Female celebrities and models with gorgeous faces and nice body shapes are found in advertisements percolate the equation “slimness is beauty” through teenagers who therefore are desperate to lose weight even at the expense of their health. Then how exactly are these teenagers ‘ruined’ by such an equation? I find the answers in the talk about ‘Health and I did learn lots of invaluable things from the three speakers.
One of the speakers, a medical doctor disclosed the adverse effects of different slimming products, which makes me determined to stay away from the products. Most slimming products ranging from pills to simply tea contain certain kinds of chemical substances that can inhibit people’s appetite or may speed up metabolism which results in diarrhea. If these products are unrelentingly consumed, people may suffer from a eating disorder and even emotional problems, for example, depression and irritancy. As a youngster, I completely understand the essentiality of health for study and growth. Healthy adolescence with physical and psychological fitness is the foundation of a healthy life. By knowing the side effects of slimming products, I learn to stay away from them for the sake of my health.
Apart from this, the medical doctor kindly provided an ideal way of losing weight without any harmful effects on health. He suggested that teenagers who are dissatisfied with their body shapes could opt to go on a diet and do exercise at the same time. When designing a ‘good’ diet, teenagers should consider consuming food with less sugar, fat, oil and sauces , that is to eat more vegetables and less junk food. Such eating habit helps strengthen our body functions too. Besides, teenagers can constantly do some anaerobic exercise like running,, or team sports like basketball in their free time, which can consolidate our health and help us relax. Going on a diet and having exercise help us lose weight and more importantly, they can even strengthen our health and bring forth other benefits. This is verily a perfect way worth adopting to obtain a better body shape.
Another speaker, the social worker, broke the myth of ‘slimness is beauty’ successfully by telling us the importance of ‘inner beauty’. He defined inner beauty as our strength, morality and good characters. According to him, outer beauty will vanish one day as time passes, yet inner beauty is something invaluable and will exist throughout our life. People seek friends or life partners with good personalities. Employees hire people with excellent abilities and potentials. So being slim in fact does not guarantee success or the establishment of secure relationships. After listening to his explanation of inner beauty, I realized that value of a nice body shape is merely as light as a feather when compared with that of inner beauty.
The social worker further revealed an efficient way to combat the myth, which is to establish self-esteem by exploring our strength. By analyzing past data, he found teenagers will easily believe in the imperative of outer beauty when they neglect the merits they possess and thus lack security as well as confidence. To avoid this, we should explore our strength and extend it. Amid this ‘voyage of discovery’, we should also recognize our role and contribution in a community or a group, which helps us gain confidence and establish self-esteem. Once we own this treasure, it is unnecessary for us to seek security by desperately losing weight.
This third speaker, an ex-patient recovering from an eating disorder, introduced the audience a terrible consequence of adopting methods to lose weight, which was breaking the hearts of her families and friends. She admitted that due to the overconsumption of slimming products, she suffered from an eating disorder, the subsequent physical illness and other psychological problems. More importantly, her situation dragged her family and friends into deep apprehension for quite a long period of time. She felt extremely remorseful for putting extra burden and sadness on her beloved ones. From her experience, I learnt that we have to stay away from any extreme attempts of losing weight not simply for the sake of health, but also our dear family and other people who care about us.
Furthermore, she pointed out that some advertisements promoting slimming products and programmes are deceitful. In the light of her past experience of joining slimming schemes offered by various beauty centres, even though the advertisements promised costumers a healthy scheme of losing weight, the companies or the beauty centres would just offer her some so-called ‘healthy’ products consisting of chemical substance which would harm her health. Some even forced her to pay extra money if she failed to achieve the targets of weight loss. Superficially, the female models on posters of beauty centres look extraordinarily fabulous, we should be alert to the possible traps hidden behind them.
The cost of ‘beauty’ could be large or small. It also depends on the ways we interpret this word and how we attempt to attain it. After attending this talk, I was inspired and understand that health and beauty are not mutually exclusive if we adopt correct attitudes and methods to strike a balance between them.