126. Should I watch Fat Friends?

Let's talk about whether or not you should watch Fat Friends. 

With the focus of the Netflix show being based around people who met at and regularly visit a diet club, it is understandable that you might be wary of watching if you're trying to escape dieting yourself.

I'm going to explain how I see Fat Friends through my very own eyes - the funny and satirical, the sympathetic approach to its characters, and how we can relate to the depiction of different foods chosen when on a diet, loss of control around food, and how dieting affects family members' relationship with food. 

The show highlights fat shaming in and out of diet clubs, laughs at all the clichéd sayings related to diets, addresses relationships with people when you're in a bigger body, and more. It's sympathetic and designed to make you laugh out loud at dieting.

It's funny, it's sad, it's heart warming, and it's light-hearted. Let me give you a whistlestop tour, and then you can make your own decision on whether to watch it yourself.

Transcript

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Welcome to the Intuitive Eating and Body Positivity podcast. I'm Terri and I'll be talking about all things intuitive eating, body positivity and health at every size and shaking off weight stigma, diet culture, and food rules so that we can all have a better relationship with food and our bodies. Hello hi happy Thursday. I know Thursday. This is not my usual Monday release day, is it? Things have gone a little bit crazy with the bank holiday. I don't know where I am. I don't know what day it is. I don't know what's going on, but I made sure that I didn't work over Easter, so that's why there was no recording over the weekend, no release on Monday, so here we are on a Thursday, but you know, there you go. That's what you got to do, right? How are you? How was your Easter? Was it good? Was there loads of chocolate? Were there loads of Easter eggs or did you completely shy away from it? How was it for you? It was good for me. I had a couple of Easter eggs. Yeah, as a grown woman, my dad still buys me an Easter egg at Christmas. A Christmas? For goodness sake, at Easter. Which is cute, right? Isn't that sweet? But yeah, i had a nice Easter. It was good yeah it was a nice long weekend. Hope you're not feeling too stressed after it. There's no need. Everything is cool. You had some chocolate. You might have had a lot of chocolate. You might have had a lot of other food, but you know what? It's Sound Quality Weekend and that's what it's there for. To have a nice time to have some down, time to have some food, have some drinks, however you took it, whatever happened for you, it's absolutely fine. And you just have to remember Easter eggs are just chocolate bars in a different shape, right? That's all they are. And actually I think you get less chocolate in an Easter egg than you get in a bar of chocolate. Maybe I need to go and Google this, but don't panic because all it is a different shaped chocolate bar. It's fine. And by that, by that logic, it means that it's OK that they're not there anymore, because sometimes we can feel like we have to eat them and eat them quickly and eat loads of them and get rid of them and things like that, because then they're gone. Or maybe you miss them because they're not there anymore, but it's fine because you can pop to the shop and get some more chocolate. Because maybe you are a grown up with your own money and you can just pop to the shop. That's fine, so don't worry about what happened to Easter. Easiest something done for some people I know, but honestly it's all good. All good. So let's talk about fat friends. Are you watching it? It popped up on Netflix and I was like, what is this show from the early two and, i mean early 2000s. 2004, something like that, which I didn't think was that long ago. And then I thought about it and I thought, no, that's 20 years ago, it started. Anyway. It popped up on Netflix. I've never seen it before. I've never heard of it before. Didn't have a clue what it was about. Now all of a sudden there's all this hype about it. It's being talked about on social media. My friends are asking me if I've seen it and i was like, this is massive, this is clearly a big deal. Anyway, I'm in it and I'm in it deep. I love it. Just love it. Now, for those of you who don't know what it is, here's the premise. It's all about a group of people that go to and a diet club. Basically it's just about this group of people that go to a diet club. But it does end up being much more than that. It's about the story of their lives, you know, their families, their social interactions, things that happen to them in general, everyday life. So it's not just about the Diet Club but it is heavily centered around it. So a lot of the conversation on social media has been, should I watch it? I don't know if I can handle it. It's really triggering and I can understand the worry around it. I can understand the worry for somebody who is trying to let go of dieting to see this program come up. That is all about dieting. It's all about the diet club, what you get there, the friends you make there, that sort of thing. So I get it. If you're watching it, how does it make you feel? Or if you're not watching it does, what does the thought of it feel like? How does it make you feel? Does it feel like you can watch it? Does it make you feel like you'd be really uncomfortable and it would