In this blog post, I will be examining scenes from The Office Season 5, Episode 1: “Weight Loss.” Particularly, I will look at scenes where Kelly Kapoor, played by Mindy Kaling, describes her own strategies for quick weight loss. In the show, Kelly is established as the ‘ditsy,’ celebrity-obsessed office worker. She is Dunder Mifflin Paper Company’s Customer Service Representative, which fits her talkative, bubbly personality. Known as someone who tries to dress in current trends, is shown to be overly concerned about her appearance, and often discusses surface-level issues, it makes sense that she was chosen as the character who attempts weight loss through misleading popular culture trends.
The first scene I will examine is from the beginning of the episode. In “Weight Loss,” the show’s branch of Dunder Mifflin is attempting to collectively lose the most weight in order to win a corporate contest. Some take the stairs rather than the elevator, some exercise, and some, like Kelly, fall prey to lose-weight-fast methods spread through social media and celebrities. In Kelly’s first scene of the episode, the camera focuses on the cubicle next to her’s, and the audience hears coughing (00:09:26-00:10:00). The camera pans over to Kelly, who is sitting at her desk screwing the cap on a large jug of liquid with shaking hands. Some syrup sits next to a few lemons. Holly, who works at the adjacent cubicle, peeks her head over and says “You’re shaking, are you all right?” To which Kelly replies “Just leave me alone!”
The next scene is Kelly’s interview with the cameraman. She mentions that she’s on the third day of her cleanse diet. This entails drinking only syrup, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and water to replace all three meals of the day. Getting slightly more enthused, she explains that she ordered some bikinis in a size two, which is her goal size for losing weight. She sing-songs “Gonna look amazing,” but clearly is having to force any excitement and sounds exhausted.
Her appearance suggests this exhaustion. She has very dark undereye bags because she likely isn’t getting enough sleep due to coughing from this drink concoction. She sounds weak and tired, because this diet is not providing her body with the nutrients necessary for energy and simple survival. This scene shows the damage from diet culture. Kelly is trying to lose weight quickly by not adequately sustaining her body. However, this is just the beginning of what the dangerous effects of diet culture can be. It connects with eating disorder-perpetuating rhetoric that ‘skinny is best’ and that one must lose weight to be pretty, and that quick-fix cleanses like Kelly’s drink are a healthy way of losing weight. Later in this same week, during the weigh-in, Kelly collapses on to the ground, showing how this diet is not sustaining her body (00:14:20).
The next week, Kelly says that she swallowed a tapeworm and it’ll grow in her stomach, eating all the food she digests so that she can’t gain weight (00:19:00). She is continuing to attempt dangerous weight loss tricks, even after mentioning how she was on an IV in the hospital for three days after the fainting incident (00:14:40-00:14:45). Over halfway through the episode, Dunder Mifflin finally makes a statement that the company does not condone extreme weight loss habits (00:27:54-00:28:04).
The problems with this episode connect to our introduction to fat studies this past week. This episode continues to perpetuate fatphobic beliefs that the best measure of health is a scale, even though simply how much we weigh is not an accurate measure of holistic health. The episode perpetuates the belief that having fat is bad and inherently unhealthy. In terms of Kelly’s juice cleanse, I did some more research and learned that it’s known as the “Master Cleanse,” which one consumes for 10 days to replace all meals.
On some websites, people love this diet. It helped them lose weight quickly and they were able to not eat food for all 10 days. When I was scrolling through the comments of a website from 2009, trying to find one saying that it’s not enough nutrients to sustain a body for 10 days, I only found one. Furthermore, this commenter suffered lots of backlash, with one person saying that “It is not unhealthy to give up food for a period of time…I think it’s an awesome cleanse and it works wonders. If you can’t give up food, then don’t. But don’t disrespect people that can do it.”
This comment felt unnecessarily aggressive, and the writer made fasting a matter of willpower to not eat. This glorifies the ability to not eat for 10 days, when this is often unhealthy for one’s body without approval of a physician.
My hope is that the producers of The Office aimed to reflect the weight loss trends of the time this season was filmed, in 2009. It’s an interesting commentary, but they don’t refute any of the potentially dangerous actions the workers are taking to lose weight until over halfway through the episode. Taken the wrong way, this episode and Kelly’s diet could be used as examples for how to lose weight quickly, particularly for women-identifying people, on whom society puts way more pressure to lose weight in order to be considered traditionally beautiful.
This episode is rife with assumptions on gender, race, and sexuality. Kelly’s struggle to lose weight demonstrates the disproportionate pressure on women-identifying people in western society to lose weight, more so than men. Her focus is completely on her appearance, shown by the comment about ordering bikinis in a size two. The men who discuss wanting to lose weight do it mostly for general health reasons.
Works Cited
Carell, Steve, and Mindy Kaling. “Weight Loss.” The Office, season 5, episode 1, NBC, 2005.
Julson, Erica. “Master Cleanse (Lemonade) Diet: Does It Work for Weight Loss?” Healthline, Healthline Media, 17 July 2018, https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/master-cleanse-lemonade-diet.
McKinnon, Martha. “Cayenne Pepper Water Lemon Maple Syrup.” Simple Nourished Living, Martep Media Group LLC, 25 Feb. 2017, https://simple-nourished-living.com/cayenne-pepper-water-lemon-maple-syrup/.