We humans are a sucker for a journey. The tears I’ve shed watching a rural teenager get over the death of her grandmother through the healing properties of singing Whitney to Simon Cowell. The number of warm summer evenings I’ve lost because I had to wait through two ad breaks to find out what this ex-teacher from Ottowa looked like after she’d got rid of her baby weight; her baby now a teenager, the weight to lose that of a fully dressed four-year-old. A beginning: fat. A middle: hard work, a little crisis. An end: thin.
But, this week, Weight Watchers is acknowledging that, while this story is satisfying for the armchair viewer, it is not realistic. Not for the thousands of people for whom the journey of weight loss looks less like a simple car ride and more like a kind of nightmarish Interrailing experiment where your wallet is nicked by a one night stand you were falling in love with and your bag gets lost at the airport, containing your contact lenses and inhaler, and then suddenly the island you came from goes missing in a storm. Weight Watchers is scrapping its “before and after” photographs, the ones that show the transformation of their members Benjamin Button-ed, growing down, from big to little.
“We’re not going to discourage a member who wants to show where they are today versus where they started,” a spokesperson explained, “but when they’re talking about their journey, we want to celebrate all their moments. As a brand, we want to be your partner no matter at what point you are.”
Source:
theguardian
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