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Pills for Fat B@stards

Beady said:
In the Cortislim ads, I've noticed the pitchman is "Dr Greg Cyanomone (sp?)," and in small print it says "PhD." Does anyone have any idea what his PhD might be in?
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marketing
 
Women keep buying gels and creams for spot reducing. After all these years that this myth has been debunked, many women believe these things actually work. All major cosmetic brands have a number of such products in their range. How do you expect people to debunk pills when they aren't even through with creams yet.
 
Here in deepest, darkest Africa we appear to have made a breakthrough against the TV advertising of diet pills. I understand that such advertising is to be banned if the effects have not been proven by clinical trials.

If this gets passed into law it could also be a useful precendent for an attack on homeopathy!
 
There is of course another large category of people, those who don't have self-illusions that such products work, but find the cost insignificant compared to the offered promise and hope. I've heard lots of such people saying "ok, I know it's 99.99% a scum, but I'm just buying it for the 0.01%." The desire for a slim, athletic body is so strong that even buying a short-living hope justifies the amount of money they pay. The other day I was talking with a woman who bought another bogus product, Cellulase Gold. She knows it doesn't work, but she says that buying it has a psychological effect on her, by signaling the beginning of a "dieting season" and motivating her to eat less.

Then there is the power of the advertisements. Many times such products don't make explicit claims because they don't need to. They just use suggestive ads. I've been watching lately the commercial for L'Oreal's "Sculpt-up". There is a perfect-body model holding some light dumbbells and talking to the camera saying that her body needs "sculpting" all year round. Then "L'Oreal Sculpt-up" appears on the screen. It doesn't take long for the overweight soon-to-appear-on-the-beach lady to make the connection. It works in the same way that cars are suggestively promoted as status-symbols, clothes as lifestyle modifiers and perfumes as sex-appeal enhancers. When there is ample demand it is not necessary to explicitly mislead.
 
El Greco said:
She knows it doesn't work, but she says that buying it has a psychological effect on her...
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So far as that goes, the idea of the emotional crutch is very valid. I smoked for something like 30 years, and had attempted to quit innumerable times for most of those three decades. I finally did it after just three days on a "patch" prescribed by my doctor.

True, it was medicine prescribed by my doctor, but even I am not that susceptible to medication. I think it was just the idea that it was a valid prescription that helped me over the hump.

Anyway, that was ~15 years ago, so I can only assume something about the treatment worked.
 
"Not intended to treat or cure any legitimate illness."

Try to find where they hide the fine print.
 
new skeptic said:
No way the Leptoprin lady is the scariest. Her continued warnings about the product, high flying promises regarding its effectiveness, and creepy mannarisms make it so that those commercials give off a "deal with the devil" vibe.

P.S. you know Leptoprin's other name is Anorex... seriously :D
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Yeah, I was just noticing last night that that woman has the scariest eyes I have ever seen. She has a look inher eyse like she just killed her entire family and buried them in her back yard....then went to shoot the commercial.
 
c4ts said:
Try to find where they hide the fine print.
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We've had a 42" widescreen set since early November. You'd be surprised at all the fine print we can read, and most of it is downright hysterically funny (or appalling). Do you have any idea how many things can't be depended upon to do what you would buy them for?
 
Nyarlathotep said:
Yeah, I was just noticing last night that that woman has the scariest eyes I have ever seen. She has a look inher eyse like she just killed her entire family and buried them in her back yard....then went to shoot the commercial.
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LOL! And don't you dare try to buy it if you only want to lose 5 or 10 pounds. Oh no, it's much too powerful for that. Well, that tells me that with that stuff you should be able to take off those 5 or 10 pounds in about an hour or so, right?
 
"New" pill, called ProVactin. I wonder when these will stop and infomercials go back to "all natural" penis hardeners like the ones that played endlessly four, five and six years ago.
 
Okay new thought - what about a pill for "Willpower"?

You market the pill (a placebo obviously) as the crucial step in losing weight.

Repeat how people fail diets because of a lack of Willpower, but this new pill will provide that.

It may have an actual beneficial psychological effect, in which case it would literally be providing them with willpower.

So the marketing would be true.

What ya think?


I realise that technically you would be selling sugar pills at a massive mark-up and it would not directly have the advertised affect and any positive affect noticed by the subject would be a result of the subjects own convictions, beliefs and misperceptions of the effect...

