New Year's Resolutions in a Hi-Res Age

  

By Sam Watermeier

In this season of new resolutions, advertisements for the weight loss-boosting cereal Special K are everywhere, all of which enticingly ask, “What will you gain when you lose?” Over the past year of losing weight, I have gained an unsettling awareness of our culture’s obsession with physical appearance — an obsession that seems to have reached an all-time public high. 

When I turn on the TV or open a magazine, I feel inundated with photos and tales of physical transformation.

In the fall of 2011, I decided to transform my appearance as well. I was simply tired of being a chubby guy. I felt like a thin person trapped in a big body, which seems to be the media’s view of anyone who is overweight. Like any ambitious American, I wanted to shed my shell as quickly as possible.

The regime that followed was essentially glorified torture. For several months, I ate and exercised as respectively little and much as possible. My daily meals consisted of the following: a Slim Fast shake in the morning, a Special K cereal bar for lunch, a salad for dinner and coffee throughout the day to boost my energy. I jogged on the treadmill for at least an hour every day, usually burning between 500 and 700 calories (about half of what I was eating.)

Between late November and February, I lost about 50 pounds (more than I should have, according to my doctor.) At a certain point, I didn’t feel hunger anymore. I fed on reactions to my new appearance.

Herein lies the dangerous appeal of Facebook or any social media — its ability to evoke almost instant validation. When friends liked my new profile pictures and commented on my appearance, I felt absolute satisfaction. Only later did I realize how shallow and artificial that satisfaction was.

Most of the “likes” I received were from people I barely knew. Why did so much of my happiness depend upon their virtual validation?

When you turn on the TV, you are bound to find plenty of strangers telling you that you will be a better, happier person if you are thin. (This is also suggested by the countless “happy hand on hip” profile pictures online). In my view, we live in an aesthetic-driven age in which our external condition — and society’s view of it — determine our internal state rather than the other way around. Is that because society is becoming more two-dimensional, as people are engaging more with cyberspace than the world outside it? Like The Film Yap’s Nick Rogers wrote in his review of “The Social Network,” we have all been in computer whiz Mark Zuckerberg’s position at the end of that film, refreshing our Facebook pages, “awaiting digital confirmation of our flesh-and-blood worth.”

Social media offers an illusion of intimacy, a chance for people to acknowledge each other’s appearances more comfortably and discreetly.

Of course, the emphasis on physicality over personality was apparent long before the advent of profile pages. The media seems to always largely focus on what is tangible, visible, marketable. (Weight loss programs are arguably easier to “sell” than treatments for depression.) News and social media focuses on issues we can see — and sensationalize.

In that sense, our culture has scratched only the surface of human potential. Hopefully we can dig deeper, look into less visible problems, reach for less tangible goals — food for thought as we chase our resolutions this month. 

This Saturday, from 11 to noon on 91.3 WCRD, you can hear more of Media Matters' thoughts on this topic.