It’s not just reality TV that is obsessed with weight. If you watch enough daytime television, particularly on “women’s networks,” you are treated to an endless parade of commercials about weight-loss products and diet foods—means of disciplining the body that will also fatten the coffers of one corporation or another. These commercials drive me crazy. They encourage self-loathing. They tell us, most of us, that we aren’t good enough in our bodies as they are. They offer us the cruelest aspiration. In these commercials, women swoon at the possibility of satisfying their hunger with somewhat repulsive foods while also maintaining an appropriately slim figure. The joy women express over fat-free yogurt and 100-calorie snack packs is not to be believed. Every time I watch a yogurt commercial I think, My god, I want to be that happy. I really do.
It is a powerful lie to equate thinness with self-worth. Clearly, this lie is damn convincing because the weight-loss industry thrives. Women continue to try to bend themselves to societal will. Women continue to hunger. And so do I.
In one of her many commercials for Weight Watchers, Jessica Simpson smiles brightly and says, “I started losing weight right away. I started smiling right away.” In her commercials for Weight Watchers, Jennifer Hudson shrieks about her newfound happiness and how, through weight loss—not, say, winning an Oscar—she achieved success. These are just two of many weight-loss advertisements that equate happiness with thinness and, by the law of inverses, obesity with misery.
Valerie Bertinelli was a Jenny Craig spokeswoman who proudly showed off her “new body” in 2012. Though she lost forty pounds, she then gained some of that weight back. For that crime, her penance was to go on the talk show circuit, trying to fight fat shaming. She would, of course, eventually head back to the gym when her press tour was over. She wanted, according to ABC News, to be “back in bikini shape by summer.” Kirstie Alley also rejoined the Jenny Craig fold around that time. “Without a coach helping us along the way, I don’t think someone can make it for the long haul,” Alley said. The public weight-struggle spectacle is a popular fallback for once-famous women who yearn to recapture their former glory.
Women, for that is whom these ecstatic diet food commercials and celebrity weight-loss endorsements are for, can have it all when they eat the right foods and follow the right diets and pay the right price.
What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?