Like many of you, my Fiancé and I have spent much of quarantine watching a metric ton of television, particularly reality television. We started this trend way back in Spring, just before quarantine (approximately 12 years ago), with Season 40 of Survivor: Winners at War. I hadn’t watched Survivor since season 1. I was aware of it in the zeitgeist, but I thought of it as an old, routine standard like Wheel of Fortune. My Fiancé, Tyler, assured me that season 40, with its premise of former winners competing against one another, would be superior television, and about 5 minutes into the first episode, I heartily agreed.

I was instantly hooked. By the time the season concluded, we were fully in quarantine, and Tyler and I decided to re-watch (for him) and view for the first time (for me) the best of all 40 seasons. We raced through them in a matter of weeks, sometimes finishing a whole season in one weekend. After we went through the best-ofs, we decided to watch all the seasons with a winner who appeared in season 40. We’re currently about half-way through that run.

There are many things to love and enjoy about Survivor. The challenges, the gorgeous tropical island scenery, the manipulation and politics, the backstabbing and blindsiding, the genius strategic moves, the force of will, the strength of the human body and spirit, the friendships and relationships. But beneath and beyond all of this, there is one element of ultimate fascination: starvation.

If you’re unfamiliar with the format of the show, here’s a brief overview: A group of people are stranded on an island, split into two (sometimes 3) tribes. They only have the clothes on their back and one personal possession, such as a journal or bible. They must build a shelter, locate and boil water, and catch/ forage for their own food. Eventually, they must build a fire with flint or basic friction. Each week they compete in challenges for rewards and then immunity. If they lose the immunity challenge, they must vote someone off the tribe. After a few episodes, the tribes will swap and then merge at the halfway point, becoming one tribe. The contestants then compete as individuals, hoping to get to the top 2 or 3, win over the jury of their voted-off peers, and win a million dollars.

Many contestants who make it all the way to day 39 lose 20 or more pounds over the course of the experience. That’s nearly half a pound a day. You start to see the visible evidence of this weight loss as early as episode 2 or 3, with the people who arrive the smallest and the largest showing the most loss. Sometimes, you’ll see a contestant who is clearly naturally quite slight, probably less than 110 pounds, and at the first episode you will already fear for them and what their body is about to endure. You watch a group of people, with generally diverse (although always abled and primarily thin/athletic) bodies demonstrate the aesthetic, physical, mental, and spiritual effects of extreme depravation. There comes a moment when people start to look, sickeningly and problematically, “good.” That moment is brief, quickly followed the true horror of a body in dire need of sustenance: in short, they look like they’re dying.

You’re on a low-calorie diet…

Does your body know that you aren’t starving to death on a deserted island?

When I was dealing with PTSD and having daily panic attacks, it was nearly impossible for me to eat. Food was the last thing my body wanted. I was nauseated all day and not at all in tune with any hunger or zest for life. I ate enough to get by, but it wasn’t really enough. Consequently, I lost 40 pounds. I would lie on my bed and take pictures of my stomach, absolutely delighted to see my rib cage. I felt glee when I shivered with cold. I was so proud that I never felt hungry. It felt like a sort of achievement.

This phase of anxiety-induced depravation didn’t last too long. As I grew healthier mentally, I grew healthier physically. I hired a health coach and started strength training - both of which contributed to an increased daily calorie intake. Yet, as I ate more, I became more and more concerned with staying small. I still kept track of my calories and ate at a calorie deficit. It wasn’t until quarantine, when I stopped weighing myself and gained weight, that I realized my body had still been starving, even as I ate “enough” and was able to put on 5 lbs of muscle from lifting weights. When I stopped weighing myself and allowed my body to gain weight, a few things happened: my digestive issues greatly resolved, I stopped feeling chronically cold, my immune system strengthened, and my cardiovascular health drastically improved. A starving body is not a well body, and most of us who “diet,” track calories, or force our bodies to stay smaller than they’d naturally be are inducing a sort of micro-starvation. We might not be stranded on an island with only a few coconuts, but our bodies, if they are chronically hungry, will show the receipt from this depravation through our mental and physical wellbeing.

Knowing all of this, here is the conundrum I have been working through for the past seven months: my absolute favorite part of Survivor is watching people’s bodies utterly deteriorate and fade away. That’s wrong and sick, right? But I’ve done a lot of work to not be so hard on myself and instead to observe and question my reactions and behaviors. Why am I so fascinated with watching people slowly starve to death? Why do I find their emaciated, obviously ill and failing bodies, often, so beautiful? Several answers spring to mind: cultural beauty ideals, the toxicity of white supremacy, and my own eating disorder.

