Lose Weight the Easy Way!

I just lost 4 pounds in a week! You can do it too! Now that it's holiday time I've been eating the many Christmas cookies I bake for meals and I've actually been feeling a bit under the weather so my appetite is weaker than usual. I also haven't gone to the gym lately due to feeling sick. This morning I stepped on the gym scales and learned I'd lost 4 pounds!

So to recap:
- eat fewer calories than normal
- eat whatever you like, without regard for nutritional value

And you too will lose weight.

Yes, folks, it really can be a numbers game. But is that the game you want to play? I feel like crap, and although my mouth is happy to be chomping on cookies, when I got on the treadmill, I sweat like a construction worker in July. I felt gross! Eating cookies has meant I haven't gotten any real vitamins and minerals into my body in about a week. And I've probably lost muscle mass, because it's been a week since I lifted weights. When I stand in front of my mirror in the nude, I feel jiggly. In fact, I wouldn't have realised I'd lost weight, had I not stepped onto the scales.

Lesson learned? Eating less can make you lose weight, but weight loss is not an ideal goal. Losing fat, gaining muscle and getting healthy is a much better goal to work towards. After the holidays - burp - I'm going to go back to eating healthy.

This is why you think you're fat

A lot of us who work with digital images know that many of the photos we see in magazines, on billboards and posters are manipulated. But the power of an image is so strong, that few of us actually see a woman on the cover of a magazine and think "Well sure she's beautiful but most of that image is fake."

The Dove Soap company's Campaign for Real Beauty is doing a great job of exposing this issue of advertisers showing us false images to make us feel inferior so they can sell us more stuff. On their site you can watch their Evolution commercial that shows the transformation a model undergoes from normal-looking girl to billboard beauty with the help of lots of makeup, lighting and much digital remodelling of her features.

But most of these transformations from plain Jane to va-va-voom take place behind closed doors, and with willing participants. What model doesn't want to look as beautiful as possible? Unfortunately, many models don't talk about how media editors are chopping up their bodies into smaller, thinner versions of themselves. Several years ago, Kate Winslet spoke out against GQ magazine for chopping up her image to make it thinner. GQ's editor defended the magazine by saying: "These days you only get two kinds of pictures of celebrities - paparazzi pictures or pictures like these which have been highly styled, buffed, trimmed and altered to make the subject look as good as is humanly possible. We do that for everyone, whether they are a size six or a size 12. It hasn't a lot to do with body size. Practically every photo you see in a magazine will have been digitally altered in this way."

Thanks to magazine editors everywhere for making women believe we're too fat because we don't measure up to your standards. Standards which don't exist in real life. Thanks also for showing men what beautiful women look like, but neglecting to tell them that noone looks like that in real life.

Despite this grand deception that is common practice, it's rare to see a celeb or model speak out against the endless need to cut women down to a tiny, unattainable size. That's why I applaud Vida Guerra for publicly complaining that FHM magazine made her butt look smaller when it featured her. Vida is no stick-thin runway model, but she ain't no fat girl either. She has modelled for Playboy and her website shows off her sexy curves and her very womanly body. So, it's interesting to watch her question the magazine's decision to cut her booty down to size.

I guess you really can't be too rich or too thin these days. I can't wait for this pendulum to swing back in the opposite direction; and it surely will. In the meantime, I'll focus on being healthy, thanks! And as long as my body allows me to jump and run and play, I will love and appreciate its non-Photoshopped shape.