In any competitive reality television show, understanding the psychology of the game is key to being an engaged and successful player. Knowing how to play off the tendencies of other competitors will help you establish yourself and move toward victory, but it is far from the root of competitive reality television's psychology. It is the superficial one, which is immediately apparent to the players as well as the viewers, but is very different from the subtle and ultimately destructive, or at least indifferent, psychology of those behind the scenes of the show.

This subtle psychology is very apparent in shows such as The Biggest Loser. In the show, overweight contestants compete for $25,000 by trying to lose the most weight. Each week the player with the least weight loss is sent home, until only the “biggest loser” remains. Ostensibly the show appears to be trying to help the players by making them lose weight, but with the addition of the cash prize, their incentive becomes divided between losing weight and gaining money, and invariably losing weight takes a back seat to gaining money, and serves as a means to the monetary end. The players' drive to get the money causes them to to approach weight loss in an irrational and manic fashion, which ultimately will do more harm to them than good. No one wants to be the one with the lowest weight at the end of the week, and weekly weight loss totals tend to be in or near double digits (as opposed to the generally recommended two pounds per week).

All of the contestants are obese, ranging from 50-60 pounds overweight to several hundred, and many have other weight-related health issues that make exercising harder for them, yet they all push themselves beyond limits that any normal person in relatively good shape would ever think of. This is evident in the current season when the contestants go to an Olympic training facility to train with athletes for a week. Here we have athletes whose bodies are purposefully molded to be in perfect condition, and their reactions to the contestants' workouts range from stupefied awe to genuine concern. When one of the Olympic hopefuls is leading a workout, he stops and asks if the red-faced and sweat-soaked contestants might need to take a break, and one of the shows trainers replies, “Hell no!” In the next shot, the look on the Olympic athlete's face is one of concerned horror for these people who are clearly pushing themselves beyond a reasonable and healthy limit. The contestants, however, are oblivious to his concern, and deeply enough indoctrinated with the “hell no!” attitude of their trainers and their own desire to win that they push on where even an Olympic athlete would not. This display of irresponsible exercise may seem horrifying, but according to the show's past contestants it is only the tip of the iceberg. According to them, when the cameras are off, things really kick into high gear, and contestants will exercise for hours at a time wearing multiple layers of clothing, and deny themselves food and water in order to lower their weight on the scale. One contestant reported that he so severely dehydrated himself that he urinated blood. He also won the competition that season.

This disregard to long-term health defines not only the length and intensity of the exercise the contestants are willing to endure, but also the physical limits beyond which they push themselves. One player, Miggy, has to leave the show for emergency surgery, and is gone from the show's compound for several days while she recovers. Upon returning, and being told by her doctor to take it easy, she follows the letter of the law, but not the spirit, and walks 12-18 miles a day the remainder of the week. At the end of the episode she has lost enough weight to stay on, but as she hobbles uncomfortably down from the scale, you have to wonder what implications this will have for her recovery and health. Another player, O'Neal, has severe knee problems, to the point that he cannot take part in some of the exercises that require a lot of knee and leg work. In one episode, he is challenged by one of the show's trainers to push himself by squatting up and down while balancing on a half-sphere exercise ball. Despite his knee problems, he does it, and the other contestants react as if it were a miracle of biblical proportions. But it is not the power of God which has allowed him to put mind over matter; it is that of pride and money, which are far less omnipotent. In an interview later in the episode he says that while doing it he experienced in his body surges of the most excruciating pain he had felt in his life.

I've mentioned the show's trainers a few times so far, but their role is key as they are the architects of not only the show's masochistic workouts, but also its double-sided psychology of harming through helping. Since they are figures of authority, the contestants are going to believe whatever they say, especially since the contestants are completely isolated from their friends and family while on the show (with the exception of several phone calls that can be “won” through competitions). Furthermore, the contestants are overweight and the trainers are thin, muscular, and attractive. We get a false sense that all of the things the trainers yell at the contestants during their workouts are what made them into the beautiful and thin people they are, but as is shown at the Olympic training center, there is clearly no way this could be true. It is important for the contestants to think this though, because it gives them justification for what they are doing to their bodies in order to win the money. A contestant may be urinating blood, but he is doing so with the indirect approval and encouragement of the show's trainers when they force them to do extremely difficult workouts with the implication that they will remain fat and unhealthy if they do not do them.