The three things are inseparable, of course. They all perpetuate and uphold one another. White supremacy teaches us to fear blackness, in both skin color and associated body type. Blackness and fatness are intertwined, and through white-supremacy’s doctrine, we all aim to be as small as possible: as oppositional to blackness as possible. Our American culture is born from and indivisible from this root of white supremacy. Think of the average high-fashion runway model—there you go. That’s the ideal. Granted, we now have strength-aspiring “fitspo.” More importantly, we have the healthy and progressive HAES, fat acceptance, and body positivity/neutrality communities that actively fight back against these standards. Body positivity is complicated as it was created by and belongs to fat, black womxn but has been commodified and overtaken by thin, white womxn on social media (I’ll go into this in greater detail in a future blog post). Yet, despite this progress, we all continue to suffer from this fatphobia (internalized or otherwise), racism, ableism, and toxicity.

Watching Survivor was like holding a mirror to my subconscious brain, showing me the illness at the base of my experience of the world. Do I like fetishizing thinness? Do I desire to have a thin(ner) body? Do I, thereby, hate my own body when it is not thin? Do I believe a thin body is a righteous body? A healthy body?

With this last question, I extend to you my main point: Survivor makes it as plain and clear as possible the fallacy at the root of the equation that thin = healthy. By definition, the contestant’s weight loss is due to illness, and former contestants have demonstrated this by sharing the difficulties and long-term effects on their bodies after returning to their normal lives. They might suffer from heart damage; muscle atrophy; metabolic disorder; chronic digestive distress; and acquired eating disorders, namely binge eating disorder. In an article by Hannah Benson for The Middlebury Campus, former contestant Sophie Clarke mentioned developing an eating disorder after the show: “‘95% of our conversations on the island are about food,’ Clarke said. ‘When I first came home this summer, every morning I would want it planned out, like what are we having for lunch, what are we having for dinner. Are we gonna have a snack, where are we getting it?’”[i] Another contestant, Eliza Orlins, mentioned constantly carrying several snacks with her out of a deep fear of not having food when she was hungry. “I would hoard food. I would have food in my bedroom. I would carry food with me everywhere I went. Every purse that I had, every pocket had a granola bar, candy, whatever, because I was so scared to be hungry afterwards.”[ii]

Pretzels are one of my favorite snacks. What happens when I don’t “let myself eat them?”

I eat handful after handful when I come upon a bowl of pretzels in the wild.

These changes to the minds and bodies of former contestants exemplify what happens to the human brain when we diet. Restriction, or purposefully eating less than you need, tells your brain that you are starving, that you are in a period of scarcity. Your body then does several things to work against this: it slows down your heart, slows down your metabolism, turns off non-vital functions, and induces extreme fatigue to encourage you to rest and conserve energy. “Within days, faced with nothing to eat, the body begins feeding on itself… it can no longer supply necessary nutrients to vital organs and tissues. The heart, lungs, ovaries and testes shrink. Muscles shrink and people feel weak. Body temperature drops and people can feel chilled. People can become irritable, and it becomes difficult to concentrate. Eventually, nothing is left for the body to scavenge except muscle.”[iii] When you are near food, then, the body recognizes this as abundance, and encourages you to eat as much as possible because it does not know when you will be able to acquire food again. This, my friends, is what we call a binge. It is not a moral failing or a lack of willpower. It is a voracious and primal urge to give your body the energy it needs in times when it is not getting enough.

When the contestants on Survivor win a food reward, they will eat as much food as quickly as possible. Several have described trying not to eat this way as it causes nausea, bloating and gas, diarrhea and constipation, vomiting, and headaches.[iv] Yet they are unable to slow down, unable to feel or honor fullness cues, because their brain has a much more important priority: fight back against starvation. Stay alive.

In Season 40, the voted-out players were sent to another island, called The Edge of Extinction. There, they competed to win advantages which might allow them to get back in the game. They had about ½ cup of rice to eat a day. This was the most extreme example of starvation that I’ve seen on the show. ½ cup of rice is around 100 calories. That’s it. For the whole day, every day, for up to 38 days. Natalie Anderson, a cross-fit athlete and one of my personal favorite contestants, was voted out first. She was on the edge of extinction for almost the entire game, and lost 25 pounds in 39 days. On her Instagram, Anderson wrote, “We ate MAYBE 1/2 a cup of rice on a good day! That’s around 100 calories and around 20 grams of carbs. Any protein or fat we got was from fishing. However, the calories and energy I spent spear fishing usually outweighed the catch.” [v]

At the end of the season, you see a group of people at the lowest possible realm of functioning: they sleep most of the day, struggle to gather and catch food due to the energy required to do so, barely maintain attention, and find the puzzles and mental aspects of the challenges nearly impossible. Their brains are not focused on solving the puzzle. Their brains are starving, operating on the barest of battery-life, only focused on one thing: food. Season 30 winner Mike Holloway describes the altered-state caused by such extremes: “Thirty-nine days did a number on me. With little food, your body goes into shut down mode. It’s almost like being in cold water where your blood constricts to vital areas.”[vi]

Granted, when a contestant manages to push through despite their state, it’s incredible to watch. They might hold themselves up on a pole with only ¼ inch footrest for several hours. They might run an obstacle course five times and then solve a puzzle. They might hold their hand above their head for six hours. It makes for truly compelling television and demonstrates the strength of the human spirit, but it also breaks these people. They’ve collapsed after winning. They’ve sobbed or spent a long time trying to catch their breath. They’ve lost consciousness. Think of how long they could have stayed on the pole or held their hand above their head if they had proper sustenance. Think of how many puzzles they could have solved if they weren’t malnourished.

