I absolutely LOVE this t-shirt for working out.
It’s a t-shirt for a personal trainer in Canada by the name of Roland Semprie. The shirt has markings along the front indicating when your workout is done. When the sweat reaches the appropriate mark, then you can stop working out.
I wish I could buy some t-shirts like this. They’re a great idea!
Via: » Roland Semprie Personal Trainer advertising/design goodness – advertising and design blog
Long before Healthy Choice and Jenny Craig, Mott’s provided these three course, 300 calorie meals. You can see the ad here:
It reads:
Eat 3-course, 300-calorie meals of “forbidden food” and lose up to 5 pounds a week.
Be sleek and slinky. Buckle into a beautiful new beltline. Eat Mott’s Figure Control Meals. They make every other diet seem strictly from hunger.
You eat meals of “forbidden food” like beef stew. Casseroles. Chicken a la king. Appetizer and dessert, as well. Three wickedly wonderful courses. Yet each meal is less than 300 calories!
Why feel starved when you can eat meals that are a pound and a half of deliciousness? Why be bored when you can choose from seven different meals?
Mott’s lowers the calories in 48 other Figure Control Foods, too. Foods you can buy separately, like breakfast drinks. Salad dressings. Pancake syrup. Fruits. Mott’s famous no-calorie sweetener. All are high in satisfying flavor – low in fattening calories.
Take off weight this wicked new way. Lose up to 5 pounds a week. Just fix a delicious, convenient Mott’s Figure Control Meal for lunch and dinner. Slim breakfast down to 300 calories with Mott’s Figure Control Foods. It’s great to be a loser with Mott’s!
I’ve found in the world of processed food, you can only have two out of these three options: low in calories, large serving size or tastes good. If something is low in calories and tastes good, then it MUST be a small serving. If something is a large serving and tastes good, then it MUST be high in calories. If something is low in calories and a large serving, then it MUST taste like cardboard.
Mott’s brags about their Figure Control Foods being low in calories and “a pound and a half of deliciousness.” I know that all three are impossible, so what was it? Were they really delicious? Were they really low in calories? Were they really a large serving? I never got to try them, so I’ll never know, but I suspect that they might have been exaggerating the “deliciousness” of their three course meals.
I saw this vintage ad and it confused me.
It reads:
Loungewear for Losers
Here’s the wingingest look in Hostess Gowns for the woman who’s losing weight. The colorful skirts is light in weight because it’s 100% acetate satin quilted to fluffy Kodel polyester fiberfill. Sizes 38 to 44 $20
Also in black/orange. And note this: this Hostess Gown also comes in sizes 8-18, which should gie you something to aim at. $18
This “gown” looked like a robe to me. Was this something that people wore in public or was it for sleep? Fortunately, Xtabay Vintage explained it to me.
Back in the day, a hostess gown was a long dress the lady of the house would wear when she entertained. The dress only left the house to go to the cleaners, otherwise it was paired with silver mules or some other cross between a slipper and a sandal. In summer, the hostess gown might be made of cotton barkcloth with a Polynesian design custom made for Mai Tais on the patio. In the early 1960s, Vogue magazine even suggested having hostess gowns made to match your living room curtains and upholstery.
The hostess gown had many advantages. First, it was usually cut loose so that you wouldn’t have to wear a girdle. Many of the gowns had comfortable empire waists. It was fancy and informal at the same time, so it let guests know that this was an occasion, yet they could feel comfortable in your home. Hostess gowns briefly morphed into maxi dresses in the early 1970s, but they quickly fell out of fashion to be replaced first with Carol Brady outfits.
So, this wasn’t a robe, it was an informal dress that you wore when company came. I like that they made it in all sizes from 8-44, but the thought of wearing something so very quilted just makes me cringe. I think I’ll stick to my blue jeans and sweaters instead.
New York is trying to help their residents be healthier by launching a “Don’t Drink Yourself Fat” campaign. They talk about it here:
Here is the commercial they have talking about the dangers of sugary sodas. Warning, it’s kind of gross.
