Channel Nine show Excess Baggage.  TV show Excess Baggage ...
"The excess baggage we are all carrying around is not our
weight. It is our preoccupation with size." Photo: Channel Nine
If Christmas is the time to be merry and binge, then the New
Year is the time to focus and fast. January is when the highly
lucrative weight-loss industry ramps up its seductive promise
that if we commit to gruelling exercise regimes, to detoxing and
to counting calories with religious zeal, we can begin a new
life. The weight will be over.  For ''thinspiration'', we need
look no further than reality television's The Biggest Loser and
its new counterpart, Excess Baggage, which profiles celebrity
weight loss.  But how helpful are these programs? And how honest
is it to perpetuate the notion a new body will equal a new life?
Former The Biggest Loser host-turned weight-loss contestant Ajay
Rochester.  Former The Biggest Loser host-turned weight-loss
contestant Ajay Rochester. Photo: Quentin Jones  According to
Michelle Bridges, p