SCIENCE: Diet Commercials Featuring Size 2 Women are Worse than Puberty

Sitting on my couch, eating large pieces of cake while I watch lifetime, I encounter any number of interesting commercials (including for Lifetime's new show "Drop Dead Diva," where a model is reincarnated in the body of a fat lawyer, and considers this cruel punishment...), but outside of the cleaning and/or your-children-and-husband-are-just-too-stupid-to live! varieties, I'd say none are more common than the dieting adverts.

Try Alli and eat what you want and maybe lose weight! Only 100 calories of oreos in this pack, to guarantee you're not bothered with pesky "learning about real nutrition," "actual nutritive value" or "satisfaction!" Sign up for Bally total fitness and start working out in rooms chock-full of models! Your self esteem will plummet so low you'll never be able to leave (or you'll continue to pay, but never come!)

The worst offender, though, is Special K. Why? Because every commercial they run, be it for their mid-day cracker packs, their blueberry breakfasts, or their 'don't take a single lick of the brownie-batter bowl with your child, be more rigid in your chocolate needs by refusing anything but Special K products all day long' classic, all these installments and more I'm not mentioning, feature models-as dieters.

I get it, you want to be aspirational. You want people to realize that the Special K diet can get results. You want pretty people on TV. But honestly, if a thin life is one where you never eat anything but corn-flakes, skim milk, and myriad products that, as they are low-calorie versions of actual food, cannot possibly be as good as Doritos, why aspire? When the "diet" you tout involves eating one serving of cereal (read: less than a cup for most Special K cereals, which means not enough to stop your stomach from growling) for not one but TWO of your daily meals, essentially constituting a starvation diet, how can you try to tell me that this is a HEALTHY lifestyle choice?

By all means, keep selling your products. And if you feel like it, keep using unrealistically slim models to do so. But when you do, put a disclaimer at the bottom: "the bowl of cereal our spokesperson is consuming is the only thing our spokesperson will consume all day in order to maintain her 'goal weight.'"

Or else just team up with Alli so that we can all eat a reasonable amount of Special K and still lose weight!

-Posted by Jilly