The Advertising Of Diet Plans And Supplements Essay

Have you ever been watching television and a commercial for Hydroxycut comes on featuring a male or female who went from 250 pounds to 150 pounds and looks like a fitness model just from using Hydroxycut? Although these results may seem extreme this is what many fitness advertisements promote; portraying unrealistic body images and displaying false results. Fitness advertising can be found in print and broadcast forms. While fitness advertising can be viewed as having both positives and negatives, I believe fitness advertising is negative. This paper will discuss the negatives of fitness advertising, to include creating negative body images and promoting false results. It will, also, address the counterarguments against fitness advertising being negative.

Mass media is effective in teaching us what we “should” look like. Women should be thin. Men should be muscular. The skinny and muscular ideals portrayed in advertising encourage men and women to look a certain way. The depiction of the female ideal has helped shaped society’s perspectives about beauty. The media pushes you to “improve your body” by buying their products but soon the road to a skinny and toned body leads to a self destructive path of self hatred. The powerful ideas that the media transmits through words, images, and movement can have lasting impacts on the human brain, affecting how we think and

Today, we are always surrounded by a variety of media and we identify ourselves in parts of those images we see. Media believes women should look like Victoria Secret models: tall, lean, and tanned women, but lately there has been issue from women all over the world who are tired of having to be set at impossible types of female figures. Revolving around a certain type of body figure is horrible because bodies come in different shapes and sizes. The media has influenced the female body perception by showing that women need to have a “perfect body” to pass in society. These magnificence gauges, multiplied through the media, impacts affect women and their self-perceptions. The medias influence on female body image has led to eating disorders, dissatisfaction in women, depression, and substance abuse in women.

Every time you flip a magazine, change channels, or go online, you are struck with images of models who are super skinny with flashy outfits and have excessive make-up on. Ads not only try to sell their products, but also promote how females should look like. These models are airbrushed and photo shopped which is false advertisement. The media progressively encourages a thinner body image as the ideal for women. We see advertisements every day. Some of these ads use manipulative strategies that influence our choices and spending habits. For example, “One in every three articles in leading teen girl magazines included a focus on appearance, and most advertisements used appeal to beauty to sell their products.”(Teen Health) To grab the viewers’ attention, especially females, they include

The media group that retouches images skews the “normal” body image of people through many of its outlets, including models in advertising and magazines, and actors in TV and movie productions. “The average model portrayed in the media is approximately 5’11” and 120 pounds. By contrast, the average American woman is 5’4” and 140 pounds” (Holmstrom, 2004). This statistic shows how the media manipulates consumers into believing that because they are not what the average model looks like, they are not living up to a certain standard which implies that they need to look like that to be beautiful. Another research fact that shows a similar concept is that, “In the United States, 94% of female characters in television programs are thinner than the average American woman, with whom the media frequently associate happiness, desirability, and success in life” (Yamamiya et al., 2005). This association of female thinness and happiness, desirability and success makes consumers believe they must achieve this unrealistic thinness to achieve more ultimate goals and fulfillment in life. “The media also explicitly instruct how to attain thin bodies by dieting, exercising, and body-contouring surgery, encouraging female consumers to believe that they can and should be thin” (Yamamiya et al., 2005). This idealization of thinness in the media is seen so much, and is extremely harmful to women’s self confidence and is often associated with body image dissatisfaction, which can be a precursor to social anxiety, depression, eating disturbances, and poor self-esteem (Yamamiya et al.,

This is particularly apparent with the effects of advertising media. Bordo points out that “miracle diet pills and videos promising to turn our body parts into steel have become as commonplace as aspirin ads,” (par.1) which influences an idea of the kind of body one should aim to achieve. Additionally, it presents the notion that, with such products, reaching one’s weight goal will come with more ease. It gives an incentive and makes people accustomed to the belief that losing weight is necessary. By exhibiting this pattern and concept that advertising media is inducing, Bordo gives insight as to why there is an influx in the desire to lose weight and to achieve it by any means necessary. She also suggests that the “ideal of the body beautiful has largely come from fashion designers and models” (par 2).With the exaltation and emphasis on the gratifying physique of a woman’s body, many young women find themselves corresponding to the ideals the fashion industry places on both its fashion and models. Remarkably enough, Borodo conveys that, not only are females following in the fashion industries’ steps, men are falling underway as well as “more ads featuring anorexic-looking young men are appearing too” (par.2). In presenting the fashion industry for what it represents and influences, Bordo effectively reveals a fellow cause of

Advertising is an over 200$ billion industry and according to Jean Kilbourne, people are exposed to over 3000 advertisements a day. Advertisements are everywhere so there is no escaping them; they are on TV, magazines, billboards, etc. These ads tell women and girls that what’s most important is how they look, and they surround us with the image of "ideal female beauty". However, this flawlessness cannot be achieved. It’s a look that’s been created through Photoshop, airbrushing, cosmetics, and computer retouching. There have been many studies done that have found a clear link between exposure to the thin ideal in the mass media to body dissatisfaction, thin ideal internalization, and eating disorders among women. Body dissatisfaction is negative thoughts that a person has about his or her own body. Thin ideal internalization is when a person believes that thinness is equivalent to attractiveness and will lead to positive life outcomes. Less than 5% of women actually have the body type that is shown of

“To be happy and successful, you must be thin,” is a message women are given at a very young age (Society and Eating Disorders). In fact, eating disorders are still continuously growing because of the value society places on being thin. There are many influences in society that pressures females

