Earlier this year, as I was surfing around my cable system, I discovered a PoopReport-friendly television series entitled
You Are What You Eat on the British import channel, BBC America. Each
episode is thirty minutes in length and is hosted by nutritionist Gillian McKeith, who specializes in helping obese Brits break their excessive eating habits and learn healthy new ones.
More than a fit-looking female herself, Gillian marches into the flats of the lazy and overweight (with permission, since it's someone's opportunity for fifteen-plus minutes of fame) with the snap and authority of a Marine boot camp instructor. Then she checks all the tongues (pets not included) in the house to see if they are coated. (They always are!) Next, she flings open the food perp's fridge and gasps loudly at the contents: shelves groaning with jelly doughnuts, cream puffs, cakes, pies, sodas, and fast-food leftovers galore, and not a speck of anything lean, green, or leafy in sight.
Gillian tosses it all into the nearby trash can with a vengeance and barks something like: "This is a nutritional nightmare! All this sugar and butter and salt and lard! Don't you realize what you're doing to your body? No wonder you're six stone overweight!" (I actually don't know how much a 'stone' is, but it sounds so much heavier than a pound, doesn't it? Perhaps one of our British PoopReporters can enlighten us here.)
Then, to further brand the horror of their bad habits into their brains, Gillian lays out an entire week's worth of addictive cuisine on the dining room table for her subjects/patients. The mother, father, son, or daughter (pick one or more) all stand there and grow dizzy at the sight of all those bottles of ketchup, bowls of sugar, shakers of salt, cans of sodas, mounds of chips (French fries to us Americans) and tons of takeout that they take in daily with frighteningly-jiggly results. Finally, Gillian sits her charges down to a colorful table laden with their new regimen of fresh fruits, veggies of all kinds, nuts, juices, lean meats and fish, and then proposes a manageable program of exercise like walking and trips to the gym.
But not before she strikes the note that makes this series so interesting to PoopReport: she insists on examining everyone's "poo", as she puts it, before they've been nutritionally-saved.
No one's privacy is invaded, however. Gillian sends them all off to their loo to make specimens.
It's about here that a commercial for something is inserted.
Next thing you know, we're back, and there's Gillian wearing a surgical mask and gazing down intently at those same specimens which are now nestled inside what looks like tastefully-opaque Tupperware containers. Of course, she never actually handles the stuff, and we are spared close-ups. But she does comment quite vividly, and I paraphrase here: "Oh, what a wretched smell!" At which point, one of the poo-ers replies: "But isn't poo supposed to smell?"
"There's smell, and then there's smell. This is definitely not an aromatic poo!"
Our nutritional drill instructor is likely to comment further, describing the consistency and color of the poo, since we can't see it. Once I heard her say that she spotted something strange-looking down there and that it was probably due to not chewing the food very thoroughly. And then, her point made, she dropped the matter. (Uh, not literally!)
The show cuts to the end of six weeks or so where drastic improvements are noted. People have lost weight, cleared up their skin, gone out on dates (at least the single and divorced ones), gained lots more energy, and are presumably are now producing the right kind of aromatic poo. Gillian does not, however, revisit that matter.
