Eruantale

My jaw hit the floor the other day when a commercial for Campbell’s Select Harvest soup came on television the other day.

Narrator: People often choose light foods without really looking.
Shocked girl holding a frozen dinner: 310 calories?

The narrator then goes on to inform me that Campbell’s Select Harvest soups are only 80 calories—as if 310 calories is outrageous for something that is meant to be eaten as a meal.

This commercial (see video below) is extremely disconcerting to me. Judging by the prevalence of fad diets, weight loss “supplements” and eating disorders, American consumers do not understand basic nutrition or the science behind weight loss. Well intentioned people routinely adopt dangerous habits in order to lose weight these days, and this commercial encourages that mindset.

Your body needs a certain amount of calories each day in order to function. If you eat too few calories, your body will think you are starving. This is dangerous and actually makes it even more difficult to lose weight. The amount of calories you need to eat each day depends on several factors, but in general, consuming less than 1,200 calories a day can provoke this kind of response. Most people who lose weight and maintain the loss do not cut back their calories to such an extreme number, because you can’t live like that for a long time.

I don’t have a problem with Campbell selling a soup that has 80 calories in a serving. If I wanted to have some soup with a sandwich at lunch, I might grab a light variety soup with 80 or 100 calories to a serving. But to insinuate that 310 calories for a meal is shocking and unreasonable is insane. If a person decided to cut back to a diet of 1,600 calories a day in order to lose weight, they could eat five 310 calorie meals a day!

Unless the women in that ad are considering eating an entire Lean Cuisine as a snack, they have no reason to backpedal at the sight of the nutritional information. There are enough commercials on TV pressuring women to go to extreme measures to lose weight these days. Campbell shouldn’t contribute to the problem with more misleading ads that reinforce dangerous eating habits.

See for yourself:

What do you think? Is this ad reasonable? Or is its premise ridiculous?

It’s about time to do a little catch up on my Project 365 posts. Though it may surprise you, I haven’t been remiss in updating due to procrastination. On Monday, I took a photo with my cell phone and e-mailed it to myself. My cell phone specifically said that the message was sent. However, it didn’t arrive until today. Go figure.

January 25th (24):

On Monday, we had to go to the UPS store to ship a package. This sign was pasted to the counter, and I had to take a photo of it because I have a friend named Daisy. Apparently, the UPS store has named their “very large” and “full color” copier Daisy.

January 26th (25):

Five minutes till midnight seems to be the theme of this week. Sorry about that. As you can see, I have a cold. Don’t worry, I know it’s not the flu. But since I’ve been sick all week, I have been completely spaced out. Also, life is pretty uninteresting when you sit around and cough while watching TV. I don’t even have a voice at this point, so I can’t even talk on the phone.

January 27th (26):

I crawled out of bed after taking the aforementioned NyQuil to snap this shot before passing out. By the time I’m done with this project, I’m sure I will have photographed every section of my bookshelf on nights when I forgot to take a picture.

January 28th (27):

“Oh no, what am I going to take a picture of?” I asked my husband. He grabbed this giant teddy bear that was sitting right by the couch and held it up. It works for me. There is that bookcase in the background.

January 29th (28):

I keep attempting to go to school and every day I only last about an hour. But that’s okay. If I hadn’t gone to my first class this morning, I would have missed this shot of the curly haired Aleesha with shockingly straight hair! She has a singing voice that will blow you away.

The irritating buzzing of your cell phone wakes you up at 6:30am, and you briefly become conscious enough to wonder why you were so optimistic when you set your alarm last night right. Then you reset it to 7:00am and go back to sleep. When next it buzzes, you leap out of bed and grab some clothes from the stack you have yet to put away. With no time to pack lunch, you throw your books in your bag, skip breakfast, and scramble out the door, figuring you can just buy lunch at school.

When lunchtime rolls around, you order some greasy, overpriced and oversized selection at the café. You have no cash, because you forgot to go to the bank, so you just put it on the debit card. Halfway through your hamburger, you realize that there may be a pop quiz in Biology today, so you whip out your notes and textbook and attempt to speed read an entire chapter in the thirty minutes before your class.

This is what studying looks like.

While waiting for the bus to come after all of your classes are finished, you boot up your laptop and hit YouTube with your friends. Even if you’ve already seen every one of the videos in How It Should Have Ended’s channel, you still laugh hysterically every time you see Gollum. On the bus, you stick your headphones in your ears and try not to make eye contact with any creepy people.

By the time you get home, the monster burger is no longer enough to keep you going, so you open the fridge up and stare at its contents for several minutes before moving on to the pantry. You go back and forth between the two until you finally decide on a bag of chips to accompany your study time, since it’s fast and easy.

You bring out your laptop again with the intent of writing an essay that is due tomorrow morning, but eventually your research brings you to Wikipedia. Then you spend three hours looking up theories about UVB-76 and the Voynich Manuscript on Google, until you remember you were actually writing a paper about the Great Barrier Reef. You crank it out in 1.5 hours so that you won’t miss your favorite show, after which you decide to watch three old episodes of Chuck recorded on your DVR.

At one o’clock in the morning, you brush your teeth and set your alarm for 6:30am with ambitions of exercising tomorrow. Or today. You don’t really care about the difference. (more…)

On Sunday morning, I burned the living daylights out of my arm with a hair straightener. Don’t even ask me how it happened. I have decided that burns occur due to brain farts—like the time that I randomly decided it would be a good idea to pick up a plan that just came out of the oven with my bare hands. I apparently thought it was no longer hot. This is one of the great mysteries of life that will never be solved.

Needless to say, I didn’t have a very good morning. With a two inch long blister forming below the crook of my elbow, I decided that coffee and bagels would be necessary after Sunday School. Mochas fix everything.

January 24th (23):