Many women all across the world feel unattractive when they see these ads as they flip the page of their magazine or even pass the store in the mall. Women already experience enough self-esteem issues and social media does not help. Every woman wants to be beautiful and most importantly feel beautiful. The ads with the title “The Perfect ‘Body,’” give the impression that that is what the perfect body looks like. According to Dwyer, the brand’s Facebook page has been receiving backlash. For example, Facebook user Stephanie Connolly wrote: “Just seen the ‘perfect body’ advert......and here’s me thinking that the perfect body was the one I felt comfortable in......oh well better get back to throwing up my dinner!” Evidently, being exposed to these ads creates a pressure for girls. To reach these unattainable goals, many women begin to starve themselves and develop eating disorders; women will try anything. Not only does the average women (feel the pressure), but the models in the ads do too. Last year, model Bria Murphy, daughter of Eddie Murphy, was interviewed live on Good Morning America about eating disorders in the fashion industry. She explained how some models go to extreme lengths—such as eat cotton balls soaked in orange juice—because of the pressure to stay thin. “They dip it in the orange juice, and they eat the cotton balls to make them feel full,” she said. While that’s awful enough, the average teenage girl or adult woman might be

When Perfection Is Not Perfect The media including television, magazines, and the internet has a colossal impact on the public; the media informs people what to wear, what to buy, and how to look. Knowing that the public is extremely impressionable, companies target unsuspecting men and women with images tempting them to achieve weight loss and to create the perfect body at an extremely quick rate with little to no effort. These fad diets offer the allure of quick weight loss, but the results can be harmful. Informing someone of how he or she should appear seems innocent enough, but suggesting what fad diet one should be on can cause harm to the person’s health, mental well-being or appearance.

When faced with the question – ‘Do you ignore advertisements?’ most people claim to pay no attention to them. However, the messages are getting through on a subconscious level, whether we like it or not. A prevalent sentiment that most advertisements portray is that it’s necessary to emulate the body image of a model; even if they are digitally enhanced. The Ramifications of this are insane, contributing to health issues and misuse of supplements in both women and men. We need to become aware, are raise awareness about the negative impacts linked to the body image that advertisements portray. A Multitude of advertisements are culprit of this, although, only two significant ones, an AXE Body spray add, and the Victoria’s Secret ‘The Perfect

The world of advertisement could almost be described as a narrower, staged version of our own. The constant exposure to the same false world advertising shows us had one very real effect: the real world begins to mimic the false one. People, to be frank, hate themselves. They hate their body size, their facial structure, their skin color, and everything else companies can create insecurities about for them to fix with a product. In the United States alone, up to 30 million people suffer from an eating disorder. In a survey done on a college campus, 58% of female students felt pressured due to their weight, and 83% of those students then dieted for weight loss. 44% of those students were average weight. This is not a problem only among

It depicts the type of moods that humans will experience. People interpret media differently and receive messages through different perspectives. Although this advertisement could possibly exploit inner insecurities and anxieties that readers may have towards themselves, the other side of that is looking at the advertisement and finding motivation through it. Motivation is a good thing at times, but when motivation turns in to desperation and frustration, it can trigger unhealthy and not the most intelligent actions. A study was done in the Flemish part of Belgium with a random sample of 618 boys ages 11-18 years old. Within the study, the discovery that adolescent boys' use of supplements, has a relation to the exposure to appearance-focused media and fitness media (Frims & Vandenbosch & Eggermont, 2013). In saying this the findings showed that boys who rarely used fitness media were approximately five times more likely to have ever used supplements and more than twice as likely to consider the use of anabolic steroids compared to those who have never used fitness media (Frims & Vandenbosch & Eggermont, 2013). It is important to understand the concepts and theories that the companies continuously use on innocent and uninformed people because it happens everyday. The viewers of these different types of media, may not realize that the environment they are surrounding themselves in could cause serious

Have you ever watched a television advertisement and afterward felt that you needed to lose weight or work out more? The weight-loss and fitness industries are billion-dollar industries and they feed off of our negative body images. There are constantly advertisements on television that tell us how unhealthy we are, how much weight we need to lose, how we must get the fat off us the quickest way possible to be slim and beautiful, or how much muscle mass we should have. This message of body dissatisfaction is a serious one and can even become deadly for young men and women. The saying is “you can never be too rich or too thin.” This is what young women believe when they see stars, their idols, walk the red carpet looking deathly skinny. They want to be like them; therefore they do whatever they can to obtain this unrealistic media driven picture of what the “perfect” woman looks like. Body image dissatisfaction has made eating disorders one of the biggest problems for young girls and women. Steroids have become the issue for young men. Commercial advertisers depict men and women as

People in the marketing business for commercials, or directors for a film or magazine ads are making people lose their self-esteem. “Annually, magazine companies spend billions of dollars on diet and exercise advertisements to put in their magazines. Magazines sell body dissatisfaction to their readers through unrealistic images of women, as well as dieting and exercise information. Thirty years ago, Marilyn Monroe, a size 14, had the “ideal” body shape and size, but today’s standard is much smaller. As the beauty ideal continues to get smaller in our society, body image within American women continues to plummet. Magazines portray and compare happiness with being thin; therefore some feel if they are not thin, then they are not happy. As with women of all ages, many college-age women are believed to hold unrealistic ideals of body shape and size, ideals