Maybe the skinny models weren't so bad...

I attended an interesting presentation a week or 2 back by a personal trainer. Some of his clients have been fitness models and he talked about how these models have to train and then basically dehydrate themselves and do other things for photo shoots to get their bodies looking a certain way. The bottom line is that it isn't very healthy and it has given society a distorted view on what a healthy person looks like.

I think the tide may be turning though, and personally I don't like were it's heading...

Case #1 - There was an ad on TV a couple of months back that first got me thinking about this. Ad starts focused on a guy on a lazy boy, and he's surrounded by his family. The guy is huge, and not big, just obscenely fat. From his 2 or three chins, down to the rolls spilling over the sides of the chair and the bowl of potato chips perched on his huge gut. He's watching TV and talking about how hard life gets when his signal goes out. At this point, you may be thinking that this could be one of those ads that encourages you to get more active, to break away from the TV and get some fresh air... That was what I was thinking, but man was I wrong. As the camera pans back from the guy and his about as disgusting family, he yells something about moving an antenna, and then you see a guy on the roof moving their TV antenna. The ad isn't about any kind of activity, it's about a car dealership that goes above an beyond. In this guys case, even getting on the roof to move fat, lazy ass, disgusting humanoids antenna so he can watch more TV.

Case #2 - The new dish network ad... I like Frank Caliendo, but seeing the same ad over an over again was getting annoying... But then they started a new one. It appears to be fairly low budget, just a head shot of a lady talking. The lady is well spoken, and not exactly a beauty queen, but maybe if she lost a couple of hundred pounds she'd look quite decent. Some people have double chins... She has a huge flap that comes out below her face and seems to form a frame around it. I could almost describe it as something like the large flaps on Orangutans faces, but I would prefer that those remain the trade mark of those big apes. She's talking about how with the new DVR she can watch more programs.

What has happened to our civilization? We go from having a problem with models promoting an unhealthy level of weightloss, to the other extreme where the morbidly obese are promoting the ultimate in laziness? Give up America, just continue to grow fatter and fatter. Now that's a message everyone can embrace - just don't try and get your hand to meet on the other side...

I know there are problems with the perceptions people have with the skinny fitness models, but everytime I see a picture of a guy with ripped abs, I get motivated to do more. I know I'll never look like that, but I'd much prefer being headed in that direction.