Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Furious with the media

I would like to address something that disturbs me about  about exercise photo's and weight loss videos. I am an avid Hulu watcher, so obviously I get the breaks that show whatever commercial is sponsoring the viewing of the TV show. The commercial that constantly pops up, and never ceases to infuriate me, is the Weight Watcher commercial that uses a child's "dream" to be a princess or astronaut as an introduction to the possibility that you too can conquer your "dream" of loosing weight. The commercial then goes on to show woman who are 100% healthy as people who are either on, or need to start getting on Weight Watchers. What truly aggravates me is that the people shown in it are thin, and that kids are used as weight loss dreamspiration. I have never been a Weight Watchers fan, I hate that Jennifer Hudson caved in and became a Hollywood stereotype by joining their program. But this commercial pushed my annoyance with the brand over the edge into hatred. If people insist on making weight loss commercials, use real people who are actually in need of loosing weight. Don't make healthy people feel inadequate by suggesting that the thin actors in the commercials also need to loose weight. And on a side note, I posted this video on my Facebook saying kids should not be used in a commercial for weight loss, and one of my friends claimed that it was because childhood obesity is on the rise. The children used were the perfect picture of beautiful thin children. It had nothing to do with obesity, it was just sick.
Here is the link to the commercial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fES3xqbUwp4

I was surfing Pinterest today, and stumbled upon a disturbing exercise pin under the Beauty category. Normally I just ignore exercise pins because I am rather lazy and don't ever like the exercises elaborated on. HOWEVER, it was the image that disturbed me and prompted me to follow the link. The image had a circled the area under a model's (whose bones I could visibly see bellybutton and captioned it saying "end lower belly pooch"(see the <---picture here). Following the link I found yet another picture of a skinny, thin beautiful model with a flat stomach, the same spot being circled and labeled as pooch. It was on a blog, and it did claim the models were thin, but that they had "pooch". A. they have no fat what so ever. B. What most people refer to as pooch, is just skin. Stomach aren't meant to be totally flat, or concave. If they were, they wouldn't be called stomachs. And food wouldn't be going into them. I read the article and was generally furious. If those models in the pictures have "pooch" then I am obese. Why can't exercise pictures ever be of real people?

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