What is the Riot?

The ultimate question for this blog is to figure out why everyone is so interested in dieting (myself included). If you google diet, it reads there are 156,000,000 search matches. The United States’ population just reached 303,000,000 and if you google diet there are 156,000,000 search matches related. This totals half the amount of websites for dieting as there are people in the country. If this was possible, you could look at it as if one of every two people in America has made a website that includes the word diet. This of course is not the case but the numbers are surprisingly high. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page you see related links to diet. One link reads how to lose weight. Is everyone concerned about losing weight?

Look at the entertainment industry; it is clear that celebrities are worried about being skinny. From Lindsey Lohan to Paris Hilton, these famous figures are skinny and constantly focused on losing weight. On the home page for E online, the new video up right now is about how celebs quickly slim back down after having a baby. Not only is there an stress on being skinny, but being pregnant, or just having a baby is no longer an excuse to pack on a few extra pounds. There is the constant emphasis on how skinny or fat a celebrity looks in a picture. How can Americans escape the reality of how today’s culture is so focused on being thin? It is all around, on TV, online, in advertisements. While watching The Today Show on NBC one morning, six out of eleven commercials that came on were advertising either a weight loss product or a product that promoted a healthy weight. The constant reminder of the way a person looks is inescapable.

With such a strong emphasis on dieting, it also creates an easy target to make fun of. Jean Teasdale, a writer for the satirical newspaper The Onion, has written an article about her own experiences with dieting. Her story is funny because she faces many of the problems everyone deals with while dieting, which include not being able to stick to a diet, or getting sick of the same old diet everyday. It pokes fun at all these dieters, but reading it makes you stop and think about what dieting has come to. Why are people always focused on losing weight? Do people diet just to say they are dieting to make it seem like they are trying to lose weight? Obviously I do not know, but many people including Jean and myself struggle to understand the ways in which to diet.