Too Thin?

11Mar10

Fat. It’s the word on every American’s mind. It’s a constant thought and it’s everywhere. On the front covers of magazines and on the news, it seems it’s impossible to escape the debate on weight. The federal government now claims that two-thirds of adult Americans are overweight and that 72 million of them are clinically obese. This weight debate has spawned a $50 billion industry of weight loss drugs, books and programs. They say America’s too fat, but the real question is: Is America, as a society and culture, obsessed with being skinny?

From director Kevin Smith being booted from a Southwest flight, to size four models being told they’re too big to work, it seems that the weight question is everywhere. It seems that America thinks “boney is beautiful”. With New York’s 2010 fashion week just ending, models are claiming that they’re being told they’re too big to work. Cocoa Roche, a size four and 120 pound model, claims that work has slowed down for her and that she was even fired from Ralph Lauren because she’s considered too big. Crystal Renn, now a size 12, is considered too big to model most fashions. Crystal, who struggled with anorexia for three years, says that she believes people are obsessed with being thin and it seems she right. Striking statistics claim that 10 million females and 1 million males suffer from eating disorders in this country and 42% of Americans conceded that they have negative feelings about overweight people.

Think about it, when you look at a thin person, most automatically make the judgment that they are completely healthy, but you don’t know that person’s personal life. A size 2 person who eats fast food three times a day, compared to a person whose size 18 on an organic diet with daily exercise, it’s most likely that the size 18 is actually the healthier one of the two. What someone looks like from the outside doesn’t always tell you their actual health.

Even though there are millions of books that urge people to lose weight, there are also several books that argue that is completely possible to be overweight and still healthy. Many people turn to diet pills and strict calorie diets in hopes of shedding pounds, but only 5% of dieters are able to keep the weight off after five years and 95% of them say they aren’t able to lose any weight at all. So is America skinny crazy? Well, it seems to be.

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Tags: america, anorexia, culture, debate, disorders, eating, fat, obese, skinny, society, thin