Why is There an Obsession with Celebrity Weight Loss?

Since most of the female population seems to be on a diet, it is hardly surprising that there is a fascination, if not an obsession, with celebrity weight loss. It is because there is such a huge transformation from a fat celebrity to a thin one that so much coverage is devoted to a trivial issue, in the knowledge that this is what people want to read about. If you put a 'before' picture on the front cover of a magazine, it is guaranteed that someone is going to open it up to see what the celebrity looks in the 'after' picture.

Celebrity weight loss is therefore a rather lucrative business, helping to shift more copies of celebrity magazines and also increasing the amount of interest in the celebrity in question, especially in how they went about losing the weight. Celebrities will obviously try to capitalise on this new-found interest and so it is not unusual to see a wide range of exercise DVDs fronted by a celebrity who has lost a noticeable amount of weight. There are plenty of people who will go out and buy a celebrity-fronted exercise DVD in the hope they achieve the same results.

As far as the general public is concerned, celebrities have an easy life, so easy that they shouldn't have a problem controlling their weight. It can therefore come as a surprise to see that a celebrity has gained weight, although it usually isn't long before they've lost it all again. Yo-yo dieting can make a celebrity seem more human, as there are many women facing the same difficulties, and when a celebrity loses weight it gives ordinary women the belief that they can lose weight, too. It obviously takes more than just following an exercise DVD, though!

The obsession with celebrity weight loss is unlikely to go away any time soon, even when many of the celebrities are z-listers whose 'job' is merely to be famous, because there are so many celebrity magazines and only so much 'news' to cover. Weight loss is an issue many ordinary people are struggling to deal with and so there are plenty of individuals interested in celebrity weight loss. They continue to purchase magazines just because a slimmed-down celebrity is on the front and are prepared to try out various diet fads and fitness plans if a celebrity advocates it. Maybe one day, when people are less fixated with celebrity culture and aren't so preoccupied with their weight, this obsession will fade, but it's hard to see this happening in the near future.