Changing Lanes: No sob story - just a local doing a great job

The TV show “The Biggest Loser” appears in one form or another in more than two dozen countries. I enjoy some TV shows, even when there is only a small percentage of interesting content among lots of filler. I record the show and watch it later, fast forwarding through repetitive and tedious stuff and the contestants with sob stories that are only included to strum heart strings. Only once in a while have the sob stories anything to do with why a person became fat.

If these confessions and clearings-of-the-air get sloppy and soppy, I can’t keep from making my own exaggerated and sarcastic sobbing noises, entertaining my adolescent self.

What I am seriously looking for in Biggest Loser are the parts that inspire me in my battle against my own fat self. These days, smack in the middle of the two-hour Biggest Loser sweat and sob fest, they show commercials and review what happened in the first hour, followed by another five minutes of ads before the second half.

I watched the first hour in high speed - 15 minutes. I grasped the plot well, so how do they figure that anyone needs to see a review? I can understand going over what happened if the first and second hours were separated by a week or so, but I can usually remember what happened an hour ago. Do they honestly think we would forget the first half because we are lost in a dream world, wanting all the products shown in the commercials?

It would be unfair to the companies who spent advertising money to fast-forward through the commercials. I, of course, stop and watch each one carefully.

I researched Biggest Loser on Wikipedia and, like so many other things, found far more information than I either wanted or needed. If you want a show-by-show breakdown with all the facts and figures, Wikipedia is the place to go.

There are some things on Biggest Loser that don’t make sense. I was trying to find out how much time goes by after the last week on the ranch and the finale of the show. The live finale is aired one week after the last recorded weekly show, but the contestants lose far too much weight and undergo too much of a transition for it to be in real time.

If you start out at 400 pounds and lose half of it in the course of 12 or 15 weeks, you must have undergone some sort of surgery to remove excess skin or ugly lumpy parts that develop on people who lose massive amounts of weight in a short period of time.

Ali Vincent was a winner one year - the first woman to win the contest. She lost nearly half of her starting weight and turned out to be a 122-pound petite little thing at the finale. She must have needed to get rid of some packaging. You can’t put 50 pounds of flour in a 100 pound sack without having a bunch of excess sack.

I think some sort of surgery had to ensue after the last aired program and the winning contestant-revealing finale.

This year, a local Western New Yorker is on the show. Emily Joy is from Silver Creek. She is doing WNY proud in that, as I write this, she is still on the show and losing vast amounts of weight every week. Emily Joy works her patootie off daily. I can’t say her every hair is always in place, but on every show, before we see her, she puts on makeup and looks pretty before she hits the cameras. If I had trainers beating me up for six or 12 hours a day and I couldn’t escape, I would not care what I looked like from day to day.

My face would be swollen and streaked from crying (no sob story, just sobbing) all night and I would have bruises and scrapes on my knees from begging the others to vote me out. I would love to see Emily Joy win; she is good looking and a lot tougher than I am.

Comments? Changinglanesterry@gmail.com.