It says:
Drinking one can of soda a day can make you 10 pounds fatter a year.
Don’t drink yourself fat. Cut out soda and other sugary beverages. Go with water, seltzer or low fat milk instead.
It’s true that sugary sodas can pack on the pounds, but quitting them isn’t just as simple as switching to water. Many sodas have caffeine, which is a powerful drug that will kick you in the gut if you go off it cold turkey. Sensitivity to caffeine withdrawal is different for each person, but there are tried and true ways to stop drinking soda and minimize the symptoms. I wrote an article about it here:
If you are ready to stop drinking yourself fat, give yourself a few days to muscle past the caffeine withdrawal. Once you’re past them, you’ll be free to substitute water or seltzer for your soda.
This ad for Tab soda reminded me of my childhood:
It reads:
1 Crazy Calorie
Unsticky. Unstuffy. Uninhibited. The Now Taste of Tab. Not so sweet. With 1 crazy calorie in 6 ounces. It’s what’s helping so many people keep slim and trim. Tab. That’s what happening. To the nicest shapes around.
There isn’t actually any medical proof that diet sodas keep people “slim and trim.” In fact, there is some evidence that says that overuse of artificial sweeteners actually makes things worse.
I am conflicted when it comes to diet soda. For me, it’s a great way to get a little caffeine and satisfy my sweet tooth. There is all that research saying diet sodas are bad for me, though, so I feel like I SHOULDN’T drink it. I enjoy them, but I feel guilty about them. I’m sure a lot of us are dealing with food guilt for any number of things.
I’m sick of feeling guilty about food that I eat. No matter how healthy I eat, there is always some vegan raw food puritan out there telling me ANOTHER thing that I shouldn’t eat. I keep thinking that if I were thin that they would shut up about what I eat, but I have a feeling that even that wouldn’t stop them.
I think I’ll go find a Tab…
A while ago, I wrote an entry called Why Do Skinny People Hate Fat People? and the crux of my argument was that people DON’T hate fat people.
Then the comments began piling up:
As a firefighter, I am called upon almost daily to help lift obese people who have just got to low to the ground that they cannot get themselves up. No other reason except they are just to big to lift themselves. I tore out a rotator on one of these lifts, and had to have sugary to get it fixed.
I’m sorry, fat people are disgusting. Humans were not intended to carry so much weight on their bodies. It sickens me to see so many Americans defending their fatness and acting as if it is natural. As the firefighter mentioned earlier, they are stressing our healthcare system, costing us billions of dollars, and lowering the quality of life for millions of people.
I wouldn’t know, but I guess it’s the shame of being fat that causes fat people to make up so many excuses for their indulgent lifestyles and excessive critical mass. The reason why skinny, athletic, muscular people all hate fat people is because you constantly villainize every healthy group of individuals in a desperate attempt to justify your gluttonous lifestyle and resultant unattractive and unhealthy physique.
Funny how the fatty fat mc lardos on here feel it necessary to write an essay length discourse explaining how THEY are the ones who are truly happy and how healthy people are secretly miserable underneath their seemingly more happy and fulfilling lives.
Fat people disgust me. Like mentioned above, our bodies were not built to hold that much excess. People say I’m judgemental and stereotypical when it comes to stuff like this. And I am. I judge you because you are destroying your body; I stereotype you because every single fat person that walks the earth is too lazy to become healthy.
This is just a small sampling of the comments. That entry has MANY comments on this subject and I actually deleted a lot of the really rude ones. So, the verdict is out.
Skinny people DO hate fat people, but why?!
We can thank the 4th century monk, Evagrius Ponticus, for devising the Seven Deadly Sins and including gluttony on the list (kind of an easy choice for such a skinny guy). From that day, being overweight became an undesirable thing. There are people who are atheists who still staunchly believe that gluttony is a sin. THAT’S how ingrained this idea is in our collective unconscious.
Ironically, the idea that gluttony is a bad thing has some valid points. I wrote about it here:
There is an assumption that fat people are gluttonous. While overeating CAN contribute to obesity, that’s not necessarily the case.
