The Negatives Of Fitness Advertising

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

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

Fitness has grown to a multibillion dollar industry. The idea of fitness has influenced millions of lives whether the correlation was as a career, lifestyle, or an occasional hobby. People globally compete in bodybuilding, physique, and powerlifting meets earning thousands of dollars depending on their successes. Though they seem pointless at first, even the sixty second long infomercials on television advertising the new and approved anywhere gym equipment or perfect diet has made the viewer at least contemplate their health. People often confuse fitness as a sole concept of either exercising or dieting, but fitness depends immensely on both. Some people in the fitness industry manipulate diet and exercise to create the body stature they desire.

For women, advertising exemplifies the ideal female body. According to Kilbourne, young girls are taught from a very early age that they need to spend lots of time and money to achieve this “physical perfection.” But realistically this cannot be achieved. The ideal woman’s body is Caucasian, very skinny, big breasts, no flaws, and pretty much no pores. This cannot be achieved because it is physically impossible to look like this; the illusion comes from the secret world of Photoshop. No woman is beautiful enough so they leave it to technology to create perfection. The supermodel Cindy Crawford said, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford!” She knew the realities of Photoshop and body image, and more women and girls need to become aware of this as well.

The rhetorical imagery that is used to portray a man's body is spread throughout the fitness industry and health advertisements. These images are on the cover of well-known magazines such as “FITNESSRX”, distribute worldwide targeting men, ages 18-30. These magazines give a visual rhetoric as a method of persuading beauty, body image, and the pursuit of “perfection”. These companies target young adults because they believe they have the money to buy their products to obtain the body they want or the body portrayed on the cover of the magazine.

Moreover, as Richins (1991) reports, women always make social comparisons between the advertising models and themselves. As a result, advertising images create negative affect and increases women’s dissatisfaction with their own appearance. Since those images are edited through the consistent usage of digital technology, these idealized images do not portray women in a healthy manner. Indeed, these enhanced images would give these young girls the impression that they need to be ‘perfect’, just like these ‘fake’ images. According to Reist in ABC’s Gruen Session (2010), ‘young women get the message that they need to be thin, hot and sexy just to be acceptable’ in this society. Therefore, by generating the wrong perception of real beauty, the responsibility is pushed to the marketers, as they portray women with this stereotypical body type as acceptable. In addition, as the brand, Dove’s tagline in its advertisement - What happened to the ‘real beauty’? (Reist, 2010), marketers need not market their products in manners portraying women as airheads. Consequently, marketers gave most consumers viewing the advertisement, the wrong impression that

Napoli, Murgolo-Poor, and Boudville examine advertisements across three Australian magazines, aimed at females aged 5-15, in order to see if there is a difference in the images presented to younger and older readers. The physical characteristics and ethnic backgrounds of the females represented in the publication’s advertisements are examined. In their study, the authors discover that regardless of the publication type or the age of the model, the females portrayed in these magazines’ advertisements tend to be of the “ideal” body type—that is, thin and Caucasian.

Over the years the size of female models in advertising has decreased significantly. Today the average model ways up to 23% less than an average women. The use of Photoshop adds to this by creating perfect skin unattainable even with makeup, along with making the models appear even thinner. Given that these women often set the standard for beauty wouldn’t this lower women’s self-esteem. These “perfect” and unrealistic models in advertising negatively affect body image (the way we see our own body) and distort our idea of beauty. Negative body image can lead to depression, the development of eating disorders, or the abuse of weight loss drugs or anabolic steroids.

Jean Kilbourne (2010) in the video Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s image of women pointed out that people always assume the women in advertisements have the perfect look and a good figure. Many women even feel ashamed when they failed to achieve ideal beauty and retain slim figure after they saw the advertisements. I agree with her idea that the advertisement depict women in a very dangerous way. Many people started to judge women by perfect look and slim figure. These kinds of advertisements may do harm to women’s health mentally and physically, especially to teenagers, when they are trying to achieve perfect appearance as perfect women depicted in advertisements.

There are many infomercials that are placed on the television that are geared towards helping people become fit and healthy. These commercials usually feature testimonials from users of the program, workouts that are featured, and asks questions to get the viewer’s attention. And they are presented to be used by anyone no matter their fitness level. But, you have to wonder are the facts featured even true, such as, will this program even work for me? In this essay, I will analyze an infomercial and evaluate if it is worth giving it a try.

Today 's society is constantly presented with misrepresentations of the ideal body image through the advertising of diet plans and supplements. Companies in the fitness industry scam people into buying useless products or services by advertising with individuals that have, what the mass media sees as, the 'perfect ' body composition. In addition to getting consumers to buy into a product or service, these companies also aid society with the spreading of this fake idea of what classifies as the perfect body. They portray a body image that is unattainable for most individuals in society, despite how many of those supplements being advertised they buy. The models used in these advertisements, are in most cases, starving themselves, enhanced via illegal substances, or are photo-shopped to the point where even they do not look like the model displayed in the ad. All this has led to many people wanting to strive for that perfect body, that in reality, is impossible to achieve. In order to show the affect these advertisements play in our society, I will be deconstructing multiple ads in the fitness industry, as well as multiple peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles centered around the impact media has on an individual 's self-image.

The number of false advertisements in fitness industry have increased in the past few years. Now is the prime time to tell people that they should not blindly trust these advertisements and try to do a little research or consult any health care practitioner before using the product or the service. Radcliffe (2016) claims that “Sadly, one-third of adults and 17% of children in the U.S. are obese, and weight loss drugs have become a big business”

I found a TedTalk by Jean Kilbourne titled The Dangerous Ways Ads See Women. I thought this would be a perfect foundation towards answering my question. Although this is a popular source, Kilbourne discussed about women body image issues in the United States and how there is a psychological effect that impacts the way that women present themselves. This video helped me get an idea

The men in these advertisements look nothing like me, despite me being tall, it is still not enough. The media has put into my perception that slender, though muscular, bodies are more successful in romance, career and are self-confidence. These assumptions that the media has portrayed in my mind has left me questioning myself about my own physical body. I quite remember looking at the mirror and seeing that I had belly fat and my arms looked like a shrimp’s compared to the ideal men. I felt incompetent and worthless because the ideology that was put into my mind and my assumption that without the ideal body my career and romance life would come to an end. So I decided I needed to change, so I signed up for the gym to bulk up. This was no accident that I retreated to the gym, supposedly the media idea of achieving the ideal body is realized by working out, dieting, and cosmetic surgery. Pressure was also put on me by women, friends, other men and my parents, especially my father. Through advice like “Be a Man”, something that is easily said, but carried the weight of its message. I was expected to take charge. So I did by taking control of my body with exercise and drinking protein shakes and cutting down my food intake to meet the standards of society. This provided me with a sense of direction, control and achievement; however, it risked my health with symptoms of having eating disorders. Similarly, I have seen many men and women, mostly women,

One of the biggest misconceptions about body shape is that all thin people are healthy, and all overweight people are not. This means that ads that target size and help a person slim down are immediately