This post is sponsored by Lean Cuisine — all opinions are my own.
As someone who works in the health and fitness industry, I have a pretty love/hate relationship with the month of January.
On one hand, I truly love all the people who are newly interested in their health. Call them what you will — January Joiners, Resolutioners. Sure, they crowd the gyms and the grocery stores. They might not always stay, but they have good intentions.
What I hate about January — and even leading up to it — is all the New Year, New You messaging. Believe me, as someone who had my fair share of cookies and wine last month, I want to clean up my diet, too, but the New Year, New You messaging is exhausting. It implies we’re not enough. In January, on average, there is a diet message on TV or the Internet every 3 seconds.
Last June, Lean Cuisine launched a really cool campaign called #WeighThis. It asked women to answer: “How do you want to be weighed?”
After the video launched, Lean Cuisine asked women to share their own #WeighThis stories. As women, so many of us have difficult relationships with our weight, with food, with our appearance, but this message celebrates what women want to be weighed on — that has nothing to do with the scale. They created this really powerful experience in Grand Central.
For January, they’re looking to take the word diet out of the conversation, and they asked me to be a part of this campaign. They’ve developed a diet filter — both for Chrome browsers and for a cable box. The filter is a really interesting technology that mutes the diet conversation to focus on what really matters.
For the next month, I’ll be testing out these filters to see how removing the word “diet” affects my online and TV consumption. (Ironically, I won’t even be able to see it on my own site in this post.) I’m pretty excited to see how this blocks diet conversation in my media consumption(the Chrome filter even covers social media, too.) And Lean Cuisine is filtering this conversation for a good cause, too. As part of this campaign, they’re giving back to Girls Leadership, an organization which empowers girls to believe in themselves and express it.
What do you want to be weighed on? You can share it across social media with the hashtag #WeighThis.
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I think the "diet" adblocking is a really interesting idea. Maybe I'm stating the obvious, but wouldn't it also block out lean cuisines ads, since they are a type of "diet food"? I say this as a purchaser of lean cuisines, so it's nothing against the company itself. Just one of the many thoughts that ran through my head as I watched the commercial (and I admit I teared up!).
Well, I think that's the purpose of this campaign — to position themselves as not a diet food, but just another healthy option.
I share your thoughts on all the New Year, New You campaigns! I honestly see it along the lines of body shaming. I mean, it would have been much better to say 'better you'. I love the idea of blocking out 'diet'. I feel that the word is mostly associated with starving yourself so I think it's great that Lean Cuisine decided to disassociate themselves from the word :)
Great idea diet adblocking. I think that difficult to make the plan for diet as starving yourself :-)