So far, My Big Fat Fabulous Life has been on the air for five seasons. If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s supposed to detail the life of Whitney Thore, a one time radio station employee who has always been on the cusp of becoming an aspiring dancer, but who also struggles with her weight. As a matter of fact, she claims that she has tipped the scales at a whopping 380 pounds due to a disease known as polycystic ovary syndrome, more commonly known as PCOS. This is a condition that often causes women to gain weight and it can be excruciatingly painful. Over the last five years, the show has had cameras following her around detailing various aspects of her life. What you might be more interested in learning is how the show has changed over the last several years.
For starters, the show has evolved a great deal since it first began. It was supposed to be an inspirational and uplifting show that detailed the daily life of a person who was morbidly obese, yet who had a fighting spirit and refused to let something like that get her down. In the beginning, she spent most of her time working, taking various dance classes and even teaching aerobics classes at a local gym. When she wasn’t doing that, she was hanging out with friends and she had a rich social life. The goal, according to Thore, was to prove to people that you can do anything you want even when you’re not supermodel thin. That being said, the show definitely didn’t stay upbeat and positive for very long. In fact, by the second season you can notice the changes and by season three, the very thing that endeared so many people to the show was gone.
Unfortunately, the show started going the direction that so many other shows have gone. It became more about sensationalism than anything else and the drama in Whitney’s life seemed to be over the top by the third season. As opposed to being a show about someone who was committed to living the best life possible despite her struggles, it became a show about someone who seemed to want all of the best things in life but didn’t have the commitment pull it off. It didn’t matter what the subject entailed, there always seemed to be one excuse or another for why she couldn’t deal with whatever she was facing at the time. She also started to have a lot of conflict with co-workers, friends, former boyfriends, excetera excetera. All of that played out on the television screen and whether or not it was just for the cameras, it was something that got old very quickly.
Of course, there have been other changes as well. Typically, the show starred a lot of Whitney’s family and friends and throughout the last five seasons, some of them have come and gone. In addition, both she and some other members of her family have gone through some serious health concerns and that has changed the show quite a bit. She’s been dealt a few blows by her own physician, telling her that she is either going to have to lose weight or else but perhaps the biggest blow came when Babs had her stroke. That was sad, but it didn’t have the type of shocking quality some of the later episodes had.
Those later episodes had her moving into a home of her own and also saw her getting pregnant. As it turns out, the baby was Lennie’s but the two of them had been apart for quite some time. As a matter of fact, when she went to tell him that she was pregnant, he even questioned whether or not the baby was actually his. That is precisely how much the show was changed over the years. It went from being a feel-good type of show to this drama-filled mess about someone who is having trouble committing to much of anything in life, including relationships, who is now pregnant and facing serious physical and emotional challenges. For some reason, a lot of people seem to enjoy all of this drama but if you’re looking for something that’s more uplifting, you will no longer find it here.
