Manipulative Weight Loss Seminars Exposed

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Category: Culture and Media

Weight loss seminars sell dreams: Pretty promises packaged in fast, easy to use vials, bottles and boxes, wrapped in colorful celophane and offering quick weight loss and a life of friendship, career advancement, love and romance. Eat, drink, massage and vibrate your way to slim beauty. Please be aware and recognize the shiny magic lantern that promises to grant your wishes but delivers dissipating smoke.

I went to an all day seminar designed to help people lose weight at a very fancy hotel in the Los Angeles area today.  I didn't stay long.  So sad.  The attendees were mostly fat, frightened women.  The speakers, in my opinion, were using the platform to sell product and offer fast and easy solutions to the attendees who would spend money.

The many display tables were really little stores - with lots of chocolate and sweet edibles, mysterious 2000 year old cures to nibble on and high tech expensive water that does supposedly does magical things to your body to help you lose weight.

Women were buying - eagerly with worried faces.

What a formula!  Attract women who feel badly about their bodies and hope for a fast simple answer that will give them beauty and freedom from their problems.  Charge them to come to a many starred hotel that intimidates them. Dress like a TV commercial model. Act as if losing weight and getting the body they want is easy.  Hold up lots of products.  Explain in medical language, peppered with fact and varnished with hard sell, how the products help a body lose weight easily and fast.

Give them lots of food on the break.  All "legal" food. They can eat those sweet and enticing edibles with relief because the treats are part of a weight loss program. Plus they need to eat because they are so anxious and intimidated. 

Then talk to them with a face full of personal concern. The lovelies from on high offer their attention and care to these insecure women.

End point:  a lot of money changes hands.

A young man in a white turben tried to sell me a 2000 year old food that supposedly cured just about everything and made people beautiful.  He actually took out an open plastic package, reached in with his bare hand and offered me some of the grainy chunks.

He looked startled when I refused to eat strange food that was laying in a bare hand that had been who knows where touching who knows what.

I left and walked by the beach for a while, I think for soul cleansing.

I saw an overweight woman, smiling and walking briskly with her two dogs.  I felt better and wished the women at that seminar were with us, walking briskly under the trees on this lovely day in the park overlooking the sea.

Put down the magic lantern. You can honor your wishes for a healthier body, more attractive appearance and better life by discovering the genuine and effective effort necessary to make your wishes come true. 

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0 # Wow, I have never thought about it that — Jakki 2009-12-18 17:36

Wow, I have never thought about it that way. All of those scared people being taken advantage of.

Not to mention that when they get home and the diet eventually fails because it's not addressing any real issues, we feel even worse about ourselves because we couldn't even do something that was supposedly so easy and fool proof

0 # Hi Jakki, Yes, we humans can become s — pinkjoanna 2009-12-18 18:11

Hi Jakki,

Yes, we humans can become so overwhelmed by our feelings that we lose the ability to see our situation from a larger perspective.

We can be in such pain that our thinking is limited. In that state of vulnerability we may reach out to grab a quick and easy pain reliever an attractive person offers us.

Isn't that what television ads attempt to do?

We need to move beyond feeling and believing that our only hope rests in a product someone offers us. Our hope really rests with our ability to grow, heal, think and make clear evaluations of what is going on around us.

Sometimes a simple answser is the right one. For example, we might have an allergy. When we stop exposing ourselves to the allergen we feel better.

Sometimes a simple answer is not so simple: like telling an alcoholic to stop drinking or a b inge eater to stop bingeing.

With just about any form of eating disorder, the key to recovery and weight loss or gain is developing the strength and health to tolerate our feelings and be able to think clearly about realistic solutions to problems.

To achieve that we must do some internal work on ourselves with as much healthy support as we can rally in our lives.

I can't think of anything that is easy and fool proof. Can you?

Thank you for writing!

warm regards,

Joanna

0 # The only thing I can think of that is fo — Sandy Phillips 2011-01-10 21:00

The only thing I can think of that is fool proof is being our authentic self . Not easy takes work but it will be ever lasting.

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