“Knocking off excess winter weight is never easy. We sweat, we starve and still that hot, Halle Berry beach bod eludes us all. Never mind! The route from flab to fab may not be laden with cheesecake. But the pound-whittling strategies found in these hot diet plans could make your bikini bod the envy of the beach in 2008. Consult with your doctor before you start any diet. Then let the fat wars begin!”
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Hold up! Did she really just say “let the fat wars begin?” Does anyone else see something wrong with that?! And what if I don’t want to look like Halle Berry?! And does it ever occur to us that the reason we are sweating and starving and yet still don’t have Halle Berry’s body is because we weren’t meant to have her body?! We were meant to have our own body? And what’s with promoting body envy and jealousy? Is that just the total norm now? At least she encourages us to consult a professional before we start a crazy diet (although the professional will probably just measure your “BMI” and if you are anything over a 25, encourage you to go for it, cause you could stand to lose a few pounds)!
Let’s take a few moments to analyze the promises of each diet:
1) The 5-Factor Diet: Lose weight fast and suppress your appetite.
2) The Best Life Diet: Life style change over dieting will help you slim down and look like the celebrities.
3) The French Diet Why French Women Don’t get Fat: Combine foods in a way that promotes “fat loss” despite “hormonal imbalances.”
4) The Volumentrics Eating Plan: Eat “high density” foods sparingly and lose weight.
5) The South Beach Diet: Drops “stubborn belly fat first,” (not quite sure what that means).
6) The Zone Diet: A “waist-whittling” plan that helps you have the “hot bods” of Jennifer Aniston and/or Brad Pitt.
The language that articles like this one use pose a real problem for us. When will we stop falling for these “diets” and stop centering our lives around trying to fit back into the same size jeans that Jennifer Aniston wears? I think as soon as we stop falling for this nonsense, the sooner they will stop writing it!
The “fat wars” are giving the 100-Years War of European history a run for its money. There is a media and cultural war on fat, and the casualties are numerous. Women and men are literally dying to be thin.
This is why it is so important to expose the underlying bias in media messages and to give us (and by that I mean all consumers of media) a chance to at least defend ourselves from the onslaught.
I hate diets! They are so ridiculous and make us feel so bad about ourselves when we can’t stick to them. As Benjamin Franklin said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”