I recently heard a radio commercial for a diet pill that promised to get you “high school skinny.” It just struck me how often I’m hearing the word “skinny” these days. When did skinny become the new ideal?
So many of the popular diet books seem to have skinny in the title. Have you noticed? Perhaps the trend got started a few years ago with the success of Skinny Bitch, which is a vegan book that sparked an entire line of skinny books and products. Now you can read about the Secrets of Skinny Chicks and Unleash Your Inner Skinny while wearing your skinny jeans and sipping a skinny latte or Skinnygirl Margarita. If you’re hungry, you can grab a Skinny Cow ice cream or skinny protein bar. The skinny marketing trend has even jumped over to the beauty aisle with skinny shampoos and skinny lotions.
Skinny is everywhere. It has certainly become a mega-empire for the Skinnygirl herself, Bethenny Frankel, who’s making a bundle with her Skinnygirl cocktails, books and other products. Maybe skinny helps sell a lot of books and a lot of booze, but I still don’t like it. I think it sends the wrong message. That was the topic of my latest blog post for WebMD. To read more, please check out Real Life Nutrition.
Image courtesy of Shira Golding on flickr
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Yes this surely seems to be the trend now. Enjoying reading thru your blog. I hope to meet you in person in 2012
Good post! I have seen this word a lot lately. It is to bad that the word “skinny” is used more than the word “healthy!”
The media and some marketing experts are trying to replace the word healthy with the word skinny.Skinny figure can never be a measurement of healthy figure.Nice pst!Thanks for sharing your opinion with us.
skinny is everywhere! I have also seen new alcohol come out in promotion of this new trend, Voli vodka is one of them, its supposed to be 40 percent lower calories and also infused with electrolytes.
I don’t think skinny equates health.
If you want to find an example of a place where skinny should be ideal, just go to a Cheesecake Factory, a Machine Shed restaurant or a food stand at a state fair. More often than not, those places are purveyors of gluttony. I’d rather be skinny than fat.