How male weight-loss culture is portrayed on shows like “The Biggest Loser.”

In Episode 8 of the last season of The Biggest Loser, NBC’s incredibly popular weight-loss competition, buff and gruff trainer Jillian Michaels berates the eventual winner, Danny Cahill, because he is not working out hard enough. “I think you’re getting weak, like a girl,” Jillian sneers. “Spending too much time on the trampoline!” she adds, referring to Danny’s earlier, ostensibly sissy workout with the show’s other trainer.

It seems strange that Jillian should use the girl insult on Danny to get him to lose weight. Not long ago, after all, the whole enterprise of weight loss was a girly pursuit. But as The Biggest Loser—Season 9 premieres tonight—shows, dieting has become the new beefing-up. Because of the so-called obesity crisis in America, it is now socially acceptable for men to want to slim down—they just have to be doing it for masculine reasons like competition, strength, and supporting a family, and they have to keep on eating manly foods like enormous chunks of meat and pizza.

(See a Magnum Photos gallery on men—and women—working out.)

Of course, no real man would want to admit that he was dropping the pounds just to look better in a bathing suit. Therefore, male dieting culture has a distinctively different feel than its female counterpart. The Biggest Loser keeps it tough by turning weight loss into a competition, an ethos that is filtering into the larger culture. Greg Beato wrote about the seductive charms of TV professional-eating competitions on DoubleX last month, and the New York Times ran an article last February about the rising popularity of “diet bets” among (mostly) male coworkers—whoever lost the most weight or body fat percentage won a wad of cash. “These guys are repeating what they did as kids on the playground to see who can run faster or throw the ball harder,” University of Maryland professor Geoffrey Grief told the Times.

This explains why spokesmen for weight-loss products geared toward men are often former sports stars—like Dan Marino, the retired Dolphins quarterback who shills for NutriSystem for Men. “I’m in the best shape since my playing days,” he says on the print ad, making counting calories seem like part of the football-playing lifestyle. The ads for Pepsi Max, the new diet soda marketed as the “first diet cola for men,” take the sports-warrior image to an absurd extreme, declaring that Pepsi Max is made from “wolverine spit” and “scorpion venom.”

Being able to protect—and bed—women is an important part of male weight-loss culture. When the men on The Biggest Loser talk about their weight-loss motivation, it’s almost always about being healthy so they can be stand-up guys and provide for their wives and children. Danny, the Season 8 winner, said in one episode, “I can’t be a family man and be 430 pounds.” On the FX sitcom The League, which is about five men and their fantasy football league, one character, Kevin, has a deal with his wife: He can watch as much porn as he wants, “even the hardcore stuff,” as long as he is working out. At the end of the road is not a soft aesthete eating nonfat yogurt and dried fruit but a porn-watching, paycheck-providing real American man.

Tags: dan marino, larry the cable guy, NutriSystem, the biggest loser, weight loss for men

Jessica Grose is the managing editor of Double X and the co-author of Love, Mom: Poignant, Goofy, Brilliant Messages from Home. Click here to follow her on Twitter.

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