© Photo: freeimages.com
People lose track of who they really are amid piles of photoshopped images. Blinded by their body image ideal, they subject their bodies to all kinds of experiments. Dieting is a common choice. It's easy to fall for a fad that promises good looks with little effort.
Tosi Ivanova: According to Marci Anderson, a Cambridge-based nutritionist and dietitian, the medical community is also contributing to the modern diet craze. It has developed a “warn on obesity” and instead of working on people’s health it’s actually making a target out of people’s bodies, which feeds their obsession with appearance. Bingbing Xia, a San Francisco-based freelance writer who has contributed to rawbayarea.com, a web resource on raw food dieting, noted that people in the US readily switch between diets opting for ones that promise better looks: “A couple years ago everyone was all about veganism. And then there was this huge interest in low carb, like PALEO and PRIMO - they are two really popular communities, it’s a really different kind of lifestyle than vegan lifestyle, but so many people who used to be vegan started eating meat again, because they decided that it was more important to be low carb, because low carb was what made you lean and thin. It just shows how quickly someone might abandon their philosophy, whatever they think is moral, for something else, and then you wonder if that’s because it’s really just a covering for wanting to look really great,” Bingbing Xia said. People who don’t fit the modern beauty ideal are often subject to verbal abuse, criticism, and bullying. Leanne Thorndyke, Head of Communications at the UK-based Beat charity organization focusing on eating disorders, noted that there isn’t enough diversity across fashion, media, and advertising, so a lot of people aren’t aware of the fact that what’s considered good-looking is actually not healthy. Theresa Kinsella, a New York-based dietitian specializing in eating disorders, is certain that the human body has an innate ability to regulate itself in a healthy way but people forget about it because they constantly get distracted by dieting: “Usually people that are attracted to dieting are attracted to the rules of dieting because they don’t trust themselves and that frequently is a very scary thing for people. It takes a lot of practice and a lot of times people don’t really understand what comfortable hungry might feel like or the continuum of hunger but a lot of times people know the extremes. So people will know what starving feels like and stuffed feels like but they might not be familiar with the grey area. And so a lot of it is trusting that in-between place and learning what the physical sensations in the body around eating feel like,” Theresa Kinsella said. A lot of the diets make you feel great at the beginning, but two months fatigue and irresistible sugar cravings set in. Without yielding any substantial results, most diets harm people's health. Dieting and restricting food intake is actually one of the worst things a person can do to their body, according to nutritionist Marci Anderson. Cutting calories, going on cleanses or detox diets are some of the riskiest habits that could lead to the development of a full-blown eating disorder. Source: http://sputniknews.com/
