Body Culture: Attitudes to Health, Weight, and Beauty

Give an outline of the various attitudes to body culture in the four texts:

Many of us fight a strenuous battle against either a few annoying pounds that just do not want to go away, against weak muscles, or we fight to live up to the beauty ideals of today. We have one thing in common, and it is that we are all influenced by the body culture surrounding us:

In the article Can You Be Fat & Healthy David Jacobs, professor of epidemiology , explains how the way our current body culture has slim people as the ideal may be problematic from a health point of view. Studies show that being overweight, but very active physically is way healthier than being slim and sedentary. Also, the diseases often linked to overweight can be avoided by eating right and exercising, and in that way our culture of acclaiming thin people may be wrong because an overweight person, according to David Jacobs is just as likely as a thin person to be healthy.

The article A weight on their shoulders deals with a tendency typical for the body culture of today. Both men and women fight their battles in gyms all around the world – women fighting with getting fit and slender as the goal and men fighting with the goal of gaining muscle mass. Looking good is essential, and it is the motivation for men to lift weights at gyms in an extent that makes every other man in the gym a component. This article gives a picture of a body culture where appearance is everything.