be triggering you? Are you watching it? Do you find it just funny? Do you find it just hilarious? There's lots of ways to view this and if it feels difficult, let me help you to see this differently. I'm going to tell you how I see it and then hopefully if you wanna watch it, you can see it through the same eyes as me. Well, not through my eyes, because they're my eyes. That's, you know, through the same lens, shall we say. So here's how I see it. It's satire, right? It's meant to be funny. It's meant to be ironic. It is meant to take the absolute Mick out of diets and that it does. They just spend the whole time taking the Mick out of the dieting crowd. But here is what else I see in that program right i see a really sympathetic approach to all of the characters. They're not, as show writers, making anybody in that group out to be stupid or a fool for doing the Diet. Well, hang on, I'll come on to this in a minute. But you know, they're not outwardly saying what a stupid person you are for dieting. They are sympathetic to their characters, their situations, the things that happen as fat folk or as people who are not fat but are on a diet. They are sympathetic to the consultant as well of the group they are. They've taken a really nice approach, actually, to making you really love the characters and to treating them kindly. They do, I was gonna say, promote. It's not promote. They do highlight very disordered eating. And by that I mean all the things that we do when we're on a diet, the not eating with your family or eating with your family, but not eating the same food as your family. So there will be somebody who just has slices of ham and a massive player salad. We've all been there, right? We've all been to a diet club. I thought, I'll just have some ham and salad and God, that is actually something that I remember from my mum dieting as well. Just some sliced ham and some salad. No, Mum, that ain't gonna fill me up. Do you not know me? Do you not know my appetite? That is not filling me up, but it does highlight the foods that you eat. One person had cottage cheese, for example, and a plate of salad, and it just highlights the different foods that you choose above others when you're on a diet. By the way, there might be some spoiler alerts here, so I'm going to try and not talk about the actual storylines. But if you're going to watch it, just know that I'm going to give you some insight into a few different situations. So Soz, not Soz. Here for the education, right? Yeah so the eating habits. And it's about, you know, if you go out to eat what you eat instead of other people. There is an episode where this one couple. Has food, has these big plates of food, and there's a standing joke about cabbage. He's like, how many times in one day do we have to eat cabbage? And then she's got his wife has got the plate absolutely piled high and she says to her daughter, who are both on a diet, by the way, it's fine because it's all vegetables, it's all free food. Well, do you resonate with that? Do you remember piling your plate up massively high with all this food that are supposedly free foods on a diet, so it's fine to eat them all? So there's no actual gauge of whether you're hungry or not, It's just a case of eat all the free food you can, cause that's what you're told on a diet, isn't it? Go ahead, have as much of that free food as you like. But the reality is we don't need a mountain of food because you might be able to eat a really good, healthy amount of food. And by healthy, I mean, you know, a considerable amount of food. That doesn't mean that you need to pile your plate up more than what is good for you, but this is what was being depicted in that scene. So it was highlighting the differences. In that one scene you had the girl with the cottage cheese and the salad versus her mum and her dad who are eating this mountain of vegetables. Both of those things are advocated for on diets. Neither of those things are OK unless that's exactly what you need and want to eat at that time. It also showed the loss of control around food when you're on a diet. So you know when you get stressed, when you're upset, that sort of thing. It shows. The way you just go, right? That's it. I'm just gonna eat everything in my sight. Now I'm gonna have, I think in the one scene the girl has something like 3 bags of crisps, 2 bags of pork scratchings and a pint of Guinness. And I was like, Yep, yeah, I recognize. That not all of those things, because I don't like cheese and onion crisps, I don't really like pork scratchings, and I definitely don't like Guinness. But I knew what she was going through. She was stressed. She'd done so well on her diet. She'd been praised by lots of people. But she was upset about something, and her go to was to binge on all these foods that she doesn't usually get access to. Interesting, right? And that's not the only time that happens in the four seasons that I've watched. Because yes, I have been binge watched it all. Then there are, what other examples are there? So there is an example of how it is knocked on to people around us. So when you're dieting and you make your family diet with you, how they react to food when you're not around? So in this one example, the consultants son just really wants some food. Some decent, you know, hearty meals. This is a teenage boy. He wants to eat more than a plate of salad. And you see him kind of sneaking bars of chocolate, that sort of