Comments on: The Cultural Contradictions of Jenny Craig http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/08/mixed_messages.html The Law, the Universe, and Everything Tue, 14 Feb 2012 05:18:12 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: A reader http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/08/mixed_messages.html/comment-page-1#comment-47703 A reader Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:26:17 +0000 http://www.solove.org/archives/2008/08/the-cultural-contradictions-of-jenny-craig.html#comment-47703 <i>"Mostly the visuals feed complacency; as overweight as a viewer may feel, he or she surely will never fall this far into the potato chip abyss. And if the morbidly obese people on screen can drop 100 pounds, then even the chubbiest kid on the couch can fit into a swimsuit by summer."</i> This seems like a bizarre and contradictory statement. Why would watching people on TV engage in extreme weight loss dieting make people complacent about their ability to lose weight? It's not like the people on the Biggest Loser are shown losing weight by watching TV. Weird article. Of course, what IS problematic about those shows is that interviews with the contestants after the fact show that a lot of the participants were actually engaging in eating disordered behavior during the competition. Now THAT gives people an unrealistic view of weight loss. “Mostly the visuals feed complacency; as overweight as a viewer may feel, he or she surely will never fall this far into the potato chip abyss. And if the morbidly obese people on screen can drop 100 pounds, then even the chubbiest kid on the couch can fit into a swimsuit by summer.”

This seems like a bizarre and contradictory statement. Why would watching people on TV engage in extreme weight loss dieting make people complacent about their ability to lose weight? It’s not like the people on the Biggest Loser are shown losing weight by watching TV. Weird article.

Of course, what IS problematic about those shows is that interviews with the contestants after the fact show that a lot of the participants were actually engaging in eating disordered behavior during the competition. Now THAT gives people an unrealistic view of weight loss.

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