On Sunday, I was flipping through the channels when Anna Nicole Smith came on. I dropped the pizza I was eating and my eyes widened. It wasn’t her big boobs that made me stare, nor was it her sexy red dress. It was what she was advertising. “It’s TrimSpa baby,” she said, as she tossed her hair and wiggled like a grasshopper with no legs.

According to the commercial, Anna Nicole Smith has loss more than 60 pounds from taking the weight-loss pill TrimSpa. She was doing the commercial to show the viewers how her life had been transformed from being fat and unhappy to being skinny and cheerful.

Yeah right.

There are thousands of weight- loss pills out there, and there are millions of people who take them. However, none of these pills actually works permanently without the behavioral changes to accompany them.

Judith Trumpy, nutrition therapist at the Thielen Student Health Center, said hardly anyone can lose weight on a pill without the lifestyle changes to accompany it.

The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t approve these pills based on how well they work. They approve them based on whether or not they are harmful, and even then bad pills slip through the cracks.

It took the highly publicized death of Rashidi Wheeler, a Northwestern football player, for the FDA to ban ephedrine. Who knows how many people died from weight-loss products containing ephedrine before it was banned?

When I came here from Nigeria, I had never seen as many people as I have seen here in America who are overweight. It’s ironic that for a society so obsessed with weight loss, Americans are the fattest people on earth. Why is this so? It’s probably because there is so much misinformation out there by companies that manufacture these weight-loss products.

Anyone trying to lose weight would have to sort through a variety of fad diets and stupid pills, with stupid people as their representatives.

There are so many girls who think they are overweight who are actually at a healthy weight. According to qualityhealth.com, not enough fat around a woman’s hips or thighs is actually unhealthy. Just because a lot of people with unhealthy habits are fat doesn’t mean that everyone that doesn’t look like Paris Hilton is hyper-obese.

Several studies have been done that show that fat girls who exercise regularly are actually healthier than skinny girls who don’t. If you are as skinny as a broomstick and you eat salads for every meal, take note.

Several of these drug companies create a fantasy world and then lure people in with deceiving commercials. In their fantasy world, you have to be skinny to be healthy. In their fantasy world, Paris Hilton is accepted as the standard of beauty, happiness and health. In their fantasy world, people who don’t look like models are ugly, unhappy and unhealthy.

These companies set people out on a dubious, elusive tilt-a-whirl of weight losses and weight gains that end up in an abyss of discontent. It is common knowledge among health professionals that you can’t lose weight permanently on a pill alone, so why do people still try?

Quite often, the dangers of being “overweight” are overstated while the dangers of continuous weight cycling are understated. The failure rate for sustained weight loss by using pills is almost 100 percent; therefore, drug companies that sell these weight loss pills are actually doing more harm than good.

Human beings were not meant to be cringing beings defined by 30-second commercials or by covergirls with skinny legs and fake boobs. We were all meant for so much more. Even though we may not be skinny or pretty but only average and obscure, we are each unique in our own way. In our own unique way we can live healthy life styles.

Don’t be duped by pseudo pills and blonde representatives (e.g., Anna Nicole Smith). Don’t go searching for weight-loss magic in the neverending maze of weight-loss “science.”

It would take you the rest of your life.