Get Some Meat On Them Bones

While tracking the football game tonight on Yahoo! Sports, I periodically saw this advertisement flash on the screen. It looked odd to me but I wasn't paying much attention to it. Then I stopped to try and scan the box score for some information and it struck me.

That woman is so skinny it doesn't look healthy. It doesn't even look human, hardly.

Now, a football game's box score is a fine place to advertise nutritional supplements and weight loss products. Most of the guys tracking the score, like me, have bellies on them. And it's a time-proven technique that you can use a picture of a sexy woman to sell stuff to guys.

But this picture is not sexy at all. It's scary. This woman -- assuming this is a real model at all, which I can't quite tell -- does not seem to have enough ribs. Has she had some surgically removed to look that skinny? Seriously -- if we colorize the picture some and make her all gray, she winds up looking like this:

Now, that may look a little bit familiar to some of you. Maybe that's because like me, you're amused by bizarre stories of UFO abduction. Yep, this model presents pretty much the silhouette of a Zeta Reticulan Grey of UFO lore, pictured to the left.

Ladies, the Zeta Reticulan look is not an attractive one. Not even if you add a couple of big ol' fake silicone boobies. There is such a thing as taking the whole weight loss thing too far. It's called anorexia and it's not good for you.

A body like that is not a trim, athletic, sexy body. It is an under-nourished skeleton of a body, one that calls to mind images of starving children in third-world nations. In the United States, the land of plenty -- plenty, hell, in the land of Claim Jumper -- there is no reason to not get at least adequate nourishment for your body. My instinct is not to try and go out with this woman, but to find her a pastrami sandwich and protect her from high winds and sudden drops in temperature.

Health and fitness are good. We should all watch what we eat and be careful to get good food. But for some of us, that means getting enough good food and carrying enough enough body mass to have functioning kidneys. That whole BMI thing is a bunch of bullshit, a call for people to become impossibly thin. Eat right, get some exercise, and relax about your bodies already.

Hell, you can even indulge in something bad. I've been not paying huge attention to what I eat, not getting as much exercise as I should, and I've still managed to drop at least an inch off my waist in the past couple of weeks -- at least, judging from how my "skinny suit" pants felt today, which was pretty loose. I've been largely eating what I want, just mostly having reasonable portions. And not even that consistently.

The point here is, you can be reasonably healthy, and get your body in reasonable shape, without spending gobs of money on bizarre herbs and plant products of highly questionable medicinal value -- and you shouldn't ever need to look like a Zeta Reticulan.