Last week, my daughter came up to me after watching children's programming on TV. I believe it was Nickelodeon. She said, "Mom, I can tell you've been eating too many bad carbs. You need to get a week's worth of meals delivered to you: seven breakfasts, seven snacks, seven lunches, seven dinners, even seven desserts!"

"Oh?" I said, surprised. "What makes you say that?"

She pulled up her shirt to reveal her little bony girl body. "See, mommy? See how my hips go straight down? That's how YOURS should go."

"Really," I said, seething. "Where did you hear that?"

"On TV," she replied, then, looking up into my angry mommy face, she said, "It's okay, mommy. You're still nice."

I was boiling inside, because I became anorexic when I reached puberty. Until sophomore year of high school, I thought my hips were an unhealthy aberration, leading me to both exercise constantly and starve myself. I was at least 20 lbs. underweight trying to eliminate what was healthy and normal in the first place. That this was happening to my daughter made me murderous.

"That's not true," I told her. "Grown up ladies have hips that go out like mommy's. That helps carry the baby inside you when you're older."

"Oh," she said, knitting her brows slightly at the notion that the TV lied to her. "Okay." And off she skipped away to play.

I had no idea exactly which weight loss company had poisoned her mind until yesterday. It was my old nemesis, NutriSystems.

The earlier commercial that raised my ire ("I went from a size 10 to a size 4!") now included silouette diagrams of a "bad carb body" (pear shaped) and a "good carb body" (stick figure, straight up and down.) They improved on a classic!

Growl...