(Note: I’ve been off on holiday, so if you made a comment and it didn’t show up, I’m still sorting through the anti-spam-o-matic. Sorry!)
Did Weight Watchers not make their sales targets this year? Because this article in The Age, Overweight women ‘surrender to obesity’, reads like a lightly re-worded press release from an angry and frantic general manager.
Apparently, according to a poll conducted on behalf of Weight Watchers, 35% of women who describe themselves as ‘overweight’ have not tried to lose weight in the past 12 months. The audacity! The incredulousness! The very nerve of those women!
According to the WW Australia general manager, us fat ladies are ‘apathetic’ and ‘in denial’ about our weight problem. Somehow she also thinks it is political correctness gone mad that people might say ‘obese’ instead of ‘fat’. What-EVER. Seriously, does anyone actually know anyone who describes themselves as ‘obese’ because they can’t bring themselves to say ‘fat’? The fat women I’ve known who were not into size acceptance all seemed to use ‘fat’, ‘heavy’, ‘overweight’, ‘large’, and the three billion other euphemisms for fat including ‘fluffy’, which makes me gag on my baby-flavoured doughnuts.
People are ‘starting to think being overweight is normal and therefore acceptable and not something they need be concerned about’. Really? Really and for truly? This is news to every fat person in the damn country, assaulted daily with news reports on how fat will kill you and commercials from diet companies (results not typical), and comments from everyone from their doctor to strangers in the street on exactly what a fat bitch they are.
Ooh, and The Biggest Loser makes people ‘complacent’ because they’re not as fat as the fatties (hand-selected for low self-esteem) on the TV. But “Australia has to face up to the truth, we’re one of the fattest nations in the world”!!!!!!!OMG!!!!!
IN WHAT REALITY DOES THIS WOMAN LIVE? I suspect the one where Weight Watchers isn’t a diet, it’s a “lifestyle change” omg really it’s not a diet please please please buy our points plans and our crappy processed food! The kind of reality where fatties routinely sneak cough drops to sabotage their WW goals. The kind of reality where you can get in the national papers for having a product with a very, very high failure rate* and the “journalist” doesn’t question your blatantly obvious motives.
Sweet Zombie Jesus!
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* There’s a study recently published in the British Journal of Nutrition, I believe, where researchers asked about 600 of WW’s most successful dieters – their star lifetime members – about their weight loss maintenance. At 5 years, only 16.2% of these star dieters had maintained their goal weight. We’re talking those women who’ve made it their life’s work to stay thin. Only 50% of the other weight loss heroes (and heroes really is how they’re presented by WW) had managed to maintain a 5% weight loss. Also, these “successful” dieters were not the formerly very fat people often featured in the before-and-afters, the mean BMI was 27.5, with a +/- of 3.2, IIRC. (I can’t access the actual article from here, sorry.) So, while officially “overweight” to “mildly obese”, these people were what most people outside Hollywood/fashion would deem “normal” to “a bit chubby”, as illustrated by the Shapely Prose BMI Project. I think it’s Weight Watchers that’s in serious denial, myself.