This harming through helping mentality is applied not just to physical exercise, but to the contestants' emotions and psychological issues as well. For many of them, their weight gain has as much to do with physical problems as it does with emotional ones. The root of their obesity is in the death of a parent, a lack of self esteem, or depression. Food becomes a coping mechanism, and the result is obesity, which further deteriorates the contestant's self-esteem and happiness in a vicious cycle that propels them to where they are now. Just like the contestants' obesity, their emotional problems can not be solved in the span of several months, but they are addressed nonetheless for the sake of compelling television, and to reinforce the idea in the minds of the contestants that they are not only competing but doing something good for themselves.

From time to time, generally during workouts, when the contestants are already pushed to their limits, the trainers (who act irresponsibly even as exercise professionals, but in this case extend their irresponsibility to a profession in which they have no training or certification) will have a one-on-one talk with them about what is causing their turmoil. It is easy to tell when this is going to happen – in an overly staged manner, the trainers will quietly talk to each other about how so-and-so has seemed really “down” or acted like something must be “eating at them.” This builds up drama in the show, but it also helps to create a version of the contestant's problem that can be dealt with strictly in the frame of the show, and which can be superficially remedied easily. The trainers don't go into these talks with the mindset of “I'm going to try to find out what is bothering this person and help them to work through those issues and get to the point where they are no longer a problem.” They identify a problem, distill it so that its essence is still there but its far reaching and deep psychological implications are ignored, and go into the situation with a superficial “solution” already in mind. When they talk to the contestant, they subtly steer them toward coming to the conclusion that is implied by their suggestions, and in combination with their authority this leaves the contestant with no option other than to agree with the trainer, creating, for appearance's sake, a real solution.

Not all of the contestants are susceptible to this psychological cajoling though. One contestant, Migdalia, clearly has deep emotional issues regarding her family and sense of responsibility, and a tendency to completely internalize these things, which often gives her a stoic but dejected look. The trainers pick up on this and during a scene of intense weight lifting, try to coax something out of her, but she won't budge. The more they pry at her to reveal what is bothering her, the more you can tell that this is something that is really too deep and painful to try to work through in such a short period of time (not to mention on national television); it is not worth it to pick the scab this case, the wound underneath is too deep. This doesn't stop the trainers. They keep pushing, and pushing, until they get a result that isn't negative, but isn't even successful by their standards. In a later scene, Migdalia's mother even points this out, saying that while Migdalia has her problems, they go too far beyond the show and its purpose to be addressed there.

The trainers and the people behind the scenes on the show do all of these things for one reason – to create a successful show that will bring in lots of viewership, and in turn, ad revenue. They are well aware of their harming through helping psychology, and they know that it's what will make the show work. But like the contestants, the viewers can't know this, and have to think that they are watching something inspiring. While the center of the show's psychology toward its contestants is to uproot them physically and emotionally while making them think they are being helped, its psychology toward its audience is to create the illusion of long term success and happiness. A lot of this is done through careful editing to make scenes look more inspiring than they are. In one of the trainers' one-on-one talks with a contestant, they talk about the death of her father when she was a teenager. He had weight problems similar to his daughter's, and their relationship was strained, which made his death that much harder. In the scene she tells the story of his demise and ultimate death. It does not sound like an inspiring or happy scene at all. With some solemn, minor key music, it would be so tragic that no one would possibly think to put it on television – nobody would want to watch it. But with music that carefully moves from minor to major key, and builds up to a hopeful flourish at the end, when the trainer simply makes a statement that “that's hard, you can change,” we feel like the contestant actually has changed. The two share a tearful hug, and the scene ends. The contestant has to go on still holding that pain with her, not to mention having gone through what must have been an uncomfortable experience in exposing that pain on national television, but the viewer simply goes on to the next scene where the next carefully crafted inspirational scenario happens. The viewer is entertained by the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing someone expose the kinds of problems most of us would withhold, and is absolved of any feelings of guilt in having seen those problems by being led to think that they have been solved, and that, for that matter, if the show didn't exist, and the viewer didn't watch it, that person would never have “worked through” those problems.

All of this may seem terrible – and it certainly isn't good - leading people on and ultimately hurting them for the sake of high ratings and profit. But it also illustrates a larger societal problem; Americans want easy and instant success, bandages which will make wounds out of sight, and therefore out of mind. This show gives them exactly what they want, and while not long lasting or meaningful, it gives them some kind of happiness. It also gives the show's staff, and the network executives money, which is what they want. And since the contestants would probably be incredibly resistant to a traditional and healthy approach to weight loss, and viewers would become bored with a show where contestants only lost 15 pounds (as opposed to 115) in two months, maybe this is all we can really strive for. That doesn't make it right, but at least it's honest.