Obesity and Eating Disorders

Students in America spend most of their time in front of technology such as watching television, playing video games, and going on Facebook and sitting in front of the computer for hours on end. In addition, many of these students are not eating the right foods at the right time of day and may be eating too much of a bad thing. As stated in our textbook, "nine million American students are overweight or obese" (pg. 126). This is not a good statistic and as physical education agents of change, it is our goal to fix this statistic. In many schools, recess and physical education is cut out which does not help matters any more. If these students do not get a chance to have at least 120 minutes of physical education a week, then they are on a road to an unhealthy lifestyle. On the contrary, students feel the pressure to be thin and therefore eating disorders are on the rise. Girls are pressured that being skinny is the only way to be successful and be pretty as well. They see pictures in magazines of supermodels and models in ads and these females are unrealistically skinny. They get the message that females that are that skinny are the only ones that can be models and the only ones that are pretty. Males on the other hand get the message that they have to bulk up and gain as much muscle as they can. A way to do this would be to take steroids which is the unsafe way to do this. Males can just go to the gym to lift weights and work on their cardio to stay in shape. These boys just want to look good and they will do anything in their power to achieve the body that they want and also recognition from their peers. Students are on the search for the perfect body and will do anything in our power to achieve it. Obesity and eating disorders need to be addressed in classes such as Health and Physical Education. It is a problem that has been facing our society for a while and we need to find a happy medium in between these two issues. We want our students to be comfortable in their bodies and be healthy as well. They need to be educated that healthy bodies come in many different shapes and there are many different alternatives these students can take to achieve a healthy body that they are most comfortable in.