Weight Loss Promises: Anger and Sorrow

I went to an all day seminar designed to help people lose weight at a very fancy hotel in the Los Angeles area today. I didn't stay long. So sad. The attendees were mostly fat, frightened women. The speakers, in my opinion, were using the platform to sell product and offer fast and easy solutions to the attendees who would spend money.

The many display tables were really little stores - with lots of chocolate and sweet edibles, mysterious 2000 year old cures to nibble on and high tech

expensive water that does supposedly does magical things to your body to help you lose weight.

People were buying - eagerly with worried faces.

What a formula! Attract people who feel badly about their bodies and hope for a fast simple answer that will give them beauty and freedom from their problems. Charge them to come to a many starred hotel that intimidates them. Dress like a TV commercial model. Act as if losing weight and getting the body they want is easy. Hold up lots of products. Explain in medical language, peppered with fact and varnished with hard sell, how the products help a body lose weight easily and fast.

Give them lots of food on the break. All "legal" food. They can eat those sweet and enticing edibles with relief because the treats are part of a weight loss program. Plus they need to eat because they are so anxious and intimidated.

Then talk to them with a face full of personal concern. The lovelies from on high offer their attention and care to these insecure women.

End point: a lot of money changes hands.

Some young guy in a white turben tried to sell me a 2000 year old food that supposedly cured just about everything and made people beautiful. He actually took out an open plastic package, reached in with his bare hand and offered me some of the grainy chunks.

He looked startled when I refused to eat strange food that was laying in a bare hand that had been who knows where touching who knows what.

I left and walked by the beach for a while, I think for soul cleansing.

I saw an overweight woman, smiling and walking briskly with her two
dogs. I felt better and wished the women at that seminar were with us.