Hey, Alli, Does This Dignity Make My Butt Look Big?

 

The new fat-blasting wonder drug, alli , is terrifying. I’m talking “Poltergeist” clown terrifying. The product poses some unique marketing challenges, to say the least.

 

Weight loss is an occasional topic of discussion in my house. I’ve had two kids in the past two years, and my husband packed on some sympathy weight each time. Babies aside, if someone were to show up at our house on any given evening and say “Hey, who’s up for Chinese?” we’d turn feral, running in circles and drooling all over ourselves. Yeah, we dig food and would love a magic pill to make the weight drop off without having to do anything.

 

I tried the whole Akins thing a few years back. Being a carb fiend, I lost my mind within a matter of days. By day four, I was chewing up chocolate and spitting it out into my office trash can before the evil carbs would kick in. Then, looking at a pile of spitty, half-chewed Dove dark chocolates, I had my moment of clarity: losing a few pounds simply isn’t worth sacrificing one’s pride and sense of humanity.

 

This brings me to alli. You’ve probably seen the in-store displays or the ads – GlaxoSmithKline has been busting it on the marketing front. I thought it was pronounced “Allie,” like a girlfriend, but it’s pronounced “ally,” presumably because it’s all suited up and ready to join in the battle against the evil dictator of back fat. But the more I learn about alli, the more I think it’s the last thing I’d want anywhere near me on the battlefield. Or in any situation where there’s another person within a 10 mile radius of me.

 

The basic gist of the FDA-approved, OTC drug is that it can help you lose 50 percent more weight than just by dieting. It blocks dietary fat from being absorbed by the body. And since the fat isn’t going into your body, it has to come out. Apparently driven out of your intestines in a car with a Papa John’s sign on top:

 

The excess fat that passes out of your body is not harmful. In fact, you may recognize it as something that looks like the oil on top of a pizza.

 

Now there’s some fine marketing lingo. And yet it gets uglier. Alli calls possible complications by the pleasant sounding name “ treatment effects .” I prefer to call them “horsemen of the apocalypse.” The site says:

 

Learning how to manage treatment effects is an important part of being successful with alli.

 

And it then offers a few suggestions to “take control.” My personal favorite is:

 

You may feel an urgent need to go to the bathroom. Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work.

 

Alrighty then. So before you take the pills, just invest in dark pants, pack a suitcase to bring to work each day, give your dry cleaner the ol’ heads up, Scotchgard your chair and tell your boss that you’ll be setting up an office in the restroom. Easy.

 

In all seriousness, how did we get to a point where we are willing to soil ourselves publicly in an attempt to achieve society's idea of beauty?

 

Everyone fell over themselves to applaud Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty for finally doing something to build self-esteem rather than erode it. The industry threw all kinds of impressive awards at it. But, honestly, is America really ready to celebrate normal-sized people? If so, why do drug manufacturers, who aren’t the type to spend billions without a few market research bullets bolstering their R&D, find a path to market with products like this? Is the consumer who buys Dove soap because she wants to feel accepted still going to take alli because, deep down, she knows that our culture doesn’t share Dove’s rosy optimism?

 

This is hardly the magic pill I had in mind. If pride and public decorum weigh about ten pounds and tend to hang out around the gut and hips, I’ll just keep them where they are, thanks.