I have been back in the States for over a month now. And for the past week, have been spending a lot of my time watching tv. The set is on pretty much all day and all night. I am gorging on it before I head back to my current home in Vienna, Austria.
Don't get me wrong: I obviously love watching TV. I have since I discovered "I Love Lucy" back in the late 60's. But I have been lucky enough to be ripped away from its insidious clutches at a fairly early age, when I had to go off to Europe - boarding school.
Channel hopping between CBS, NBC, ABC, the Food Channel, Bravo, Lifetime, TCM, TNT, HBO, E, etc etc I am blown away by how much food advertising you see. Like, all the time. And if it's not food, it's some form of medication that you have got to have unless you want to run to the bathroom every five minutes. Or have a vaginal itch. Or fail to blow up a balloon because you failed to buy the right asthma product. It's crazy!
If you're in perfect health at the outset of your TV day, you will definitely have symptoms of one sort or another that will drive you to the local 24 hour pharmacy to grab a painkiller or cortisone cream.
As far as the food commercials go, even ads for banks and credit cards use cupcakes to entice you. Reality TV sure tip the scales.....and not in a good way. Hell's Kitchen and Gordan Ramsey are entertaining but watching people cook delicious food will make anybody hungry, even me.
My suggestion, if you want to lose weight: stop watching TV. At least for a while. It will not only do your scales some good, but instead, you'll feed your brain. Sitting in the garden, or in your room staring at the wall is more educational than 95% of all the c**p that is fed to you on TV. And you won't be constantly lured by $5 breakfast bargain specials at 1200 calories a pop.
Read a book. Take a walk. Stare at the wall.