College Girls and Diets Term Paper

Diets and Young Women

It seems that women today are exceptionally obsessed with their bodies and how they look. Our culture admires the ultra-thin while ostracizing and ridiculing the overweight and obese. The overweight are seen as weak and even lazy, while those who are thin are seen as strong and energized. The media continually shows thin people enjoying and participating in life - it is as if fat people do not exist, and yet, our nation is the most overweight and unhealthy it has ever been. The media leads the obsession with dieting that haunts young American women today, and it has created a subculture of diets, exercise, eating disorders, and impossible goals when it comes to the "ideal" weight perceived by millions of girls and young women.

Almost everyone knows that the best way to lose weight and maintain it is to combine a healthy lifestyle of exercise with a balanced diet high in nutrition, low in calories, and fat. However, millions of people desperate to lose weight will try any fad diet that comes along. Usually these diets are so restrictive that they are difficult to maintain for any length of time, and so, they are abandoned after a short time, and very little, if any, weight loss is achieved.That is why so many young women fail to lose weight on diets. The normal "diet" does not fit in our rushed and frantic lifestyle, and so, it is difficult to stay on the diet. Most diets also exclude many favorite foods, and finally, after feeling deprived for too long, dieters simply give up and binge on their favorite foods. That is why a healthy lifestyle is much more effective in weight reduction in the long run, because it is a lifestyle, and not a life change, as most diets are.

Take for example, one of the hottest diet fads right now, the South Beach Diet. Many call it the "next Atkins," referring to the wildly popular low-carb Atkins diet that is sweeping the nation. South Beach professes to offer the "right" blend of carbohydrates and fats to promote weight loss. On the plus side, South Beach offers a nutritional blend of meats, vegetables, fruits, and grains that are broken down into three distinct phases. This diet is easier to maintain than many others are because it utilizes some good nutritional guidance along with cutting down calories. Unfortunately, the first two….....