User Reviews

My girlfriend watches rubbish television programmes as a way of trying to unwind after stressful days at work (and with me). I force The Wire on her and it takes weeks to watch an episode, meanwhile she rattles through reality self-improvement shows like she needs them to live. I have watched You Are What You Eat a few times with her but gradually have decided that I can probably find something better to do with my time than watch it again. The idea is the same every week; a fat person is stripped to a swimsuit and filmed in all their saggy glory. They are then presented with a week's food dumped on one table to try and shock them. Then they have their faeces critiqued before they are started off on the road to recovery. It is cheap television filler and it last an hour each time.

Like with all these things, you can see the potential and you can see how it helps the individual who is the subject of the week. However just doing good deeds and helping others doesn't get the ratings so, in this country of curtain twitchers, what we need is something with real voyeuristic value. To this end McKeith has to break the subject before she can help her. She does this by basically ridiculing them and forcing them to look at what they are – fine in theory but McKeith does it in the way you'd put a dog's nose in something bad it had just done on your floor. It is rather unsavoury viewing I'm afraid and when the faeces start flying it only gets worse.

McKeith herself is a terrible little camel faced woman who boasts tremendous and regular bowel movements. One can only assume that this is where her sense of humour went as well since she constantly looks like a smile would cause her face to shatter. Speaking generally what she says makes sense and you wonder why it needed such a really qualified person to point this basic dietary stuff out to people; but then you realise that she is not actually that well qualified – do a Google and you'll get a hint of what I mean. Fortunately narrator Shelley is funny and, although cruel, his dialogue does stop McKeith from sucking all the fun out of proceedings.

It is what it is then – yet another reality improvement show trading on the voyeuristic nature in its target audience to gawp at the subjects, tut-tut and think better of themselves because "at least I'm not like them". Personally I think it is terrible rubbish, although I appreciate we have 24 hours of television to fill on hundreds of channels so this stuff will always exist but I feel for those who list this among some of their favourite shows.

There are people that care about what they eat, there are people who don't, and there are people that will eat almost anything and not care about consequences, Dr. Gillian McKeith is a woman that does care! Basically every week she visits a family, or individual, who claim to have problems with what they are eating. Gillian sees why they are putting on weight, why they continue to eat the food, why they are having body problems when continuing to eat, and much more. The two moments that I always kind-of look forward to are when they see a heap of everything they eat in a week, and Gillian examines their poo! After that, they basically start a new healthy diet of fruits and vegetables, that will last about 3 weeks or something, to see how their bodies and health improve. Gillian completely transforms these people's lives. It was number 38 on The 100 Greatest TV Treats 2004. Very good!

I've watched this show many times, and there's one thing that always leaves me frustrated and confused.

Ms. McKeith comes to an overweight person's home and does all sorts of investigations, including extensive blood tests, palpating the person's belly, and tongue inspections, stressing that she can tell from all this that the person is unhealthy because of their eating habits. She declares that they have all sorts of vitamin and mineral deficiencies.

Then she drastically changes their diet, forces them to walk to work or jump on trampolines, and two months later she checks their results. They have all lost weight (eat less, exercise more ... hmmm, now where have I heard that before?) and she gushes over how great they look (and have you noticed they all have new haircuts, fashionable new duds, and professionally-applied make-up at this point?) but she comments only on their looks, and here is where I get frustrated.

At the end of the two-month period she never re-checks their blood, to see if the vitamin deficiencies are gone as a result of the new diet. We see slimmer people, but are they healthier? Have their tongues changed? Are their guts clear? Thin does not always equal healthy, as any doctor who treats bulimics will tell you.

Ms. McKeith makes such a big deal about the health aspect in the beginning, yet in the end she never lets us know if what these people ate for the last eight weeks made them any healthier.

If Ms. McKeith's recipes and nutritional advice were truly helping these people to fix the chemical imbalances in their body, she would be bragging about it; since she chooses to consciously ignore the results I have to wonder about the validity of anything she says.