"How to Look Good Naked" TV Show Deals With Cancer

This past Friday instead of working on my book, I turned on the TV to watch “How to Look Good Naked.” It was interesting, because it actually applied to one of the subjects of my book – weight gain and cancer. In the show, a woman was featured who had been through treatment for Hodgkins Lymphoma. In the process, she had put on quite a bit of weight, because of hormone therapy, and was suffering lack of self-esteem because of it.

The show handled the subject quite sensitively. And it pointed out something that a lot of people don’t know about cancer treatment – that it makes you gain weight, which can be a blow to a woman’s self-esteem. Of course that’s secondary to going through fairly toxic treatments and having a life-threatening disease, but it’s an issue that many people deal with.

In the show, they first had the young woman strip down to her underwear. She confessed that she was quite self-conscious about her middle. “People talk about the apple or the pear shape – I feel like I have the pineapple shape,” she said.

So, to combat her ideas about her supposedly big stomach, the show’s narrator had her place herself in line in a group of normal to quite overweight women. But as it turned out, she was way off base. She actually had the second most thinnest stomach compared to the other women, when she thought her stomach was one of the fattest.

Because of her weight gain, and the resulting drop in her self-esteem, the woman had stopped pursuing one of her favorite hobbies: dancing. So the show featured her taking a dance lesson with an incredibly hunk-y instructor in a class of talented dancers. She actually did quite well, and the whole experience seemed to boost her confidence
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“How to Look Good Naked” is a makeover show, so it featured the obligatory scenes of going shopping for clothes that make you look 10 pounds thinner and a hair and makeup re-do that made the subject appear incredibly glamorous.

The end was surprising. The show asked the woman to pose naked, and surprisingly, she agreed. It was all done tastefully, however, with a draped sheet, and she looked beautiful. In the end, they displayed the photo on a huge billboard and asked passersby what they thought. The replies were that she looked gorgeous and she even got several requests for dates!

All in all, kudos to the show for taking on the issue of cancer and body image, and making it clear that big women can be beautiful.