thing, or eating different foods when he goes to his dad's you know, that sort of thing. So there are all the different kind of aspects of the disordered eating patterns in there is actually. Let me just say there is an actual eating disorder highlighted in there. It's relatively brief, but if you are triggered by actual eating disorder behaviours, specifically binge eating, bulimia, that sort of thing, then I would stay away from it actually. But it's a very small part of a very big series. But it is there. But it does show that as the consultant, this woman is really feeling the pressure to stay thin and the pressure to be this person that is worthy of standing up in front of a group of people preaching her diet and her messages. So that's quite sad really, but it's part and parcel. You know, there's an awful lot of people who go from dieting to disordered eating, and then from disordered eating to actually eating disorders. So the figures around that are actually really quite scary. So it's no surprise it also highlights a terrible relationship with exercise. Yeah, earning your food, doing classes to lose weight, and then being able to eat more. You've done an exercise class, therefore you are now entitled to a pint or some crisps or some chocolate or, you know, whatever it is. But there is a definite link in this program between exercise and food. They talk about clothes and actually that's done very steadily, but in a nice way. You know the clothes that you can and can't wear, the clothes that are available to you as a bigger person, the clothes that come into play when you are put in a position where you're going to feel very self-conscious So being a bridesmaid and having to contend with buying bridesmaids, dresses, that sort of thing. The relationship with each other as well. Competitive nature of diet. Clubs that's in there talks about prioritizing the diet over other things. You know, when we wanna diet, everything becomes the centre of focus, doesn't it? And other things go by the wayside. I really liked as well that the thin people in this programme are also portrayed as having their own issues. Not just the disordered eating, not just the eating disorder, But they are not made out to be people who are thin and happy. They're not made out to have these perfect lives because they've lost weight. The people that you see in there that are naturally quite thin have their issues. The people in there that have gone through a journey of losing a lot of weight and are being celebrated for it also have issues. Nobody in that show is portrayed as without their problems because they are thin. So I really like that. Real credit to the show writers. They're actually for making everybody. Very real, very real. They're also very sympathetic to the problems that come with being in a bigger body. They did a really nice job of highlighting lots of areas of life where and where your weight comes into play, where you're criticised for it or made fun of for it. You know there's cases of bad bosses in there or coworkers and how they have an impact or how they explicitly are cruel to people with bigger bodies. There are stories in there of how the taunting at school still has an impact. As sure as you're older, you know there is a storyline right at the beginning about how a lady is bullied at school and his issues with things like playing football and getting changed in the changing rooms, that sort of thing. So that was really nice to see. They do a really good job of highlighting where people are cruel to people in bigger bodies, people that society deems to be fat. They do a really good job of highlighting that as an issue, and there are a couple of instances where people do stand up for themselves, but they are very sympathetic to the fact that a lot of people can't stand up for themselves and don't stand up for themselves because it's such an oppressive thing. They also do a very good job of showing how people are ridiculed in a diet club class and it is what I would say is that it's, how can I put this? They have taken it to the extreme, so not to the point where it's absolutely stupid and it's not believable, but things like the consultant will say, well what did you do? You must have eaten everything in your path this week for you to have gained that amount of weight. Or I'm trying to think of some examples on the hop. Well, I'm not gonna read out the list of gains and losses this week, because that would just be depressing, You know, That sort of thing. And all the things that are said by a consultant to you as a member in class. Like, what did you do? What went wrong? What did you eat? You haven't stuck to your plan. You can't have stuck to plan. You say you have, but you can't have done because if you had, you wouldn't have lost, you wouldn't have gained weight, that sort of thing. Can't think of any real examples now because they did a really good job of showing just how much in a class you are ridiculed. For not staying on plan, not losing weight, that sort of thing. They show the They show how humiliating it is standing on the scales in front of everybody. They show the City awards that you get. So Carol gives out silver stones. There are actual stones wrapped in silver foil. I know right now at a club, I wanted the awards, I wanted my stone pins or certificates or whatever it was that I was getting. I couldn't have cared less if it was a stone wrapped in foil. I don't think it's the recognition. So