But for some strange reason I'm guessing this isn't currently actually against the law.
 
jambo372 said:
A friend of mine has a fat aunt who was prescribed fat-blockers by the doctor. Supposedly they work by lowering the absorption of fats.
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I can't remember the name of those, but IIRC correctly, there are two main types on the market that you can get through prescription. They would either be a fat-blocker, or an appetite suppressant/speed. I don't think doctors much like prescribing the appetite suppressants though, as they have some pretty nasty side-effects and potential complications.

With the fat-blockers though (and I can't for the life of me remember the name), they reduce up to a third of the fat in your diet. The downside, of course, being that you need to eat low fat, or you'll be having some nasty gastro troubles.

I suppose the fat blocker ones would be good if you were really obese, but really, I don't think they would help that much. You need to learn to eat properly at some point.
 
Nyarlathotep said:
Yeah, I was just noticing last night that that woman has the scariest eyes I have ever seen. She has a look inher eyse like she just killed her entire family and buried them in her back yard....then went to shoot the commercial.
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with a gun. a commercial shooting gun. And you had better be really fat or YOU'RE NEXT!
 
Mmmmm

jambo372 said:
A friend of mine has a fat aunt who was prescribed fat-blockers by the doctor. Supposedly they work by lowering the absorption of fats.

She farted out grease.
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Mmmmm, Yummmy!
 
Jas said:
I can't remember the name of those, but IIRC correctly, there are two main types on the market that you can get through prescription. They would either be a fat-blocker, or an appetite suppressant/speed. I don't think doctors much like prescribing the appetite suppressants though, as they have some pretty nasty side-effects and potential complications.

With the fat-blockers though (and I can't for the life of me remember the name), they reduce up to a third of the fat in your diet. The downside, of course, being that you need to eat low fat, or you'll be having some nasty gastro troubles.

I suppose the fat blocker ones would be good if you were really obese, but really, I don't think they would help that much. You need to learn to eat properly at some point.
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I think the fat blocker is Meridian. And I understand it does have some bad side effects. My wifes doctor put her on a stimulant, she lost wieght but would be up cleaning the house at 3:00am, so she ended up stoping the diet.
 
This is all very interesting. We don't have diet pill ads on TV in the UK. We do have various dubious skin potions to reduce cellulite (90% of women reported success after just three weeks - small print: as tested on sample group of 38) and that sort of thing. Anti-ageing creams are big here now. The latest is NEW! WITH BOSWELLOX! Hhm. Sounds a bit like Botox but is in fact extract of frankincense. Natural embalming fluid then.

We're more in the grip of fad diets than diet pills here - mostly from America (thanks, guys). The Atkins has now been replaced by the GI diet (GI as in Glycemic Index, not American soldiers). There are loads of TV programmes about lardies trying to lose weight - it's freak show TV, with a person or whole family being shouted out by some pseudo-dietician.

There is one called 'Dr' Gillian McKeith who, it has been found, bought her PhD online from some dubious American postal college and talks utter utter bollocks (this isn't slander, it's been proved by scientific journalists). The journalist investigating her managed to buy the same qualifications for his cat - who was dead. And yet she is just starting a new season on a widely watched channel.

People are just so desperate, they'll swallow any old ◊◊◊◊◊. Anything is easier than getting their lardy arses down to gym and chucking out the takeaway pizzas menus.

We're evolved to seek out fat and sugar, which were once rare and hard to find. But now we're surrounded by them.

I know it's hard to lose weight and then to keep it off, but can't people see that diet books and diet pills don't work. otherwise, you'd only need one book or one course of pills and you'd be fixed for life.

Food is not your friend. It's fuel.
 
I forgot to add, in response to Treble Head: I saw the fat guy from Bad Manners on TV recently. He is a shadow of his former self.
 
Ugh. I just about lost it when I saw a new commercial for Leptoprin. It starts with, "Have you seen this commercial?" and runs the original, "This is far too expensive for casual dieters, blah blah blah..." Then it continues with, "Now, through our special offer, you can have it for this discounted price!"

It makes me wonder if it was the plan all along (take in as much as possible from the fools who would pay a lot, then reduce the price to get the "bargain hunters"), or if it was necessary because they weren't making enough with the high price.

One of those commercials (it may be Leptoprin; they all sort of run together) features the worst ad copy ever. "Are you overweight? Take a look in the mirror!" It seems to imply that they're blaming the viewer for their condition -- which is, for the most part, entirely true. But such a truth does not make for good advertising; something else must be causing the extra weight, something that their product can solve.
 
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