In the category with white chocolate M&Ms for things that I wish I had thought of first, MissRepresentation’s #NotBuyingIt app is one of the coolest things I’ve heard of recently. It joins the ranks of other apps I just love.

From the same folks that brought us that eye-opening film a couple years ago comes an app that brings media literacy to your finger tips.

The #NotBuyingIt idea was first made popular as simply a hashtag on Twitter. PolicyMic reports that the hashtag accompanied over 10,000 tweets during this year’s Super Bowl and reached almost four million people. The app takes that kind of grassroots consumer power to the next level.

The app combines the power of social media (Twitter, namely) as a higher tech “complaint department.” Users of the app can slap “#NotBuyingIt” onto an ad that they find offensive or degrading and let the company using the ad know how they feel. The app also allows mapping of where the most offensive ads are originating and which communities are taking the biggest stand.

The app is still in development and the creators are working to raise money to make it available. If it’s something you want to support, check out the fundraising page.

The months leading up to last night’s The Biggest Loser premier left me struggling with the decision of whether or not to watch what I feared would be a train wreck. On the one hand, I feel strongly that it’s unwise and unfair to make judgments based on per-conceived notions. On the other, I didn’t want to inadvertently support the show by my watching. And I didn’t particularly want to feel angry and sad.

For full disclosure, I’m writing this post in advance of the show’s premiere and setting it to auto-post. As of writing this, the premier is still over a day away and I haven’t fully decided if I’ll tune in.

If you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, The Biggest Loser has decided to “tackle childhood obesity” this season by featuring three children on the show. The kids, two aged 13 and one 16, aren’t participating in all of the typical aspects of the show that the adults undergo. However, their stories are featured prominently and the goal is to help them lose weight – lots of it – during the course of the season.

Let’s just give the producers of the show the benefit of the doubt for a moment and suggest that they are genuinely concerned with childhood obesity – rather than simply trying to use our extremely misguided cultural obsession with waging war on fat children to revive a show that’s getting stale. Okay, so we’re saying they care about childhood obesity.

The show clearly knows much less about childhood obesity than they should, given the fact that they are purporting to be tackling it for the common good. For one, parading children on television is rarely a good idea, and when it comes to an issue as loaded with bias and discrimination as weight, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Anyone who has perused YouTube or has teenage friends on Facebook knows how cruel appearance and weight comments are the norm, particularly when the commenters are able to be cloaked in anonymity. To plaster three young people, not even old enough to give their own consent, on television to talk about their weight struggles is setting them up to be victims (or sadly, worse victims) of scrutiny and cruelty from the strong anti-fat segment of our population.

Further, the fact that The Biggest Loser frequently ignores is that the type of weight loss promoted on the show – the high intensity, rapid kind – is a formula for regaining weight. And then some. Over on Weighty Matters, Dr. Yoni Freedhoff points out that the vast majority of the show’s contestants do not maintain the weight loss. This isn’t surprising given that the same is true for 95% of people who diet, many of whom end up gaining more weight than they lost. So in fact, what the show is doing is not waging war on obesity, but potentially war on these children’s metabolisms.

By featuring these kids on a weight loss reality television show, we’re not only doing them a grave disservice, but we’re promoting inaccurate and dangerous ideas to our children: that extreme measures are the way to achieve weight loss, that weight loss is worth all sacrifices, and that it’s okay for children to diet. And perhaps worst of all, it communicates the idea to kids that weight is a self-created reality and that the “solution” is must be self-created as well, through punishing and painful measures.

Dr. Freedhoff recently initiated an advertiser boycott to help send a message to The Biggest Loser. If you’re as frustrated by this as I am, I encourage you to consider what you can do to take a stand for the kids — the three on the show and the millions around the world.

{image via pinterest}

 On each birthday and anniversary, my husband and I spend a few minutes doing a “year in review” in which we go month by month reflecting on things that happened that left an impression in our minds. While my memory seems to get poorer with each passing year and I find myself relying more heavily on my smart phone calendar to recall the milestones, I love this tradition of spending some time reflecting on how the year unfolded. A year is made of tiny moments, and our review is a way to collect all those moments – of every size – and watch how they were interwoven.

In honor of this tradition and the arrival of the new year, I’d like to offer an quick look through 2012 via the posts that made the fabric of Nourishing the Soul. Another year has passed, and I have been so blessed to have this space to share with all of you my musings, learnings, and hopes. I have also been so lucky to receive some INCREDIBLE comments that made me think for days and, in some cases, shifted my thinking on a particular topic. Last, I feel honored to have gotten to share some beautiful and poignant guest posts where readers have offered their own narratives and wisdom as a gift to NTS readers.

So, thank you to each and every one of you.

If you have a few moments to reflect, check out some of the highlights of NTS’s 2012. If you’re new to the site, this is a chance to catch up on what you might have missed.

I wish each and every one of you a magical new year, filled with love (from wherever it may come), light, and hope. I hope for everyone reading that they may cultivate a life about which they feel passionate. For those who need a new beginning, this is your chance to take a single step toward that promise to yourself. May strength and peace be in your year ahead.

I’ve vacillated about whether to write a post related to the recent tragedy in Newtown, CT.

On the one hand, it’s not like I have nothing to say. I am a psychologist after all, and much of the conversation has centered around mental illness and difficulties and disparities in mental health access. And grief is a human emotion that I am extensively trained to work with in my patients.

On the other hand, I found myself wondering if there was anything that I could add to the conversation that would be meaningful. I am not someone who believes that because I have a public space on which to voice my thoughts that this means I must or, often, should. Sometimes the best thing to say is nothing at all.

On the other hand (that’s my third hand, if you’re counting), to broadcast silence and not acknowledge the horrifying tragedy in some way feels tone-deaf. Moments of silence are humbling and give space to experience the feelings that need felt. Ongoing silence feels as though it doesn’t do justice to the lives that were lost. Those children and adults deserve to be spoken for.

On yet another hand, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we have to make meaning of the lives of those killed by using them as part of an agenda. While it’s often horrific events like this one, unfortunately enough, that can lead to real and sustainable change, I don’t believe that these lives or their deaths are in vain unless we politicize them. Each and every life has immeasurable meaning, regardless of what comes from this event.

So you might now be seeing how I’ve struggled – my mind filled with arguments and angles. And so instead of the posts that I thought about writing – the one about how Asperger’s syndrome does not include a propensity for violence or the one about ways to talk to children about tragedy or the one about how we have to stop blaming parents – I’m writing this one.

This one. The one in which I share how it’s hard to make sense of a tragedy like last Friday’s. The one in which I share how sometimes it makes it hard to even think at all.

When it comes down to it, you don’t need my prophesizing about what will become of the mental health system in this country or my advice on how to come to terms with the unthinkable. Maybe this space just needs my honesty.

And to be honest, I’m deeply, deeply saddened. I’m sure you are too.

We can be in our sadness together. I invite you to feel everything you’re feeling and to take a moment of to acknowledge gratitude for the ones you love. That’s what I’ll be doing.