Weight Loss Seminars Sell Dreams
Pretty promises packaged in fast, easy-to-use vials, bottles, and boxes, wrapped in colorful cellophane and offering quick weight loss and a life of friendship, career advancement, love, and romance. Eat, drink, massage and vibrate your way to slim beauty. Please be aware and recognize the shiny magic lantern that promises to grant your wishes but delivers dissipating smoke.
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 products 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 supposedly does magical things to your body to help you lose weight.
Women Were Buying - Eagerly With Worried Faces
What a formula! Attract women 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 facts and varnished with a 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.
Endpoint: A Lot of Money Changes Hands
A young man in a white turban 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 lying 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, walking briskly under the trees on this lovely day in the park overlooking the sea.
Put down the magic lantern. You can honor your wishes for a healthier body, more attractive appearance and better life by discovering the genuine and effective effort necessary to make your wishes come true.
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Written by Joanna Poppink, MFT. Joanna is a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in eating disorder recovery, stress, PTSD, and adult development.
She is licensed in CA, AZ, OR and FL. Author of the Book: Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder
Appointments are virtual.
For a free telephone consultation, e-mail her at
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