Having just read the Hunger chapter in The Beauty Myth, I felt a bit horrified. I originally thought that the "not eating to get thin" idea existed but not too wide spread. The statement that "Many are hospitalized, many die" scared me to a certain degree (179). How is it that people know that not eating is harmful in many situations and that both women and men (but mostly women I think) do this often if they feel pressured from the outside world. The idea that we need to be thin has been there for a long time, but the ways in which we get thin have been chosen for us by the media. Advertising of things such as cigarettes, diet tablets, and other sources of "thinness" point us towards the wrong way of being thin.
I also think that being thin and being fit have been confused. They are not one in the same thing. Being fit often results in being thin, but simply being thin does not at all mean that you are strong and fit. The goal should be to be strong and fit, not thin. Exercising and physical activity is what we were built for, not staying motionless. Therefore that should be our primary cause. Wolf wrote that Vogue stated that a woman who had become thin unnaturally "'look as though she has not had enough milk as a baby and her face has that expression one feels Londoners wore in the blitz'" (185). The second part of that phrase, I think, brings out how women feel when they put themselves through the torture of not eating. It is an awful expression to have on one's face. The face loses all color and expression, looks deflated and sickening, and scared. I personally have never understood why everyone connects fatness to eating directly without first going to lack of exercise. I suppose it connects to the fast food industry as well. As people have been realizing that fast food makes us unhealthy and obese, I think they have decided to not eat fast food without replacing it with other food. They have assumed that it is the "eating" part that makes us "fat" and not the fact that fast food is wildly unhealthy.
Something that scares me is thinking of the future. If we keep going down this road to thinness in the wrong way, a lot more people will have many problems. We need to emphasize exercising a lot more than we do today and decrease the emphasis on beauty and fat. The negativity that comes with the word "fat" is astonishing, and it should have never been there.
I also think that being thin and being fit have been confused. They are not one in the same thing. Being fit often results in being thin, but simply being thin does not at all mean that you are strong and fit. The goal should be to be strong and fit, not thin. Exercising and physical activity is what we were built for, not staying motionless. Therefore that should be our primary cause. Wolf wrote that Vogue stated that a woman who had become thin unnaturally "'look as though she has not had enough milk as a baby and her face has that expression one feels Londoners wore in the blitz'" (185). The second part of that phrase, I think, brings out how women feel when they put themselves through the torture of not eating. It is an awful expression to have on one's face. The face loses all color and expression, looks deflated and sickening, and scared. I personally have never understood why everyone connects fatness to eating directly without first going to lack of exercise. I suppose it connects to the fast food industry as well. As people have been realizing that fast food makes us unhealthy and obese, I think they have decided to not eat fast food without replacing it with other food. They have assumed that it is the "eating" part that makes us "fat" and not the fact that fast food is wildly unhealthy.
Something that scares me is thinking of the future. If we keep going down this road to thinness in the wrong way, a lot more people will have many problems. We need to emphasize exercising a lot more than we do today and decrease the emphasis on beauty and fat. The negativity that comes with the word "fat" is astonishing, and it should have never been there.
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