Losing weight when your matabolism slows down and media images; is there a connection?

Boy howdy! I do believe that mediated images influence our lives, and our perspectives not only of the world but also of ourselves. But I don't care, I love TV, and I've learned a lot about how to look and behave from TV. Most of the women I see are beautifully thin so I want to be thin...does that make a connection?

For example,I learned how to kiss by watching June Lockhart kiss Guy Williams on the show Lost in Space. I watched the way that Lockhart (Lassie's TV mom), caressed Williams' neck as they kissed. So when I started kissing I used all of Lockhart's moves.

I learned how to be a teenager too especially from these programs

• That Girl starring Marlo Thomas, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060034/
• The Patty Duke Show http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Patty_Duke_Show,
• and Gidget. starring Sally Field http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gidget

And I bought many of the products that appeared in the shows' commercial breaks.

I bought things like Summer Blond hair lightener and my hair turned green as soon as I went swimming in a clorinated pool.

I bought tanning lotion, which turned my skin so orange I looked like an alien.

And I knew that I had to stay thin...thin was and still is 'in'

"The reason why tanning lotions turn you orange is the DHA (Dihydroxyacetone) chemical in all of the products. If you try out www.instatan.comyou can order a bottle of instatan tanning spray that does not contain DHA. This works great and won't turn you orange. I use it all the time " Why do self-tanning lotions turn fair skin orange? Are there any that don't do this? | Answerbag http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/4275#ixzz1EDKHmRVe
Now I want to buy Instatan even though I am so fat (there's so much skin to cover), and I rarely go outside so what's the point.

• And I learned that thinness was important from the TV show The Mod Squad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mod_Squad) by watching Peggy Lipton who played Julie Barnes. My mother and I would watch The Mod Squad together and all she got out of the show was that I had to be as thin as Peggy Lipton. Every time Peggy Lipton appeared--and I mean every time--my mother would say--"If you just lost 10 pounds you could look as pretty as Peggy Lipton"--way to go ma!
  

• I started shaving my legs even though I had no real hair, but that's what women did in the commercials I watched

It wasn't until I started college at San Francisco State (SFSU), where I majored in TV, that I learned about Marshall Mckluen, the Canadian scholar. Mckluen raised TV from a medium that very few people took seriously, to the necissity of TV college majors in many important colleges..

McKluen is famous for the proverbs 'the medium is the message', and 'We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future". McKluen was the first academician to take media, and popular culture seriously. http://marshallmcluhan.com/mcluhanisms/.

McKluen also said 'The trouble with a cheap, specialized education is that you never stop paying for it.' http://marshallmcluhan.com/mcluhanisms/. That's for sure.

During high school I found that few smart people ever watched TV (those who did watch watched PBS). I felt sorry for them. My family would watch TV together, and our TV was treated like an active member of our family. In fact, we got our first TV when I was 2 years old and living in Toronto, Canada. The first thing I ever saw was coverage of a flooded area near where we lived; I sat in my uncle's lap watching footage of a woman driving a car into a large pool of water where she and her car disappeared.

Getting our first color TV (when I was in junior high school) was a turning point in my life; I had wanted to watch my favorite TV shows in color in order to see how the characters all looked, what they wore, and how they interacted with one another. I needed color.

Not only do I love TV, I need TV. My parents were so busy being alcoholic narcisists; I learned early not to ask them too many questions about growing up; all they said was that growing up sucked as they drank their vodka.

These days I obsessively watch Angel and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Both of these shows have taught me how to be a champion in my own life-that sounds stupid I know; but TV has taught me so much about how to communicate with other people.

But what about the commercials? Are commercials as powerful as some believe? Well since the television industry spends over one thousand billion dollars each year on advertising I'd say YEAH!

If commercials did not affect viewers, the advertising industry would not be eager to spend so much money; the fact that advertisers are willing to spend such enormous amounts of money alone supports the notion that both TV programs and commercials have the power to manipulate viewers. So that means we need to learn to 'read' TV.

So what does all of this have to do with body image? Tons baby, tons. The women in TV are still, for the most part, long legged, hour glass figures, facial beauty.

So what about TV's influence? Is it good or bad? Well...it's both and the best way of protecting ourselves is to watch and listen to commercials in order to 'deconstruct' them. Watching in this way saves viewers from slavishly buying one product after another.

I do that. But I also become hypnotised by advertising: "Lose weight with these pills" and I'm online searching for these pills.

But TV is not alone in its ability to manipulate viewers, TV belongs to a Bio-psycho-social matrix.

• Bio=a predisposition for intense emotional responses as well as depression.
• Psycho=how well we understand our own minds, and
• Social=how well one fits into society--like if I feel too fat to go outside

In my next blog I will go further into a discussion of the Bio-Psycho-Social Matrix.