I think the line is spoken in hopes that it will appeal to the intended purchasers and not in regard to its truth.
I have this odd conviction that most lines in advertising are composed without concern to the truth, except insofar as regulations restrain them.
I used to work for a man who did surgeries that shunted people’s intestines around so they would lose weight. (This was years before the advent of the gastric bypass - my boss eventually gave up the surgeries because, even though they worked well, they caused such weird metabolic side effects that he considered they broke his Hippocratic oath. Or, at least, weren’t a great idea.)
(One of them was a guy whose bypassed loop harbored a strain of bacteria which made alcohol. When they got going the only way to sober him up was to give him antibiotics.)
My boss, who was a fairly passive-aggressive Swede with an aggressive-aggressive side restrained by intellectualism, told me that his super-morbidly-obese clients were the most passive-aggressive people he had ever met. He said, “Don’t ever do it until it’s the patient who asks you. His wife will come and beg you to do the surgery. Don’t. His children, his parents if living, his brothers and sisters, his friends, his neighbors, his boss, his pastors will come and beg you to do the surgery. Don’t do it until he begs you himself.”
He also introduced me to one of his patients who had made the complete turnaround that comes with the lost weight. I will never forget how she stood in the clinic room, lifting her arms, checking out the new surgery lines where they had had to amputate those huge bags of skin that depended from her now skinny arms. She told me, “There is a huge change in your life when you lose the weight, and you can’t do it alone. The surgery and the surgeon is the least important part of it. The counselors rank near the most important. But you need to have a team, and the team gets you through it. And everythiing about you will change. And not everyone can handle it.”
She also told me (what I expect most people know nowadays, but it was my first time learning it) that the surgery does not take a fat person and slim her down into a normal person. She weighed about one-eighty and always would. My boss agreed; he said a super morbidly obese person has not only more fat cells in the body, but also more bone cells, more kidney cells, more heart cells, more muscle cells; only the fat cells go away with the dieting. He said you could show the increased density of their bones with bone scans.
So maybe the very morbidly obese people this ad is trying to reach are sitting there feeling helpless and hopeless, as I’m sure depressive symptoms are natural in this society once you reach that stage, and they would do anything to lose the weight but they’re fairly sure from decades of yo-yo experimentation that they can’t lose the weight, and they can’t exercise because their huge bodies HURT when they try (and indeed it is fairly dangerous to try to exercise when your heart is already pumping through a mile of capillaries only feeding fat). The appeal that it isn’t their fault may be designed to reach winningly through their depression, and/or their passive-aggressiveness, and get them to come forward and buy the product.
But I agree it is a lie, I propose that the people who wrote the commercial know it is a lie, and I agree you have every right to be irritated by it.