In today’s society people like Pamela Anderson, Tyra Banks, and Vin Diesel are the icons of perfection. On the college campus there are hundreds of beautiful people. On that same campus there are thousands of mediocre looking people that are trying to look like that beautiful person sitting next to them in their class everyday. There are more and more college students working out everyday trying their best to fit in. I believe that this phenomenon is cultural based. This phenomenon started probably about 20-25 years ago, with models and actors started slimming down. Then the emergence of super thin models and huge muscled bodybuilders becoming the epitome of perfection. There are many causes for this phenomenon and in this paper I will discuss a few of the causes that I think are the most prominent. I will begin with the least obvious and work my way down to the most obvious cause.

The first cause I would like to discuss would be a kind of remote cause; today there are fitness centers everywhere. Granted not everyone will go to the gyms just cause they are everywhere, but when you see something enough times you start to get curious about it. Not only are they every

The last and most obvious cause of the weight obsession phenomenon would have to be the influence of the media. The media is the most powerful influence because it is everywhere. Media can be advertised in a newspaper, magazine, billboard, television, or Internet. Everything that you can see that is not nature is basically media. The media can manipulate what a person thinks. In our society it has manipulated what we perceive to be the perfect body. We see the perfect body as an hourglass shape for women, with a big bust, small waste line, and proportional hips. For men our society sees a muscular, broad shouldered, with well-defined abdominal muscles as perfect. The media always presents these people as being successful, and living happy lives. On the other hand the overweight and obese people struggle and live miserable lives. For instance the show Roseanne, the show was about the life of a low-income family, it just so happened to be that the parents were overweight. A lot of times when you see overweight people in movies or sitcoms they usually have low positions at work, and they live in small apartments. Then you see the skinny, “in shape” people with the higher positions at their jobs, and they live in nice penthouses. What the media does not show is how these “perfect” bodies got to be so perfect. They don’t show the hours of rigorous workouts, and the meager rations of food

Some topics in this essay:
Vin Diesel, , peer pressure, college students, beautiful person, perfect body, beautiful person sitting, pressure negative, peer pressure negative, obvious cause, influence media, media media, person sitting, people trying,