English Writing 04AL Q.4

Health and Beauty

Recently, slimming is so common for a host of teenagers who have been strongly affected by advertisements promoting slimming products and programmers. They believe deeply that they have to slim to be beautiful and go to extreme and unreasonable lengths in an attempt to lose weight. I have attended a talk, “Health and Beauty”, which is organized by the Department of Health. In the rest of this article, I would like to share what I learnt from the speakers in the talk – the medical doctor, social worker and ex-patient recovering from an eating disorder.

The first speaker about the issue is a medical doctor who is especially worried about the health of those people with eating. It is because a person needs enough nutrients every day such as carbohydrate, protein and fat, etc, that the person would have a healthy body to deal with the problems of life. He also stresses that even though overweight is not good for health, eating disorder impose negative effect for our body as well. Therefore, we need to take a balanced diet on life, assimilate more different nutrient and eat the wholesome food that would make our body healthier.

After speaking to the medical doctor, a social worker continued to share and express her expertise. She deemed that the advertisements are very attractive nowadays, but for the young teenagers, it is not healthy and positive. The teenagers just believe “to be slim, to be beautiful” through the advertisements promoting slimming products and programmers. They try all out to go to extreme and unreasonable lengths in an attempt to lose weight in order to be more beautiful. They would take dieting pill without prescription, and at last, they are sent to hospital. This is a current issue which you often read from newspaper everyday. She also thinks that not only the advertisers, but also the parents should instill correct values into teenagers’ mind and avoid the same thing to happen again.

At last, the ex-patient recovering from an eating disorder shared her experience with the audience. She said that she was always embarrassed about her fat body shape three years ago. She was afraid of the others’ focus of her body, so she went on a diet. She was succeeded to be slim, but she got anorexia when she was on diet. While she eats the yummy food, she would vomit the food in order to make her look skinny. It is not beautiful! Fortunately, she asks the doctor for help the situation improved. She advised teenagers that they should not just keep a closing eye on the body shape and ignore the health.

Is short, I am happy that I can attend the talk and obtain their valuable experience and expertise. I learnt that health is the most important thing for our life and do not seek beauty blindly. In addition, we should not trust the advertisements wholly because it instills some wrong values into our mind. What is more, we need to strike a balance in health and beauty.