Stupid "dieting" commercials
Jan. 18th, 2009 02:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fenchurchI 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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Date: 2009-01-21 07:09 pm (UTC)(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.)