Saturday, March 16, 2013

Free advice for the other elephant in this Spiriva ad



Here's something else that can feel like having an elephant on your chest- carrying around an extra hundred pounds or so.

Maybe what this woman needs is a more rigorous line of work.  Seems her current job involves walking sloooowwlly around an office carrying a clipboard, nodding and waving at her fellow minions, and daydreaming about her next trip to the Wendy's drive thru during sales meetings (gee, it would be awful if her tongue swelled during lunch, preventing her from getting that new fish sandwich down!)  For a change of pace, she occasionally hauls her fat butt outside to sit in the sun with a magazine.  That's about it.

I'm sure Spiriva is great for her OCD or OLD or FAT or whatever the hell this latest miracle pill is supposed to cure-- or rather, supposed to lessen the symptoms of-- or rather, replace the symptoms of with another set of symptoms.  I just wonder why, if this drug opens this woman's airwaves for 24 whole hours, she doesn't use that period of free breathing to better effect.  Like, to take a long walk at speeds above 1 MPH.  Or visit a gym.  Or revisit her Blame Shortness Of Breath On Some Disease Other Than Morbid Obesity plan. Because from this ad, I don't even get WHY this woman wants to breathe easier.  I don't see anything going on in her life that requires a whole lot of oxygen.

2 comments:

  1. COPD, which Spiriva is supposed to treat, is a respiratory condition. It has nothing to do with obesity, so I'm not understanding why the rant is about how she's obese--which she isn't--and it's all her fault because she doesn't get much exercise and eats too much. There is absolutely nothing in this ad which even remotely promotes a high calorie, low activity lifestyle. Increasing exercise doesn't have much effect on weight loss, by the way, unless you're doing strength training, and that affects weight loss because you're building muscle, which burns energy even while you're at rest. I know a woman who weighs 300 pounds regardless of how much she eats or how much she exercises (which she does, swimming laps three or four times a week, about two miles each session). It's important to eat healthy and be active, and America definitely has a problem with how much fast food it eats, but the view that too much food+not enough activity=fat pig is erroneous.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I didn't claim that this woman's respiratory condition was related to her weight. I was making the point that this woman has obvious health problems that she seems to be perfectly fine with, while being concerned about this one issue she is treating with medication. To me, she sounds like a woman with terminal cancer who is happy to have discovered just the right pill for her arthritis.

      Too much food + not enough activity pretty much always= fat. That does not mean that all fat people eat too much or don't get enough exercise, but the correlation between inactivity and eating junk and being fat is pretty much set in stone. For every person out there who eats like a bird and exercises regularly yet is still obese, there are ten thousand who can trace their unhealthy girth to their lifestyle. But as I said before, my problem with this ad is that this woman seems perfectly willing to ignore what could be a real health issue because hey, she's found this drug that deals with certain symptoms relating to another problem (and replaces them with other symptoms, btw.)

      Delete