You may, however, need a diaper.

Have you heard? There’s a new diet pill out, available off-the-shelf. It’s called alli™ (the trade name begins with a lower-case a, so that’s not a typo, though it certainly looks like one), and it “works” by attaching “to some of the natural enzymes in the digestive system, preventing them from breaking down about a quarter of the fat you eat.”

The website recommends that you “start trimming fat from your diet, and get more physically active.” Oh-oh. Your little alli™ wants you to do some of the work! I guess it’s no miracle after all.

But let’s not talk about the arithmetic of weight loss. It’s just not hot. Let’s get down to the real nitty gritty. Or oily toily, as the case may be.

When I rail against marketing, it’s usually something like this that gets me going. I hate to be assumed stupid or gullible. Marketers use language to change our perceptions and influence our feelings and decisions. Jargon is a primary tool of cults. Anyone who “has reality” on Scientology can attest to that. Marketers use language in much the same way. The philosophy differs, but the end goal is the same: to bring people into the fold.

Because of the way in which alli™ works, eating meals with too much fat may cause side effects known as treatment effects.

Here, the alli™ marketing team changes the term “side effect” into “treatment effect.” Why?

Visualize a team of stressed out marketing people in a conference room, trying to figure out how to spin greasy diarrhea as something that doesn’t sound so bad. Something that maybe even sounds good, like a sign of progress; an indication that the product is doing its job. Treatment effects.

What, might you ask, are some of alli’s™ treatment effects?

• gas with oily spotting - which means, in layman’s terms, pizza grease farts that stain your drawers;
• loose stools - a/k/a ’sploso, the trots, Hershey squirts;
• more frequent stools that may be hard to control - a/k/a you gonna shit your pants at a stop light.

Clearly, one needs adult diapers when one is taking alli™! More than a The Shuttle™, I’d wager!

Everyone wants a quick fix, but the fact is that we have created very sedentary lives for ourselves. Convenience, as I am wont to say these days, kills. We didn’t need elliptical machines a hundred and fifty years ago when we were forking hay or whatever it was that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s pa did to avoid obesity. We sit on our asses, most of us, and our jobs consist primarily of tapping away at computer keyboards with our quick little fingers, an activity which doesn’t use very many calories. We have to create opportunities to move our bodies, but we’re still eating like we have real work to do.

Like those of most diet pills, the alli™ plan requires you to do all the things you should do anyway if you’re going to lose weight. Reduce your caloric intake, increase the amount of exercise you do. So, we’re back to arithmetic again, aren’t we?

Weight loss is hard. Many times, there are other health factors at work that make it even harder, next to impossible for some. alli™ is the next miracle cure, and like those that came before it, it will make its manufacturer an assload of money. When its popularity starts to fade, and that will happen, just about everyone who used it will gain all their weight back again, just like they did after the Cambridge diet, after the Metabolife, and the Slim Fast, and Atkins, and on, and on, and on.

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Lifestyle drugs make the big pharmas big money. We line their pockets at our peril.