Which TV Show Motivates You?

Which TV show motivates you the most?

Here are the choices:

The Biggest Loser on NBC

I Lost It! on Discovery Health

Inside Brookhaven Obesity Clinic on TLC

The Biggest Loser is the show that does the most for me. And not just any episode--I get bogged down in the weekly show, and the vote-offs aren't that interesting to me.

My favorite episodes are the specials, the ones where there are just two couples or two teams or two families against each other. Nobody voted off and nobody forming alliances or stabbing people in the back. It's just people working hard and losing weight. And on the specials, it's nice because it all happens in one episode. People start the episode heavy and end it healthy.

But it still shows the part that I need to see the most--the part where they're working hard. Seeing people start out the show dying every time they exercise and then pushing through the pain and making themselves stronger by the end of the show. I need to see that.

That's the biggest thing that's missing on I Lost It! That show basically shows two people in each episode. Each person is shown in two segments--one is the "fat" segment, where they show pictures of how heavy the person used to be, and they talk about how miserable their life used to be when they were heavy, and what the big moment was when they decided to lose the weight. It's generally something embarrassing or health related.

Then, after a commercial break, they do the "skinny" segment, showing video of how they look now, holding up clothes that used to fit them, and showing how far they've come. They generally mention how the person lost all the weight, but it's generally just a mention.

For me, it's not the hardship of being heavy or the joy of being healthy that's the most motivating, but watching people hang in there during the day-to-day struggles of the time it takes to lose weight. That's what's missing from this show.

As for Inside Brookhaven Obesity Clinic, my wife has said that's the show that motivates her. Not because she has anywhere near the amount of weight those people have to lose (The show features morbidly obese people at up to almost 1,000 pounds, and my wife has far less to lose than even I do), but because of the things coming out of the people's mouths.

For example, one episode featured a man who was so large, he had to have holes cut into the walls of his house and be hoisted out by awkward cranes. Rather than come to a realization of how far gone he was, the man spent his on-camera time complaining about how no one had developed better technology for moving extremely heavy people.

My wife said seeing people so brazenly dismissing their own role in creating their problems motivated her to do get up and do something more than any of the other shows we've watched lately.

How about you? Which shows keep you motivated?