It seems that everyone knows and agrees that the beauty industry around the world is causing a lot of harm by creating an image of a perfect figure and looks. And you can see the pictures of skinny models in almost every advertisement being hung on almost every corner. We are all aware of the fact that marketing teams are trying to sell products by giving us a taste of ideality. They are playing with our minds. What is more, newspapers and magazines are packed with tips on how to lose weight, have an ideal figure and look beautiful. The saddest thing about this is that youngsters can read all this information and get obsessed about their body. In fact, that is exactly what is happening nowadays.
What really shocked me the other day and made me want to write my thoughts down was a little article I have read in the Evening Standard, a widely distributed free newspaper in London. You can grab this newspaper next to probably every underground station in the afternoons. The article which shocked me was focused on one guy’s advice on how to lose weight and keep a slim figure. He stated that his success formula is very simple and almost magical, as it helped him to lose a lot of weight already. In a nutshell, his formula could be described like this: eat very little + exercise all the time.
I know it makes sense that in order to be slim, you should not eat a pack of ice cream with cookies for breakfast, but what the guy was offering, was to skip breakfast, since according to him, in this case you will not want to eat until lunch. Then he also advised to eat very little throughout the day and exercise for several hours daily. His advice was quite bizarre, basically offering people to undereat and over-exercise, which put together can have a dramatic impacts on people’s health. I was upset about this kind of article and it made me question, who is responsible for monitoring the information the media and press are giving out.
Of course, a lot of people would say that in a democratic country freedom of speech should exist and it is entirely up to the readers to decide what kind of information is valuable. But I would say to the people in the head offices of big newspapers and magazines, as well as television networks, that they should be more concerned abou the content they are producing. In the case of the Evening Standard it is a newspaper which can be read by anyone, even by adolescent teenagers, who may not be mentally prepared enough to filter that kind of information. Just imagine, what damage may be done for the health of a girl, who found this kind of article and fascinated by it tried to follow this ‘magic formula’.
All of us should critically assess the information we are given, the information which is reaching our households, and be careful, as so much of it is wrong and harmful. It is up to us to decide what’s best for us. If you want to engage with diets and treatments like LipoTherapeia, then that’s up to you and entirely your free choice. But make sure that you’re only ever doing things for yourself, not others. In this age of technology, we can easily get lost amongst the volume of information, that it’s no wonder we start to believe the most preposterous stuff which is both misleading and can have quite negative consequences.
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