Persuasive

Erica M. Albrecht

A 14 year girl, standing 5’6” and weighing 140 pounds, just entering high school, watches television at night and every other commercial is an advertisement for some kind of dieting program. Night after night she watches these advertisements, and sees all these super thin women on television. It gets to the point where she stands in front of her mirror and starts to worry about a few extra pounds. Soon this worry leads to loss of focus, loss of focus leads to an obsession with her weight. Now she is skipping meals, cutting calories until she is to the point where she is hardly eating enough to sustain her metabolism. During the three months of this obsession she is down to 100 pounds, but that still is not thin enough for her. This story is a prime example of why instead of promoting dieting, we as a society, should be promoting healthy eating.

Dieting as a whole has just blown up everywhere you look, unfortunatly these dieting programs are promoted poorly. Some of diet programs are promoted with skinny models that supposedly lost weight on that program. These types programs lead many people, especially young women down a dangerous road to an eating disorder. If dieting was promoted more towards a path of healthy eating, we as a society could possibly slow down the rise of eating disorders.

As a society, we have become so image focused that it almost seems like image is all that matters. Everywhere you turn you see another dieting ad, with another before and after shot of clients on those dieting programs. Picture this you’re sitting at home watching your favorite television show, and there is a commercial promoting Weight Watchers, towards the end of the commercial you see a few before and after shots of some of their clients, and they go through so fast that it is hard to tell if they actually are the same people. Also there is no way to tell how long this person you just saw pictures of has been using Weight Watchers, or if they were on...