IN With THIN

        Discussions often turn into arguments as people rarely understand the style that they are presenting their opinions in.  Style is a result of diction, tone, and even punctuation as all in some way or another effect the intended message.  In the film “THIN” the director choose to display the title in wiry, skinny letters to play off the theme of the movie.  Style also determines which facts will be argued and how they will be communicated.  The movie “THIN” brought to my attention the issue of whether it was harder for me to look at extremely skinny people or extremely obese individuals.  I believe that the style in which diets are presented is one that more detrimental to our bodies than helpful.

I have been convinced that the diets that circulate through the media are aimed at making men and women deathly thin as they do not define the term “healthy” or “fit”.  Pictures are never shown of individuals that have become mentally sick as a result of an eating disorder, rather the dieting industry uses pictures of unhealthy people to attract consumers.  I firmly believe that given a photo of an obese individual and a photo of a sickly thin person, the obese person would be more appealing.

The film “THIN” makes the observation easily understandable as it is tough to sit and watch without a queasy stomach.  Eating disorders are incredibly dangerous and life threatening, but it is interesting to me that we still argue and persuade women and men into living on the border of healthy and sickly.

Faulty Fatties

 In a society that values positive change it seems that only the waist sizes of Americans’ change these days.  The front pages of national magazines are littered with photos of celebrities and the latest scale reading plastered across their body.  Jennifer Love Hewitt felt the wrath of the media’s obsession with weight and appearance as her photo was the source of many talk shows for days.   The argument made does not stop here as people use the emotions of these celebrities in the pictures to help them label every person with a similar weight to be unhappy.

The argument that America is an obese nation is one of causality as we believe the weight problem causes more than just a change in clothing size but also for those who are overweight to be unhappy.  I have never heard of someone being completely unhappy for being overfed, however, I’ve heard my teenage brother loose it after going 2 hours without a meal.  This argument is one that uses one cause to create many effects.  The idea that an increase in weight will lead to an increase in unhappiness is flawed and would be declared as a false causality.

Weight may be an issue in America but until there is a scientific relationship between weight and happiness or any other emotion towards oneself, it will never be considered a valid, complete argument.  America may be overweight but it doesn’t mean that they can’t be “phat”.