beyond what was happening on the show, studies showed that the weight gain former contestants often experienced was because the extreme circumstances they endured eventually fucked up their resting metabolic rate. That’s the number of calories your body burns at rest. The rate went down for most of contestants by hundreds of calories a day, for some, in the range of 500 calories less than typical for someone their size. Weight gain was inevitable.
The sun went up, the sun went down. I watched it all. I hated myself for doing it, but after a certain number of episodes I felt like I needed to finish the task. Beyond the harm I did exposing myself to hours upon hours of this show, at the time, I thought I watched people change their lives. Meanwhile, in the railroad apartment in Greenpoint, I had nothing to show for my day.
The popularity of that show in this country is partly because it is brutal to fat people, people we consider guilty for however they are treated because of how much they weigh. The world, this country, they want us to be cruel. It allows us to treat people poorly, to not care. Let’s be less cruel in 2024. Maybe this manifestation for the year underwhelms you, but let me remind you—this year is an election year.