Showing posts with label weight guilt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weight guilt. Show all posts

Sunday, March 22, 2009

FitnessFirst: Using Public Humiliation To Up Their Gym Memberships!

Imagine, after a long stressful day at work or school, you head over to the bus stop dying to sit down and breathe for a minute. Just as you sit, eager to rest your legs, you discover that the bench you're sitting on is actually hooked up to a SCALE that's displaying your weight to EVERY passerby in big, red, glowing numbers.

Fitness First
, a gym chain in the Netherlands launched a new ad campaign, where they've hooked up the benches of bus stops to a scale that displays your weight to the public, and if you don't like what you see
, it tells you directly below where you can go to fix that problem.

Melissa on The F Word stated, "We’re sure Fitness First is expecting a huge spike in membership from this, but the effect is ruined the moment two people share the seat. That and, you know, trying to win people’s business by humiliating them."

Enough is enough! Not only are these people being publicly humiliated, but think about the damage this is doing to their self esteem. Like there aren't enough public advertisements ridiculing women who aren't a perfect size 2 (ie. facebook advertisements that are specifically targeted to women).

Many people let this issue slide because it's "health" related, but these are the issues that make girls develop eating disorders younger and younger, and quite frankly, I think we have enough little girls starving themselves trying to look like the photoshopped women they see in magazines.