I don’t know how the idea that fat people are lazy came about. Even scientific explanations to the causes of obesity link it to sedentary lifestyle. There is a strong correlation to the fact that if people exercise more, they lose weight, so people tend to assume that those who are overweight don’t exercise. This assumption is generalized into the idea that fat people are lazy. It’s not necessarily true, but that’s what people believe.
Many of the comments I received mentioned that fat people are a burden to society. The most notable was the firefighter complaining about lifting overweight people who have fallen, yet he probably never mentioned the aged who are in the same situation. Society says it’s alright to hate fat people, but not the elderly, so he doesn’t feel put upon by the old people who have fallen and can’t get up.
Others feel that fat people have more medical bills and burden society in that manner. Still others feel that just having to look at fat people is a burden. They say that fat people “cost us billions of dollars.”
As much as I don’t like to admit it, it’s hard to deny that severe obesity is kind of gross. It affects our disgust reaction on a guttural level. I hate to say it, but I have had that reaction to photographs of fat people, despite my belief in fat acceptance. After reading and deleting hundreds of comments saying just that, it was a shocking surprise to me that so many people have this response.
This might not be something that is in our control. The feeling of revulsion could be a response deep down in our genes telling us that mating with an overweight person would not produce healthy offspring. This idea has been argued by scientists, but no proof of it has been posited.
The hard truth, however, is that some people are disgusted by the obese.
The ones who won’t say these other things to your face will ALWAYS fall back on the fact that being overweight isn’t healthy. I know that it’s more difficult for me to climb stairs. I know that I don’t feel as well as I did when I was close to my goal weight. I cannot argue with these people. I don’t think being overweight is healthy, either.
The HONEST truth is, there are people out there who hate fat people. They HATE them. They write scathing comments extolling how MUCH they hate them. They list their reasons with poor grammar and atrocious spelling, but the truth of the matter is, they hate fat people.
These people are making decisions about you without even getting to know you. They might even be in positions of power over you. They could be your teachers, advisors, bosses or peers. They decide things about you just by looking at you.
Sometimes, whether you’re fat or thin can decide your success. This is a hard truth and I can’t make it any softer. With these people, you’ll have to work ten times harder to prove you’re not lazy. You can never have a sick day without being considered a burden to the group. You will never be considered a viable love interest.
You can’t change their minds. I believe in Fat Acceptance, but it’s not working. These people are vitriolic and adamant in their hate and sometimes they are in charge.
There are only two ways to deal with these kinds of people: cut them out of your life or lose weight. More importantly, you never know WHO these people are. Since they are only willing to say these horrible things when they are anonymous, it’s nearly impossible to know if a person who has significant control of your life is a person who HATES fat people.
I’ve never known a better reason to lose weight. They are out there, judging you and some of them control your destiny. Don’t give them an excuse to count you out.
I saw Disfigured a few months ago and it messed me up. It’s the story of a friendship between an obese woman, Lydia, and an anorexic woman, Darcy. They meet when Darcy attends a Fat Acceptance group only to encounter the kind of prejudice and rejection that overweight people receive every day. Lydia is the only one willing to give Darcy a chance at friendship and healing. Their friendship takes a strange turn, however, when Lydia asks Darcy for “anorexia lessons.”
You can see the trailer for Disfigured here:
Anyone who has ever wished they could get anorexia has thought about it. When Lydia asked Darcy for “anorexia lessons,” I sat there in awe of it. Yes! I had always wanted someone to teach me how to get anorexia. If I had to have an eating disorder, why couldn’t it be the popular one?
Lydia and Darcy’s experiment goes wrong, of course, because it’s a story about loving yourself at any size, but that isn’t what messed me up. What really screwed me up and set my healthy eating back for at least a month was Darcy’s view of the world.
There is a scene when Darcy is giving Lydia anorexia lessons. They are sitting in the park, watching girls walk by and Darcy is ruthlessly commenting on their bodies. Any little flaws, whether they be muffin tops or minor bulges, are pointed out and criticized by Darcy in order to get Lydia into the anorexic frame of mind.
