The weight of diet ads

The awakened and knowing say: Body I am entirely, and nothing else. And the soul is only a word for something about the body. -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Most of the personalized ads that pop up on my Facebook profile flow logically from the information I've shamelessly divulged about myself on the site. There are ads about journalism jobs, France, my favorite bands -- even ads for argyle-print clothing, as I am the proud founder of the Argyle Appreciation Club.

Yet for every one of these ads, there always seems to be an ad for a diet -- the Acai Diet, the Kim Kardashian Diet, the Supermodel Diet -- even though I have nothing on my profile about dieting, weight, food, fitness or appearance.

Why, then, am I getting such ads? The only reason I can fathom is this: Under sex, I identify myself as female.

I'm probably a bit more sensitive to/interested in body image issues than the average person is. And I'll admit that it's too simple to blame this whole thing on advertising. No, it goes much deeper than that, down to our culture's basic views and expectations of women. 

It's a general societal assumption that all women want to lose weight. It's practically what unites us as women: a desire to be thin, delicate, refined, controlled, needless. Women talk about diet and weight as casually as one might talk about the weather, as a point of connection even among total strangers.

I'm always amazed when a female I barely know feels at liberty to comment on the caloric content of something I'm eating, babbles to me about how little she's eaten today or how she like, totally needs to go on a diet because she's like, totally fat.

According to the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), more than one in three normal dieters progresses to pathological dieting, and of those, 20 to 25 percent progress to partial or full-symptom eating disorders. NEDA estimates that nearly 10 million females and one million males in the United States have eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia.

I understand how narrow-minded and inaccurate it is to blame the media for all the ills of society. But I find it unlikely that the 91 percent of college-age women who feel the need to be on a diet (NEDA) all just adopted the notion on a whim.   

I don't mind personalized ads. I'm not bothered that Facebook knows I get giddy about argyle shoelaces. I am bothered that the people behind the Facebook personalized ads assume that, just because I am a young female in college, wanting to lose weight is an inherent part of my identity.