Buy Walking VideosFrom Flab to Fab
My cat likes to sit on paper. If she were in an empty room and one sheet of paper was lying on the floor, my cat would be sitting on it. That’s about the best use I can think of for this week’s US Weekly.
The headline reads, “20 Best Body Makeovers: How top stars went from flab to fab!†Referring to any one of those twenty women with the adjective “flab†is a travesty. Even when Oprah Winfrey and Queen Latifah were at their heaviest, they were fabulous. I sat there looking at all the before pictures thinking, “If that is flab? How could I ever measure up?â€
Margaret Cho said that when she looks at the pictures of women in fashion magazines wearing things that she could barely fit on her finger, she thinks, “If that’s what being a woman is all about, I must not be one.†I understand how she feels. Sometimes I feel so disconnected from the media’s perception of female beauty. Magazines like this week’s US Weekly just make me want to pound someone into a bloody pulp.
It’s such a contrast from the January article about the same issue. The Sexy Diet Secrets that turned out to be eat less and exercise more was so down to earth. This week’s article calls twenty beautiful and stunning women flabby and then touts “losing baby fat†as fabulous.
They did provide one tip per woman on how they lost the weight. These tips amounted to the same story of eating less and moving more, but the focus of the article was the before and after pictures. It was as if some catty girl’s club sat down and looked at all the pictures. “Look at her thighs. She was FAT. I can’t believe she went out in public looking like that!†When all I can see is one fabulous before picture after another.
Worst of all, there wasn’t one man on the list. What about Billy Bob Thornton? That boy looked like he was on death’s door when he first met Angelina Jolie and by the time she was finished with him, he was toned up and looking hot. What about the lead singer of The Goo Goo Dolls, Johnny Rzeznik? After pressure from his record label, he dropped weight and came back lean. There is not one mention of Tom Hanks’ multiple dances with weight loss for movie roles. What about Matt LeBlanc? He starved himself on The Zone diet to keep Joey’s character slim and sexy. Sure he was fabulous before, but so was Beyonce.
Don’t waste your money on this week’s US Weekly.
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March 12th, 2005 at 11:53 am
I couldn’t agree more. As a fellow journalist I see your point. Who in there right mind would purchase a magazine which makes people feel so bad about themselves? Guess what… I did. I was standing in our local supermarket the other night about to check out and looked over and saw the cover and decided that I had to see what points they could possibly make about these girls and their weight loss. Honestly any person with any exercise knowledge could tell you that working out and a healthy diet is all you need. Not any of these stupid hyped diets that sure make you lose the weight, but aren’t necessarily the most healthy way of going about it. Hopefully all the women or even men for that matter didn’t read into any of the crap that was written in the article. For those who wrote the article I hope at night they go home and really think about their journalistic integrity, with which they seem to have forgotten, and about how what they put into our mass mediums does to peoples attitudes regarding themselves. Shame on you!