I’ve never been one to believe or promote fad diets, diet pills, weight loss supplements or quick fixes. I certainly don’t believe in a certain body type or in exercising and eating well for the purpose of looking a certain way. I have always encourage being healthy, fit and strong, and feeling great through exercise and a balanced diet — all of which take time, work and dedication. I never promote goals such as a “bikini body”, “beach body” or “a flat belly in 4 weeks” or any of the other lies.
So even though I don’t agree with Protein World’s latest ad campaign and I think it’s great that woman are fighting back. I don’t understand what the fuss is about. That ad isn’t any different from all the lifestyle/health/women magazine and website headlines that we see every single day or from many of the ads that are printed in those magazines and popping-up on their websites. We see everything from diet pills, fat loss pills, anti-cellulite creams, boob growing creams, miracle detoxes, super diets to “three exercises that will lift your butt in 14 days”, “the workout that [insert celebrity name here] does to get her flat belly or long lean legs” to the products that [insert celebrity-trainer name here] sells to make you thin/burn fat/suppress appetite, yet no one really complains about those. It’s all the same, it’s everywhere and it has been for years and years. The same applies to super skinny models. Every few years someone complains about how models are skinny and don’t reflect how women really look… yet it doesn’t change.
Why? I don’t know but I’ll guess that it’s because it sells. That’s right. We, women, buy into it. We buy those magazines, we try the diets and the super foods and we buy the clothes the skinny models wear.
Most of us don’t want to buy the truth. I used to write a fitness blog for a lifestyle group. I would write about what I believe in: exercise, the truth about getting and staying fit and the importance of eating a well balanced diet. They liked changing my honest headlines to catchy “quick-fix” ones. Why? Because the quick-fixes and body-image headlines got the clicks. Unfortunately, for those readers, they didn’t find quick-fixes in my blog.
So what’s the fuss all about this time? You want to make a statement, you want to make a change, start with you — stop buying into all the other crap and all the other lies. Take proper care of your body and self and stop listening to commercial media.
Oh and one more thing, don’t go around promoting a brand or product you don’t believe in. Right now, thanks to all this fuss, they are the biggest, most-well known supplement company. All they did was pay for one ad campaign. Now they sit back as you transform it into a huge free PR campaign for them. Anyone who has ever taking marketing 101 will know that bad publicity is still publicity.
Let’s not forget to give praise to companies like Dove and retailers like Swimsuits For All and Navabi that have made their own spoofs of the Protein World ad to show their support toward all women. They do it because they care, right? No, they do it for their bottom line, to sell their products. I’m not saying that it’s not great that they are trying to send positive messages about body image, I’m just saying that, as with any profit-making company, they are in it for profit. So as much as you can argue that one company tries to make us feel bad about the way we look to sell us a product to make us look better, the other company is doing the same, they’re just taking a different route telling you look great and so that you will like them for it and then buy their products.
Rant over.