This is how it is. This is blood sport.
It made me think that if I were to get to my goal weight, I might become one of those skinny people who hate fat people. I didn’t want to be that judgmental person that Darcy was and it took me a while to realize that I wouldn’t become that person, but I have to tell you there was a lot of bingeing before I got to that point.
It was a good movie and it had a great message, but it messed me up when I saw it.
If you haven’t picked up the December issue of O Magazine, I highly recommend it for ONE article. The article is called, “The Fat Fight” and it’s on page 205 and it chronicles the story of a mother, Robin, and her daughter, Jess.
Robin Marantz Henig starts the article, telling her side of the story. She was a health and fitness writer while her daughter was growing up. When Jess was nine months old, a stranger made an off-handed comment about Robin’s baby, which turned into Robin’s obsession with making her daughter thin and acceptable in her mind. From the beginning paragraph, when Robin describes her daughter belly-dancing, she just CAN’T stop herself from demeaning her.
She wore a costume of bright blue and a gold hip scarf with jiggling coins. Her midriff – also jiggling – was bare.
She goes on to pay lip service to the dance by calling it graceful, but I can tell that the “jiggling” belly was the first thing on her mind. From the tone of Robin’s side of the story, you might think that it was all a misunderstanding on her daughter’s side, but one paragraph shows that Robin is still trying to spare her daughter the “pain” of being fat.
When she was 16, Jess sat me down one night and told me she’d been bulimic for years.
That was a VERY brave thing for Jess to do. I never did tell my grandmother about my eating disorder spawned by her desperate attempts to spare me the pain of being fat.
My first thought was she couldn’t be [bulimic], or she wouldn’t be so fat.
When I read that I KNEW with a capital “K” that poor Jess had experienced all that I had, but unlike me, she didn’t have a mother to run home to who loved her just the way she was.
When I read Jess’ side of the story, however, I learned that it was MUCH worse.
When I was 6, my mother, a journalist, wrote an article for Woman’s Day called “Kids Get Fat Because They Eat Too Much… and Other Myths About Overweight Children.” Under the main bar was a sidebar about how she’d turned me from a slightly chubby 4-year-old into a slightly less chubby 6-year-old… by feeding me less.
Let’s be honest. It wasn’t by “feeding her less.” It was by STARVING her. Just like when my grandma fed me 600 calories a day, Robin was starving her daughter because some random woman had said, “I love fat babies,” when Jess was nine months old.
This was typical. When Mom wrote about children and health, I appeared in the role of Fat Kid Saved by Diet or Exercise.
Not only was Robin mistreating her child, she wrote about it regularly for women’s magazines. The kind of magazines that my grandma read. Not only did she starve her own daughter, she recommended the similar treatment of children all over the nation. Maybe even including me.
Somehow the two of them have mended their “fractious mother-daughter relationship,” but I have no sympathy or clemency for Robin. No matter how much she thinks she has changed and accepted her daughter for the way she is, there is monster lurking in there who will never be satisfied, even if Jess were to wither away to a wisp of herself.
Believe me, I know this because I was a wisp of myself when I was 17 years old and my grandparents never accepted me. In their minds, I ALWAYS needed to lose weight. Even as an adult, when I got down to a healthy weight for my height, my grandpa never mentioned anything about my weight loss. Instead, he recommended that I go to Weight Watchers like his friend had done.
There is no satisfying beasts like Robin and my grandparents. Sure, they love us, in their way. They think that the constant negative comments about our bodies will somehow spare us pain, never realizing that the only people causing us pain about our bodies are THEM.
If you have a person like this in your life, I doubt you will ever be able to have a civil conversation about weight. Even if you think you’ve made a breakthrough with them, like Jess and Robin, know that it’s just a truce, not a victory. You will have to find someone different for support with your health and fitness because you can never depend on them to be helpful without bringing up all that pain from the past.
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