Every day, I spend an hour and a half on board New York City's 2 train. When I'm not drafting awkward emails from my blackberry, attempting to befriend small children, or playing Spelltower on my iPad (I'm an equal-technology consumer), I read advertisements spanning train walls.
Advertisements distract me from my neurotic thoughts and the mentally disturbed people sitting across from me. They also routinely inspire curiosity, then confusion, then judgment, and finally outrage in what's fast becoming my four stages of transportation grief.
When I'm lucky, outrage leads to a fifth state of amusement, which occurred this morning when my eyes landed on a seemingly satirical advertisement. When I saw the banner for a new weight loss book entitled Six Weeks to OMG, I assumed it had been written by Paris Hilton or for a Saturday Night Live parody.
Closer inspection and a simple Google search confirmed my greatest fear: this ad was not designed to entertain bored commuters. It was instead crafted to encourage weight loss via the following "principles." Please note that I pulled all bold/italicized text verbatim from official Six Weeks to OMG materials.
Did you know that...
- You can skip breakfast
- Cold baths can give you a hot body
-Broccoli carbs can be worse than soda carbs
After purging my breakfast and throwing the remainder of my protein bars into the Bronx River, I ordered ten copies of Six Weeks to OMG and four cases of Mountain Dew. I canceled my gym membership and asked my super to turn off the hot water valve to my apartment, because there's nothing more scientific than taking cold baths to get fit.
If you're not adequately roused by subway and bus stop ads for this ingenuous new approach to dieting, check out the author's website/blog, where he leads with:
When is a diet, not a diet? When it's Six Weeks To OMG.
It took a good deal of willpower to move beyond the unwarranted comma, but I read on, because in the excitement of digesting Fulton's dieting tips, I failed to notice his back-stabbing mantra:
Get skinnier than all your friends!
Fulton may have poor grammatical skills, but he's savvy enough to know that women are as catty as they are self-conscious. When I sit down to ponder my priorities in life (as I often do on my long commute), I realize that there's only one thing I want more than skipping meals and developing hypothermia in my bathtub, and that's looking better than my friends.
Never mind that they're going to read this post and Fulton's book and thus possess the same secrets I now carry in my starved, caffeine-addled head. It's a race to the finish line, and I'm going to W-I-N.