Marketing 101
[caption id="attachment_353" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Look at her eat. No wonder she's fat!"][/caption]The magazine at left, Good Housekeeping, was from June 2008, and on the front cover they show a picture of a fairly thin woman with the headline "Walk off the pounds!" Fairly standard for women's magazines, right? I thought so too, and rolled my eyes and skimmed through the magazine. It wasn't until later when I tossed the magazine in the recycling that I saw that the woman in the inset picture was eating. Yes, let's contribute to the idea fat people eat all the time. That's just great. There couldn't possibly be any other reason for someone to be fat besides eating all the time. That was sarcasm, by the way.
I understand that magazines and advertisers twist images and ideas to make us buy certain products. It drives me crazy, though, that they can't show an overweight woman doing something besides eating. You'll see this in magazines and movies all the time: the fat person is usually eating, and that's their whole personality. They're not funny or sassy or sexy or happy -- all they do is eat. If you eat too, you'll also get fat!
I was surprised to find an article about intuitive eating within the magazine itself. (If you don't know, intuitive eating is listening to your body and letting it have what it wants instead of eating because you can or not eating because you're trying to lose weight. If you feel like eating a whole head of broccoli, then eat a whole head of broccoli. If your body says you need an entire bag of Hershey's kisses, go for it. Once your body realizes you're allowing it to go to whatever extremes it wants, it won't crave extremes anymore. Revolutionary.) The author of the article says right away that diets don't work, and gives her professional credentials, which were enough for me to believe her, even if I didn't already know that . Why isn't that breaking news?
No, seriously. Why isn't the fact that diets don't work on the front cover of the magazine? That would make for an amazing edition. I would buy that. I don't buy magazines if I can help it (I got this one from a friend), but I would pay good money to read an article in a prominent women's magazine about how diets don't work. But then I guess I'd never read a magazine again, because if I knew diets didn't work, then why would I pay to read about Sarah Bell, who walked off 120 pounds? I wouldn't. What's the point? Diets don't work.
Let's see a magazine that shows me information about living healthy and being happy. Because I'm not seeing that here. Any magazine that advertises the easiest weight loss plan EVAR!! is not trying to make you happy; they want you to buy something. Thanks a lot, marketing team, for caring more about selling your product than the health of your readers. Now that's a surefire way to make friends.
