I’m always a little embarrassed to admit that I enjoy watching The Biggest Loser. There ‘s a lot I don’t like: the absurdly shameless product placement, the increasingly convoluted game-play twists and loops, the manipulative editing, and the tears – good grief! – the ocean of tears. I didn’t see that much crying and wailing in news footage of Haiti, Katrina and the tsunami combined.

What I do like is the opportunity to watch people change. Of course I love to see them transformed physically; it is fascinating to watch. But it’s a privilege to witness real change – the kind that completely rearranges one’s view of oneself. 

The Biggest Loser usually focuses on one of these break-though moments right after Jillian has tortured the life out of someone. Last night was no different. After a couple of hours of making a nearly 300 pound woman run sprint intervals over and over while shouting at her that she dare not quit, Jillian pulls her aside for her moment of truth. 

I’m thinking, “Wait for it…wait for it…” and then it arrives: her moment where she identifies that she never believed herself worthy of better. 

I thoughtabout this in the shower this morning: “That’s what everyone says. That’s the place everyone comes to at some point in this journey (myself included)”, and it became clear to me that what have here is a value crisis. We value the wrong things and we assess our own value with the wrong measures. We have an epidemic of self-fulfilling unworthiness. 

When we value accomplishment over experience, when we find our value through doing rather than being, then every failure isn’t merely a bump in the road of our life’s journey that we can push past. Instead, each failure or misstep becomes part of a growing body of evidence in the case against ourselves. 

What do you value? In whom or what do you trust? How do you identify yourself? What do you believe makes you worthy of love, happiness, joy, or any other good thing? Do you believe it?