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Stupid "dieting" commercials
I have always had a bit of a bone to pick with so many of the commercials that are trying to play up the weight-loss capabilities of products, but lately it seems to be annoying me even more. Maybe because I've been losing weight and doing it the right way... keeping it nice and slow and nutritionally sound.
I just saw an ad for Special K cereal... a little girl had built a puffy snowman/woman and her mother came out wearing a long white coat with a scarf and gloves that looked similar to those worn by the snowman (which makes sense, duh, because the little girl probably swiped her mom's stuff to outfit her creation). And the little girl makes the comment "Mom! You look just like the snowman!" Mom, of course, looks at the snowman and doesn't see that they're dressed similarly... no, she looks at the snowman and sees that it's nice and rounded, so *obviously* her daughter meant that she was a bloated caricature of a person. I should point out that the actress playing mom is not even slightly overweight... at least not in this universe. She's actually quite thin. And yet the commercial then goes on to push Special K as a solution for quickly losing all that gross extra weight she so obviously has. o_O
Yoplait has a series of commercials with pretty much the same issue... with stick thin women lamenting their weight and extolling the virtues of Yoplait light yogurt in their plans to lose all that excess weight they don't have. And don't even get me started on Lean Cuisine, showing an office filled with spectrally thin women lamenting their need to diet and excoriating another equally thin co-worker because she doesn't appear to be dieting with them.
Grrrr.
I just saw an ad for Special K cereal... a little girl had built a puffy snowman/woman and her mother came out wearing a long white coat with a scarf and gloves that looked similar to those worn by the snowman (which makes sense, duh, because the little girl probably swiped her mom's stuff to outfit her creation). And the little girl makes the comment "Mom! You look just like the snowman!" Mom, of course, looks at the snowman and doesn't see that they're dressed similarly... no, she looks at the snowman and sees that it's nice and rounded, so *obviously* her daughter meant that she was a bloated caricature of a person. I should point out that the actress playing mom is not even slightly overweight... at least not in this universe. She's actually quite thin. And yet the commercial then goes on to push Special K as a solution for quickly losing all that gross extra weight she so obviously has. o_O
Yoplait has a series of commercials with pretty much the same issue... with stick thin women lamenting their weight and extolling the virtues of Yoplait light yogurt in their plans to lose all that excess weight they don't have. And don't even get me started on Lean Cuisine, showing an office filled with spectrally thin women lamenting their need to diet and excoriating another equally thin co-worker because she doesn't appear to be dieting with them.
Grrrr.
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But that's how these groups succeed. They find the weak point in many a woman's armour and stick a needle in it.
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It's the same - and yet, the opposite - reasoning behind the ED and hair-loss commercials that show guys who are way too long to be suffering from ED and hair-loss needing the products being sold. Old, fat, impotent bald guys suddenly don't feel so bad that THEY need the product, because so does that good-looking chick magnet in the commercial!
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Wife has a bowl, a BIG bowl mind you, of cheerios. She asks her husband "What are you doing?" Husband has all sorts of tools a plans to work on home improvement projects. He's got a six month plan.
"What are YOU doing?" asks the husband.
"I'm lowering my cholesterol."
The next few shots are of the husband working hard, if not somewhat clumsily, while the wife, with the ever present BIG bowl of Cheerios, STUFFS HER FACE! EATING! ALWAYS EATING! Why isn't this a "You're eating too much" commercial?
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The woman isn't fat and the little girl should have been chastised instead. But again oh those stupid womanzes are being sensitive again.
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I mean, I watch TV shows—on DVD and on the internet—but I haven't actually seen a TV commercial since, like, 2006. I do not miss them!
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This also reminds me of a category of film that I loathe: The ugly girl who becomes beautiful when she has her hair done and eyebrows plucked. They always have some looker playing the "ugly girl," and the actress just dresses in dowdy clothes and has an unflattering hairdo. The role is never played by a girl who is not that classically attractive, but who learns to have confidence in herself.
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I suppose they have to lie because if there's one thing cereal isn't, it's skinny-making.
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Mutta.
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It still has HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP in it! Most of the General Mills cereals have either reduced or gotten rid of HFSP, but not this so-called "healthy weight loss" cereal. I haven't touched a bowl in years, and I still manage to lose weight..
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(Chemically it really is just sugar, and like any other sugar it can make you gain weight if you eat too much of it. The thing about the Special K diet is that it "works" if you use their portion sizes..which reduces calories, which makes you lose. I think it's just people can more easily control cereal portions.)
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No wonder we have a world filled with people who have no sense of a healthy body and have many eating disorders!
Kathleen