The long-term effects of a sustained period of deprivation are dangerous, both for the body and mind: former contestant Kellyn Bechtold recalled in an interview with Hannah Shapiro for Men’s Health, “My weight fluctuated not only during the game, but afterwards, as well. In the course of prepping for the show, losing weight in the game, gorging myself after, losing weight for the live finale, and finally evening out, my weight fluctuated 70 pounds.”[vii] In that same article, Mike Holloway mentioned his acquired disordered eating behaviors post-show: “I could not eat when I got home and when I did, it was a binge fest causing even worse stomach issues.”[viii] Andrea Boehlke spoke to the lasting metabolic damage from multiple bouts of Survivor-starvation: “I also noticed my metabolism is much worse now than it was before playing Survivor, probably due to the three times of starving myself randomly for over a month at a time.”[ix]

Have you ever found yourself shoveling spoonfuls of peanut butter into your mouth after a week of restrictive eating? Did you practically black out on Halloween while you put piece after piece of candy in your mouth? What about your birthday, Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July – are these holidays the only times you “allow” yourself to eat certain foods? Do you then gorge yourself until sickness once given this permission from yourself? By looking at the eating patterns initiated with the starvation of Survivor, we can better understand that there is no lack of willpower in these moments of bingeing. It is the body’s natural response to scarcity, and neither your body nor your mind is at fault for wanting, craving, requiring food.

So, as this show has asked me, I now ask you to look to yourself and your own relationship with food. Do you “diet?” Have you ever eaten at a calorie deficit for an extended period of time? Has your weight yo-yoed through the years? Did you lose a significant amount of weight on a diet only to gain it back? Did you start binge-eating while you were dieting? Were you ever malnourished?

Take the starvation of Survivor contestants as a truth-serum: allow yourself to fully understand that when you deprive yourself of food, your body does not know that you are not on a deserted island with only ½ cup of rice a day. Your body does not know that you have a refrigerator and cabinets full of food. It does not know that you could, at any moment, walk outside and go to a restaurant or a grocery store and fill your belly with as much food as you want. When you restrict your food intake, your body is stressed. Your body believes you are dying. Nothing about this is healthy; nothing about this promotes a life well-lived.

Only when we allow ourselves to eat what we want/as much as we want/whenever we want it do we break from the cycle of restriction/bingeing. Diets can be maintained for a certain period of time, yes. And yes, it is possible to maintain weight loss from dieting, though the statistics on the likelihood of that are quite grim: 80-95% of dieters gain the weight back (often weighting more than they did to begin with).[x] It is a far better choice to ADD IN nutrition: focus on adding more foods that make you feel good (dark greens, fats, bright and multi-colored fruits and vegetables, legumes, grains, protein, nuts and seeds) than to try to restrict foods that you fear are “unhealthy” (sugary/salty and shelf-stable foods, takeout foods, and foods rich in fat/carbs/calories).

Here’s the bottom line: it is healthier, far and away, to accept and love the body you have and to feed yourself not from a place of deprivation but from a place of abundance and joy.

Yours in recovery and gratitude,

Sara

Have you ever struggled with disordered eating? Have you found yourself fascinated with weight-loss-centric shows such as Survivor or The Biggest Loser? I’d love to hear about your experiences. Please comment your thoughts below. If you would like to develop a healthier relationship with your body, sign up for a health coaching consultation here. I’d be more than happy to help you reclaim your health with freedom and joy through a customized one-on-one program.

References

[i] https://middleburycampus.com/51167/news/sophie-clarke-11-takes-on-survivor-twice/

[ii] https://www.theringer.com/2020/5/15/21258971/survivor-faq-food-smells-survivor-week

[iii] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/01/20/463710330/what-happens-to-the-body-and-mind-when-starvation-sets-in#:~:text=When%20the%20body%20uses%20its,and%20people%20can%20feel%20chilled.

[iv] https://www.theringer.com/2020/5/15/21258971/survivor-faq-food-smells-survivor-week

[v] https://www.instagram.com/p/CAat2JinFhs/

[vi] https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a26959817/survivor-cast-members-real-health-stories/

[vii] https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a26959817/survivor-cast-members-real-health-stories/

[viii] https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a26959817/survivor-cast-members-real-health-stories/

[ix] https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a26959817/survivor-cast-members-real-health-stories/

[x] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/why-people-diet-lose-weight-and-gain-it-all-back/#:~:text=Experts%20think%20as%20many%20as,worked%20so%20hard%20to%20lose.