that was in there. Really funny. There is also the reaction from the people in class to the consultant making jokes about their behaviour through the week. You know what happened? Well, I did this, You know, just making jokes at their own expense, almost like so. Nobody else can, if you know what I mean. It's really well done. How they show the relationship between the consultant and the members. How the consultant shames people in class and the jokes we make of ourselves as people in a class. There are, oh god, it's obviously set in a in a you know in a hall somewhere with lots of chairs in lines. It was a very good mock up of a of a diet club at one point there's this board and the members have got their faces stuck on this board and it's like the rainbow. No, it's not like a rainbow. You know what a typical BMI chart looks like? Yeah, we got the coloured bands going from one side to the other. It looks a bit like that. And it's got the BMI levels on it, so, you know, normal, overweight, obese, and every member has got their face stuck in the band that they are in. And at one point she picks up this woman's face off the board and she was like, if you're not careful, you're gonna be moving up through these fans here and you know, makes out like she's working her way up the bands. Like it was supposed to scare her. It was just humiliating, just humiliating. And then I thought, hang on a minute, We had one of those boards in our club. In fact one of one of my girls said to me, did you have that in your swimming club, Mum? I was like actually something similar. Yeah, I did. Not with the BMI bands on, but it was, it was supposed to be more motivating than that. I think it was the amount of weight that you'd lost, you know how many stones you'd lost. So the more stones you'd lost, the further up the board you were. That kind of thing. Think that's it. I can't remember Dial, but it was supposed to be motivating. But yeah, the show just did a really good job of taking the mick out of that sort of thing and all the cliched sayings in all the land. A moment on the lips and then the whole class goes. Her lifetime on their hips is and loads she she's just got loads of these sayings that she spanks at them all the time. One is need to is greed, all these kind of things that as a consultant, you know, we're going to come out of your mouth As a member, you know you're going to hear on a regular basis, you know, that sort of thing. And what else, Intimacy issues. There's some really nice stuff in there on how it feels to be intimate with somebody when you're in a bigger body and how actually other people have also got their own insecurities, that sort of thing. I think it was really well done. Even though it was made in 2004 when diets were very prevalent, shall we say, diet clubs were the thing to do, the place to go. If you were Overweight, Even though it was made then I think it was very well done. Overall, what it does is it shows you all the stereotyping of being in a fat person's body, all the stereotyping of a diet club, all the problems with diets, all the problems with diet clubs, and it doesn't glorify clubs or weight loss. It really doesn't. So if that's what you're worried about, if that's what you're concerned about, if you think it's going to make you feel like dieting is a good thing to do and that you need to go back to your diet club, I think you can really take away that worry because that is not, it's clearly not the intention of this program. That's how I see it through my eyes. So should you watch it? Well, that's your choice. It's absolutely your choice. I do not want you to take what I've said and gone, Terry says. It's absolutely fine. No harm shall be done. This is your choice. It depends on your mental capacity at the time. Depends how you feel about dieting. If you, I think if you go into it and you go into it with a view of laughing at diets, laughing at diet clubs, laughing at the things you used to do when you were on a diet, if you can go in and watch it with a really critical eye, you're going to see it funny. You're going to see it as one big joke, but it is your choice. This is my view on it. This is how I see it. So make your decision based on how you feel and what I've said to you. But it is funny. I'm really enjoying it. I'm really enjoying it. I really love to know what you think about it as well. So I'm going to put a post in my Facebook group right now. You can come and comment on that if you want to tell me. Have you watched it? Are you watching it? Are you not going to watch it? If you are watching it, what do you think of it? Let me let me know. Go post in there and if you want to send me a voice note on WhatsApp, do that. And yeah, let me know what you think. Normal service shall resume next week. Monday episodes are back Monday. I've got a really good episode for you. It is about how your personal human design can affect how you are an intuitive eater. So good. It's a guest episode and I've already recorded it, so I know it's. But come and have a listen. It's really interesting. If you don't know anything about human design, this could pique your interest. If you do know about human design, this might put a different kind of tool in your toolbox there. It's really good. So come and join me and Charlie when the episode is released on Monday and I hope you enjoy it. Until then, have a lovely rest of the week, enjoy your weekend and I will speak to you. Really soon.