When someone asks me if I want to step on a scale, my response is usually, “Um, no thanks.” However, that’s because I never thought about what I weigh in terms of anything other than pounds.
Women usually find it difficult to talk about their weight, especially when they’re trying to lose it. It’s a sensitive subject because not being happy with your body tends to make you feel vulnerable. Thankfully Lean Cuisine, a frontrunner in the diet cuisine world, understands that, and thus chose to redefine what weighing yourself means in their newest foray into Femvertising.
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It’s called #WeighThis and starts off with an iconic (and terrifying, at least to me) image of a woman walking toward a scale. If you’re like me, you’ll probably have some flashbacks to those fateful walks to the bathroom scale when you hope you’ve lost a pound, but you’re really not sure because you had a tough week. Then, sure enough, a voice innocently asks, “Would you like to weigh yourself?” Naturally, all the women look dubious, and try to get out of the situation. But the voice reassures them by saying, “I’m not going to weigh you.” So what will the scale weigh? Find out for yourself.
As you can see, the scale weighs something that you simply can’t quantify in measurements. These women offer up enormous parts of themselves without which they wouldn’t be who they are, and funnily enough, those things have nothing to do with body size. Sometimes they’re joyful realities like a wonderful marriage, or a dean’s list certificate, and sometimes they’re hard life changes like a divorce. Regardless of what things make you up, their weight is far more significant than what you read on a scale when you stand on it. It’s truly amazing to see such a commercial come from the makers of diet meals because it shows they understand that there is so much more to life than weight loss.
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There was a moment where I thought the message might lose a bit of its power — when the women actually weighed their life achievements and milestones on the scale. I immediately thought, you just spent all this time showing us how weight is subjective, but you’re still having them weigh these intangible things? But I should’ve waited to criticize because it allowed the women to have this important realization.
To quote the woman who got on the dean’s list of her college even though she’s a working single mom, “it’s immeasurable, you can’t measure it.” There is no reason for us to be so obsessed with a number on a scale when we have achievements like this under our belts. These are the kinds of ads women want. Thank you, Lean Cuisine, for putting such a wonderful concept out into the world.
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