The American Dream....NOT!

While reading American Sports, for my “Sporting Spirit” English class, I was learning all about how in the 1970’s people started this quest for fitness. They would jog, run, swim, cycle, walk, or play racquetball all while they smoked fewer cigarettes, drank less alcohol, ate less red meat and consumed more white meat. The most interesting thing that struck me was this sentence, “Being fat in America became the greatest single sign of personal failure.”

WHAT??? Today over half of the population of America is fat or obese. Yes, according to USATODAY 65% of adults are overweight (half of those are obese, meaning about 30 pounds or more above a healthy weight for their height). This just amazes me that only 30 years after this ‘fitness craze’ that so many of our citizens have become overweight.

The book does let on though, “Dieting had its negative side; a Gallup poll in 1986 estimated that three million Americans, most of them women, suffered from the eating disorders of anorexia nervosa and/or bulimia. If exercise and dieting failed to obtain the desired figure, the most affluent Americans increasingly resorted to plastic surgery.”

So obesity is not our only concern, today it is estimated that 8 million Americans have an eating disorder. To me, what I learned from this is that in our world today most of our citizens are either fat or they have an eating disorder. What kind of image does this promote to young children? Now wonder they grow up with distorted pictures of what they are to look like. I know that I am not obese, nor do I have an eating disorder. I wonder what percent of Americans actually live a healthy lifestyle by exercising and eating right like I do???