Ellen Gray: Weighty challenges: Ruby faces adversity in the reality show's second season
RUBY. 8 p.m. Sunday, Style.
EVERYONE SEEMS to love a weight-loss story, and the Style Network's "Ruby" does not disappoint.
On a recent visit to Philadelphia, the show's star, Ruby Gettinger, who once weighed 700 pounds, disclosed that she's under 350 for the first time in her adult life.
"Flying here to Philly, I've never been able to sit in a seat at the airport, ever. I usually have to stand," but she decided to try it, she said. "I get chills talking about it. I could not believe, for the first time ever, I was able to fit in a seat at the airport."
But as Season 2 of the Comcast-owned cable channel's most-watched show gets under way Sunday, the pre-recorded Ruby is mourning the loss of her father last January.
Despondent, she's stopped keeping her food journal and strayed from the 1,700-calorie-a-day diet that's been gradually transforming a body that when the show began weighed nearly 500 pounds.
In other words, real life has intruded on the fairy tale.
And that's not such a bad thing.
Watch too much of NBC's "The Biggest Loser" and you might think the answer to this, and every other weight-loss obstacle, is a punishing visit to the gym.
On "Ruby," it's a trip to see Rascal Flatts perform.
I don't like many docu-soaps and as someone who's struggled with weight I like diet shows even less, but even I can't resist Gettinger - heck, I'm just going to call her Ruby - a honey-voiced redhead from Savannah, Ga., who says of her fans that she just wants to "hug their necks."
Though she's occasionally been weighed on camera, and will be again for this season's finale, "Ruby" for the most part has been less a show about peeling off the pounds than about a woman discovering simple joys most of us take for granted, starting with walking outside.
It probably doesn't hurt, either, that Ruby's journey has turned out to more twists than even the Style Network expected.
For one thing, we're talking about a woman who says she has no childhood memories.
Until she entered therapy as part of the show, "I never thought about it like it was a big deal," said Ruby, who remembers "everything from 13 on. I have a couple of memories of 11 and 12, but anything 10 and under, nothing. Nothing at all."
Though her father died only recently and her mother's still alive, they haven't been much help, she said.
"My mother always says, 'You were always so happy,' you know? My sister says, 'You were happy all the time' . . . But I'm sitting there going, I don't remember. I just don't know."
This season, as her therapist tries to get her to uncover memories he's sure she's repressed for a reason, Ruby's going through her school records and revisiting places where she once spent time.
"I'm getting pictures together, it's almost as if I've become a private investigator," she said.
There are pieces of this that feel too private for television, and I was relieved to find that not all of Ruby's therapy sessions take place on camera.
The cameras, though, are just about everywhere else.
"Maybe six days a month I get to myself, and that's about it," she said, insisting that the show's crew has become like "family" to her.
But then everyone seems like family to Ruby, whose tightly woven network supplies if, anything, a little too much of the show's drama.
And her past isn't the only mystery she's eager to solve.
Lately, she said, she'd been thinking about things she'd never considered before, such as that "a lot of people do cocaine," but only some become addicted.
"A lot of people eat, but there's only a few that will gain the weight or become addicted to a certain sweet, you know what I mean?" she said.
She said she regularly hears from fans who say she's inspired them to lose weight, and more importantly, to not let their size trap them inside their homes.
"And it's sad, because some of them will come out of their house and
they're riding their bikes and they're probably like 50 or 60 pounds overweight, and they said that people make fun of them," she said.
But they're learning, as she has, "that after a while, people ignore" them. "It's like going into a restaurant: After five minutes, they're going to stop staring at me," she said.
She's also heard from people who'll tell her "that they used to be those people that are prejudiced, that would look at people like me and judge us and [say] 'Why don't they just diet?' " but after seeing the show, "they finally get it, they finally understand their mother or their sister, they finally understand what they're going through," she said.
"That's worth it all to me," she said.
What she's been trying to get across, she said, is "that people not define themselves by their weight. Don't let it define you. And I feel like some people heard me." *
Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.
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