In Carrott’s Lib, Jasper Carrott ridiculed the claims put forward by the manufacturers of dieting foods with ‘Here, eat these non-fattening biscuits and get slim’. Weally? Wobble, wobble, wobble. Stoutism of the fattest order which, before political correctness, was the sensible response. Never mind ‘non-fattening biscuits’ but any claims that slimming pills or supplements can work should be treated with the same ridicule or at the very least with the assertion that it’s a scam. Thus it should have been when a hitherto unknown company started advertising its ‘Weight Loss Collection’ of ‘Meal Replacement & Supplements’. I can remember such things existing in the 1980’s without anyone getting worked up about them because most people can judge a tenuous advertising claim when they see one. Read the small print on the ad and you can see that substituting two daily meals of an energy restricted diet with a meal replacement contributes to weight loss. So in other words if you are already on a calorie-controlled diet, then the ‘meal replacement’ can be part of it.
Back in the 1980’s such ads would have featured ‘before’ and ‘after’ pics. In this case Protein World chose Renee Somerfield, a naturally slender well-tanned Aussie model with a good figure, a healthy vegan diet and a strict fitness regime. So instead of bothering with misleading ‘before’ and ‘after’ pics, Protein World chose someone who had no need of a ‘Weight Loss Collection’ to begin with to advertise its products. Rather than pointing this out, there was an outbreak of feminist fat pride by intellectually challenged protestors. Their campaign backfired as it was always bound to, giving Protein World more publicity than its owners could ever have dreamed of; unless they had predicted the reaction by knowing that feminists would take the bait. In the end, it was Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, who fulfilled the feminists’ wishes of body shaming someone not as fat as they are by banning the ads. He did it to fulfil his reputation for ‘woke’ virtue signalling (for the same reason that he later liked to be shown in a mask on his Twitter account).
Renee Somerfield, as a vegan, found herself having to defend advertising products many of which aren’t, claiming that she used the ones that are suitable for a vegan diet. The legacy is that many women who aspire to have her figure and her lifestyle are adopting a vegan diet, albeit from a purist perspective for the ‘wrong’ reason; which is better than not doing so at all and those who have experimented with a vegan diet to lose weight might follow it up by looking into the broader ethical issues. The ‘controversy’ over the adverts however boosted Somerfield’s career, which in the modern era meant more followers for her instagram accounts including the one which she uses for her own branded swimwear.
To be realistic, the vast majority of women are not going at attain a figure like Renee Somerfield’s, with or without ‘slimming’ supplements, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t strive for self-improvement, which six years on from the advertising campaign is its legacy. Nor however are fair-skinned Brits ever likely to look like a well-tanned Aussie beach bum, without applying fake tan or spending a lot of time under a sunbed. So you can look at the adverts and say that they are unrealistic and projecting a perfect body image, but most advertising works that way when it is concerned with personal grooming. It is ironic, but not altogether surprising, that feminists chose to be vindictive towards a successful businesswoman making her own career choices.
Added to which, that the censorship of this advert was successfully driven by Fat Pride identity politics, has meant that any serious discussions of the health implications of obesity get ignored. In England alone, as of May 2020 according to official statistics on the NHS Digital website, 26% of men and 29% of women were clinically obese, with an additional 41% of men and 30% of women overweight but not (yet) obese. These are shockingly, but unsurprisingly, high figures and likely to be similar if not worse in other parts of the UK and much of the ‘Western’ world. A legacy of the Lockdowns undertaken since March of 2020 has been that obesity has increased further. And yet the supposed pretext for the Lockdowns was a respiratory virus, for which obesity was and remains the main risk factor.
Renee Somerfield’s homeland of Australia had long been on my list of countries that I would like to have visited; late October / early November may have been a good time to visit, in terms of the temperature and strength of the sun not being too oppressive. However, as has become increasingly apparent, both at state and central government level, Australia is now one of the most oppressive countries among the former democracies of the developed world. Its ruling politicians are psychopaths and its police are brutal fascist thugs. It is a country that needs to be liberated and the very last thing that it needs is the idiotic intersectional identity politics of ‘body positivity’, whereby the fit and healthy must be sacrificed to the pharmaceutical industry to supposedly ‘protect’ the fat and unhealthy, which is the consequence of the ‘vaccine’ agenda.
Warwick Vegan 
You must be logged in to post a comment.