Another day, another company in hot water with a PR mess on its hands.
This time, it's Cosmopolitan Magazine and the way it titled an article about a woman who lost weight.
It's a headline that makes you want to click. "How This Woman Lost 44 pounds Without Any Exercise!" Cosmopolitan Magazine tweeted the title, but once inside the article, viewers found it wasn't all as it seemed. The woman featured had cancer. And that didn't sit too well with many of them.
Readers fired off tweets like, "Cancer is not a diet plan," and "Are you insane?" prompting Cosmo to delete the tweet and change the title of the article.
But for people like Lauren Schwartz, it was too little too late.
"I think it's offensive to me as a woman and yeah of course as a cancer survivor," Schwartz said.
Schwartz is now cancer free but the memories of her diagnosis, treatment and recovery make the title of this article, and the article itself hard to read.
"It's a revolting idea that weight loss is a positive consequence of cancer," Schwartz says. "Weight loss is never a positive consequence of cancer and there are no consequences of cancer other than maybe taking a good hard look at your life."
The article didn't state directly that cancer helped the woman lose weight, only prompted her to find a weight loss regiment. Schwartz says the real message young women need, is to focus more on their health, than their waistline.
"Let's raise our awareness in our community," Schwartz says. "Be aware of our bodies, take care of ourselves, go to the doctor when you think something is wrong. Go to the doctor anyway and get a check up but take care of ourselves. Sometimes it takes bad PR to have a good positive message out of it and that would be my hope."
We've asked Cosmo for a response to the criticism it has received but so far the magazine isn't commenting.
