And YOU get a FREE Weight Watchers membership, and YOU get a…Um, NEVERMIND

Nope….

SORRY, NO free Weight Watchers membership for YOU,  with Oprah Winfrey, who’s now a 10% owner of Weight Watchers.

INSTEAD, you get a scoop of soulful prose that if you pay close attention to what she’s implying, is that woman’s power, is about her body , ONLY if it’s at a weight that considered acceptable i.e thin and fit, in our weight and fat obsessed  society and in our  beauty.

And the only way for a woman to get her power back, is to join her on her journey to being powerful by joining Weight Watchers.

I’ve made brief mentions of Oprah before in my blog about the fighting I do with myself, because while  I admire her enormously, I have from the very start, in the late 1980’s, when I’d have a chance to catch her show. She was primarily responsible for my getting A’s in my college Speech class in the early 1990’s , because she had to put up with weight bias on top of everything else,and most of my speeches were either personal weight bias I experienced and/or other celebrities, Oprah being on top of the list. I didn’t just get an “A” in the class, I got a freaking “A” in EVERY speech.

Then seeing a woman, that against all the odds and adversity  because in so many ways she’s done an amazing amount of good while she became super successful,  with integrity and she’s done a lot of greater good with that success and the money she made. Or initially she did, when she started becoming uber successful.

She taught us, that despite gender, race and so many odds stacked against her,  people can rise above an enormous amount of adversity and achieve an enormous amount of success with hard work.

This is the ONLY problem that I have with Oprah. But it’s a HUGE problem that I have with her, if you’ll pardon the horrible pun. And I’m not the only body diversity activist to have this problem. She’s  made an enormous amount of money, in trying to sell weight loss.

I can understand the personal struggle with weight. But if the only takeaway  that some of us can get and she’s mostly responsible for that, is that no matter what any woman achieves, that she’s lessened in a major way due to what society and the media, considers a female body to be of excess weight, in the end that will denigrate any other accomplishment we/they/she  may have achieved, herself included.

It’s just all that influence she has. If Oprah Winfrey would say that she found by sniffing cow manure that it resulted as an appetite suppressant that led to weight loss and she was selling it, 10 million people would buy it,  for $29.99 plus s/h, it would sell out in 17 seconds and about 15 million people would be waiting impatiently, while it being on backorder.

I’m not anti-diet like most of my Size Acceptance/Fat Acceptance peers. I’m even supportive of weight loss surgery, which is really UNLIKE my SA/FA peers.

In my Certified Personal Training days, Weight Watchers would probably have been the only diet I would’ve endorsed. Even though I couldn’t stand the obsessiveness in their community when I would join Weight Watchers before I had my gastric bypass.

I did think it carried some credibility as a decent diet, compared to a lot of diets,  because it didn’t demonize any one food group.

But that was 11 years ago. I think their prepackaged food tastes like crap, and there is something  that I find off-putting about their approach to recruit and retain clients , both then and now.

While some of my  weight loss surgery /WLS peeps are militant with how they feel about their particular tool for weight loss, being the best and a lot of those in the WLS community are obsessive about their dietary intake, too, I couldn’t stay in the Weight Watchers community because it was demoralizing to get harped on for a small amount of weight loss or a 1/2 lb of weight gain.

The difference is, that the WLS community, you have to be at a higher weight to get a surgical intervention. Weight Watchers wants to profit on anyone who wants to lose weight, even if they aren’t overweight to begin with. I had a friend who was 5’8 and 140 and wanted to lose weight after going through a bad breakup, a few years ago. She didn’t need to lose 20 lbs, and it was difficult for her, to burn fat she didn’t have. That didn’t mean she wasn’t encouraged to see her goal through.

Thank goodness she ended up getting into therapy and quit Weight Watchers, right after that.

But while I’m regressing, this is the point I want to make. Oprah has an amazing amount of influence on people. To lump all people together saying that they are being brought down by their weight, not only is it NOT true, but for those who are insecure about their weight, doing this at the end of the year, while a brilliant marketing move on her part, it’s horrible from an integrity stand point, to make people feel that they are qualified by their weight., first and foremost.

Your body, your life, as far as if you feel  a need to lose weight and how you lose weight. But if your only takeaway of what defines  your success the most, can only be reflected on the scale, the size of your clothes and how thin and beautiful you look on social media, and Oprah endorses this kind of thinking, it’s not only infuriating, it’s a terribly sad reflection on our society. And on Oprah Winfrey, in my not so humble opinion.

Just saying…Your power  and value as a person  or in this case, as this is being marketing to and by a woman, doesn’t have ONE thing, to do with your weight and don’t let anyone make you think otherwise.

Even if it’s one of the most powerful women, if not people on the planet, who should know better, who’s telling you this. OK?

I  already apologize in advance, of the weight loss advertisements, this blog might very unintentionally will bring upon you. Just try to remember going into a new year, there will be a lot of advertising that counts on women feeling bad about themselves. You don’t have to emotionally or financially buy into, OK.

Note: Again, I’m not being pro or anti weight loss with this blog. I defend peoples right to lose weight and also not to lose weight for any reason. So no need to get hate of any kind, just for expressing an opinion, which is a lot less dangerous than the ideology she’s spewing in her newest advertisement for Weight Watchers.

Also note: Blog edited on 12-31-2015 and I’m going to re-blog it as a result. It didn’t make the point that was intended, because I was SO upset after seeing the ad Oprah made, featured above, that I digressed too much for my point to be clear.

Not to mention, while I’ll publish a respectful difference in opinions, hateful ones, will NOT be published……