If I had any true power, I’d wage a damned holy war on Kellogg’s for its Special K products alone. Seriously, you all, I would be in full mad scientist mode right now developing some formula to nuke Special K right off the supermarket shelves, and I’d do it wearing blue rubber gloves and with an intense, head-tilted-back mwahahahahaha!
Why the rage all of a sudden? Well, I found myself in the cereal aisle about a month ago. I wanted to get the Sugar Frosted Coco Bombs, but then I saw that Special K was on sale. Oh, what the hell, I thought, I’m not a child but a grown woman and plopped a box of Special K Chocolatey Delight in my basket. For the record, there is nothing chocolatey nor delightful about this cereal. It was awful. There’s this distinct, unpleasant metallic taste to Special K that no amount of waxy, faux chocolate can make up for. Do millions of women actually enjoy eating what tastes like nickels? I’m almost positive that at the end of the production line, someone stands grating metal directly into the boxes.
The next time I was at the store, I went back to the cereal aisle. I’m convinced Special K is trying to take over the world. It was bad enough when there was one variety and their slogan was that terrible “you can’t pinch an inch”. What a bunch of crap that was, eh? According to Special K, I am in dire need of their special diet. But now there are cereal bars, meal bars, snack bars, protein water, protein drinks, crackers, low fat granola, 8 cereal flavors (all of which leave a metallic aftertaste!) and their very own website designed to help you get skinny.
Trawling back through nearly forty years of vintage ads, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one Special K commercial that hasn’t made me want to hurl things at the television, write letters and boycott, with the exception of this one from 1971, which seems like some beautiful (heteronormative) alternate reality.
After my regrettable Special K purchase and the first gag-inducing bowl, I had the television on and up popped a post-holiday Special K commercial. We all know how diet commercials start up the very moment the holidays are over, don’t we? I can’t find this one online, and be thankful. In it, a woman sits with her small daughter having a tea party. There’s merry holiday music playing. The woman stands up, and the child-sized chair she is sitting in comes with her. Yes, her ass is too big for a child-sized chair! You know what that means? Special K challenge time for you, you lard butt!
Lesson: Women’s butts must not ever outgrow their five-year-old’s toy furniture.
There is danger lurking everywhere, ladies. The vending machine at work could get you!. Your male coworker’s head could turn into a popcorn popper!. That pint of chocolate ice cream you bought with every intention of eating will begin talking to you in a creepy, seductive voice and then you’ll remember you only bought it so you could NOT give into that temptation and eat a bowl of yucky cereal instead. Whatever it is you think you see, becomes a piece of food to you! And food is bad.
Lesson: Women need to fear all food but Special K, because it has issued an offensive attack on us and is a sneaky, sneaky beast set to ruin our skinny lives, or dreams of skinny lives.
Please note, you should also be afraid of having your photo taken and really worry about trying on a pair of jeans.
And your bikini wants to eat your face.
There have been infrequent inclusions of men in Special K ads, but you don’t want to forget this product is really only for women.
Lesson: Women take and take and take, but don’t ever give.
My very favorite Special K ad at the moment is the one with the mommy making a cake with her kid. Cue the scary music as she empties the batter into the pan and is left holding a bowl filled with leftover batter. RESIST THE TEMPTATION, LADY! YOU WILL GET FATTTTTTT! Eat Special K instead. It’s so much better than delicious, delicious cake batter.
Lesson: Mommy must make the cake for her precious loved ones, but she must not enjoy a fingerful of cake batter for fear of the death-fat that will instantly produce. Also implicit is that she will not be eating the finished cake product, either.
Do you see, THL readers, just how insidious Special K is and why I hate it so? This shit has been going on for forty years. The problem is, I’ve exhausted myself too much with all this ranting to start that damned war. Instead, I think I’d better take that batch of cookies out of the oven. The one I didn’t bake for my children, because I have none. The one I didn’t bake for my SO, because I am single. The one I am not bringing to work, because I barely tolerate most of my coworkers and they don’t deserve cookies. The one I plan to eat, one cookie at a time, all by myself.
PS, I licked the bowl.
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I love my mom quite a lot. However, she was definitely a product of her environment and has never really left that environment. That, and she is/was herself very naturally tiny. I don’t think she ever understood why I wasn’t. Not to excuse her, but it’s not an easy lesson for anyone to learn if they are exposed to nothing else.
It’s this prevalent thought that all fat people are in danger of dropping on the spot (AND costing insurance companies money, oh noes!) that we as a society can’t seem to shake. I am active as all get out. Eat well. Healthy as the proverbial horse.
Am still “fat”.
sbg(Quote) (Reply)
Sounds like you need a different doctor?
Gategrrl(Quote) (Reply)
Who me? If I could afford a better doctor, I would, but we have to go to La Clinica del Value (and we got booted off of OHP ‘cuz we were either too poor or not poor enough…I don’t know the nitty-gritty of it).
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
Actually, it can be a little of both.
Your (universal “your”) brain needs fat, and fructose and simple carbs can mess with your serotonin balance, if that’s something to which you’re genetically prone — so if you’re dieting and depriving yourself of foods with fat in them and generally starving yourself by undereating, then you get just the first whiff of simple carbs + sugar + fat (COOKIEZ) can send you right over the edge. It’s reactive.
Hormones can also help. When PMSing, even a mango has been known to set off a monster sugar binge.
littlem(Quote) (Reply)
Huh, that’s very interesting. Still a brain thing, but physiological rather than psychological. Makes sense. Thanks!
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
I really do think it can be a bit of both.
AISYK, stress hormones can do a number on the autonomic nervous system, so what we think about a situation can push us to stress eat/compulsively eat/binge, especially if there’s no other stress relief outlet.
Then again, just like there are those of us more genetically prone to alcohol and nicotine addiction, some are also more prone to food addiction — simple carbs especially b/c they flood the nervous system with the serotonin, thus (temporarily) alleviating stress — than others, and it takes a fairly radical dietary change to suffuse the physiological reaction, let alone break the addiction.
/knows too much about this
littlem(Quote) (Reply)
Great observations. I recently bought a family-size box of Special K (so they must now include men and children in their target consumers) and was casually looking at the nutrition label on the side. 1 serving (1 cup) of cereal has 23 carbs (this does not include the milk you put on it which also has significant carbs). By contrast, the huge 4.25 oz. Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar with Almonds which I was working on has only 21 carbs per serving (38 grams or roughly 1/3 of the huge bar)! Now, all things being pretty much equal, I’d much rather eat chocolate for 2 meals a day and lose weight than eat Special K.
Bri(Quote) (Reply)
I agree up there about it being all carbs. Holy crap! The way I am, a Special K diet (2 meals replacements of SK plus one “real” meal) would not only make weight loss impossible, but it would make me weak and shaky.
My nigel is a skinny “carb person” and could eat a diet of nothing but sugar and noodles and milk. I’m a thick, stocky type. I feel much better on proteins, olive oil, fruits and veggies.
Right now I am lifting weights. It’s a big middle finger to the P who says women should just get tinier and tinier until they disappear. No offense meant to the naturally tiny of us out there.
JT(Quote) (Reply)
That metallic taste can probably be explained by a neat science-y experiment I once did. Take a ziploc bag full of Special K, crush it up into really fine crumbs, and then pour it out onto a surface (you might want to use a plate or a paper towel to make it easier to clean up all the crumbs). Take a magnet and wave it a couple inches above the pile of pulverized Special K remains. Examine the magnet after doing so, and you should be able to find lots of teeny-tiny bits of iron sticking to it. Yup, Special K is chock-full of iron, all right.
Donna(Quote) (Reply)
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