It’s summer time, so yeah, I’m all about losing weight.
As usual, I turn to the Internet for help. I did find a whole lot of diets, with all kinds of funny and actually appealing names such as the South Beach Diet, the cabbage soup diet or the Special K diet.
They all had one thing in common: They guaranteed me to lose weight super fast while staying in perfect health if I followed the diets strictly. I only had to stay on the diet for a rather short period with the exchange of a lifetime of beauty and happiness.
Sweet!
And they all contained meals fit for a rabbit.
I could be a rabbit.
I hung in there for a whole week with thoughts that if I could go on eating like a rabbit then I’d finally become one. Then I could deep fry and eat myself with some delicious sauce.
Needless to say, I gave up my diet by the end of the week when my friend invited me to a buffet. I ended up eating the amount of food that would make any owner regret even opening up a buffet because of customers like me.
I went on eating like an elephant for the next five days, which eventually led to gaining back the weight I had lost.
I felt ashamed of myself, so I went on another ridiculous diet.
And then a vicious circle began.
I was complaining to my skinny friend who eats whatever she wants about how much I hated the Internet for luring me into believing these diets are effective. (By the way, don’t we all have such a friend that we just want to strangle while we are on a starving diet?)
My friend looked through the websites I had been checking and laughed: “I can’t believe you fell for all those diets. Honestly, some of them are really just talking nonsense.” Nonsense wasn’t her original word.
She is right.
Some don’t even make an effort to put up a photo of a hot skinny girl to give you the illusion that following this diet will get you an impossibly hot body like that. Some don’t even make up quotes starting with, “experts say.”
Now if you really think about it, those diets — as well as a lot of other information on the Internet — are not as manipulative, persuasive and penetrating as we give them credit for. Yet we believe them anyway, because our mind sees what it wants to see.
We long for an easy way to achieve what we want.
No matter how rational we are trying to be, how much we understand that dreaming about having something without any effort is just impossible, we still keep one eye open looking for some impossible possibilities.
And that’s where the absurd media information comes in. We need no evidence; we search for no logic. All we are looking for is a simple promise, a promise of taking away all the difficulties in life.
When we finally find out that the fairy tale can’t take us where we want, we get frustrated, angry and curse the Internet for hoaxing us.
Yet the next time, under exactly the same circumstance, we probably, nine times out of 10, will be falling for the obvious lies again.
Unless we get rid of the unrealistic desire in our mind completely, we can never get out of the trap we help the media set for ourselves.
Maybe it’s not just our bodies that are fat. So are our minds. We barely feed them with light food, and rarely stop our fast life to have a careful look at them.
What we don’t usually notice is that while media are simply the catalyst, it’s the fat mind that threatens our health.
As normally is the case, less is more.
Bixi Tian is a graduate student studying journalism and a columnist for The Post. Email her your dieting woes at bt121511@ohiou.edu.
