Getting Nowhere, Fast

--- An eyebrow-raising online banner ad promoting yet another restriction meal plan serves to illustrate  contemporary culture's continuing endorsement of absurdly impossible standards for the consummate model of female fitness ---

In mid-November of 2014 I labored over a blog essay, one of my longest, dissecting the bizarrely-proportioned physical ideal popularly considered en vogue, as furthered by the Kardashian example along with our traditional appreciation, endorsement, pursuit, and sale of an approximation to an hourglass figure.  Diet culture as we know thrives on pushing a rarely (if ever) achievable body shape and size -- something wholly unnatural and thus in reality only realized through surgery, Photoshop, constrictive shapewear, disordered eating, very very "good" genes, or some combination of the lot.  Well, today, in casually browsing the web on my iPhone, I couldn't help but pause mid-article to capture a screenshot of a promotional link, rather clumsily illustrated, for the latest guarantee of a body fix-all, INTERMITTENT FASTING.  Manipulating hunger cues is of course nothing new, as far as a well-known food deprivation system for controlling one's pounds.  After all, back in 1965 the world's then-number one (if only) fashion doll, Barbie, arrived in a "Slumber Party" version with miniaturized diet books and pink bathroom scale, set forever in plastic at 110.

Nearly sixty years later that strategy hasn't really evolved much, or the numbers involved, despite somewhat more nuanced reading of BMI (Body Mass Index).  Unfortunately for all genders at this point, losing weight isn't enough of a battle anymore.  "Just" being thin doesn't cut it, so-to-speak.  Rather, one's remaining heft, while limited, is expected to be molded into sculpted cantaloupe-shaped breasts and ass (for females) or muscular apple-calves (for men), with xylophone midsections, toned-yet-graceful arms, Pixar-animated eyes, and pillowy lips for really whatever sex you might identify within, if at all.  I'll be so bold as to presume that this is yet another near-impossible set of standards that has evolved to keep us forever trapped in a consumer's dilemma of perpetual self-dissatisfaction and striving.  We will always be hooked-and-baited into throwing our money towards whatever trick (for most immediate results), or longer-term lifestyle system (for more comprehensive and carefully financed makeovers) that should most convincingly guarantee our #glowup moment.  And with that being said, I present the offending ad.  

And, yes, I was in fact reading about Madonna's children.