This ain't a tune up, it's a goddamn racket

This actually started as a reaction to a bullshit Yoplait ad I saw while watching TV online - something about how low-fat yogurt, cereal, and a fruit are acceptable for 2 meals a day. And then I started calculating calorie counts and then I realized that this is not what I do best.

Because I don't feel like I have to break down how few calories that suggested "2 week tune up" is. It's fucked. It's a horrible, insidious suggestion that reentreches how women's bodies are WRONG WRONG WRONG. Because this ad isn't oriented at men - though I'll acknowledge this might mess up some men at the same time - it is beyond a doubt aimed at women. Because we're wrong. We need a "tune up" that consists of too few calories combined with exercise. We need a bunch of other shit like fake eyelashes, 30 day "shred" plans, videotapes, DVDs, blahblahblah.

All of our lives are devoted to this wrongness.

Of course I believe in health. Of course I think it matters. But there is not a single goddamn thing about starvation-style diets combined with exercise with a goal of losing weight that will almost certainly come back immediately. Not to mention that the whole connection of a SPECIFIC BRAND of low-fat yogurt (as if it has the magical formula to make you look hot at your high school reunion, as suggested in the ad I saw) isn't some gross consumerist crap that just makes us believe that we can buy the happiness that will make up for us being WRONG.

And I'm just so tired of wrongness. Tired of all of these plans, deals, videos, weekends away, diets, shreds, fucked up rules. I'm tired of being wrong. I no longer have the energy to pretend that any of it works (hint: long term, it doesn't), to pretend that I believe that it matters. I'm tired of accepting that I'm wrong.

Because maybe a world that tells me who I am is wrong is wrong.

Is it time yet?

“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail