02/10/00 -- Appetite suppressant commercials make me sick

I hate those commercials for appetite suppressants.   They piss me off and make me want to throw something at the TV.  The women in these commercials are beautiful.  Even with ten more pounds on them, they'd be gorgeous.  And it's commercials like these that make women self-conscious and uncertain about themselves, make them wonder Am I too fat?  They just tweaks me, bigtime.

There's one of these weight loss commercials where some woman who looks like her clothes have been padded to make her look bigger (it certainly doesn't look natural) with a chicken bone in one hand bemoaning that she's gained fifteen pounds.   And then, in the same commercial, a woman who looks like a twig is smoking a cigarette complaining that if she quits smoking, she'll gain weight.  I get pissed off every time I see it.  Gaining fifteen pounds isn't going to be the difference between life and death for most women.  And if there's an emotional reason behind that weight gain, then taking appetite suppressants isn't going to help because once you stop, you're just going to gain it back if you haven't taken care of the emotional issues.

If it's just because you've changed your lifestyle, then, again, you can take those things for as long as you want and it's not going to help once you stop.

And most women don't need an appetite suppressant.   They need to find a way to become comfortable with themselves.  TV ads aren't helping.  Magazine ads aren't helping.  There was an ad campaign at Lane Bryant (a store that sells larger-size women's clothes) that was something along the lines of Beauty knows no size.  And all of the models in the pictures were thin.  Okay, maybe they were taller than the women in ads in stores like Express and The Limited, but they weren't any bigger.  What kind of screwed up message does that convey?

The same kind of screwed up message that's conveyed by those stupid appetite suppressant commercials where tiny little women complain about gaining eight pounds and needing to take a pill so they can cut down on the amount of food they eat and lose those eight pounds.

It's all of that combined with all of the images that women are bombarded with as children that give women an inability to deal with their bodies, an inability to feel attractive if they don't look like the taped-up, air-brushed, digitized models in magazines and on television.  Natural isn't acceptable anymore.   Everyone has to have a Barbie-perfect body, even though Barbie is unnaturally proportioned.  Everyone has to have a tiny little waist and big breasts and if they don't, then they're fat... they're ugly.

I just get pissed off watching those commercials reinforce the problems that are already there.