Dieting has become a common practice in our society. |
Two themes from the reformation that apply to this fad are sola fide and sola scriptura. Sola fide refers to the ideology that faith is all that is required to achieve salvation. Sola Scriptura refers to the ideology that the scriptures contain the keys to salvation. In the reformation these were competing ideologies. In this situation they still compete. I would apply the idea of sola fide to the followers of fad dieting. They believe the diet works and trust that if they keep at it they will achieve the results they want. If they believe in it, it will work. I would apply sola scriptura to scientists who understand how the body works and how these diets can affect it. They believe in the "book" or science which gives us an understanding of how diets can harm, or help the body. Those who are in the sola fide camp so often don't research and look into the science behind the diets and don't understand possible dangers lurking behind the hope of weight loss.
Many diets do work and can help us become healthier, but the obsession of looking perfect and losing weight can lead people to blindly follow diets and ignore potential dangers.
One of the problems with wanting to look like the models on the magazine covers is that even the models don't look like that: they are all photoshopped to look "perfect." The other problem is that we have a tendency to always take the easy way to get what we want. Fad diets play on this, and people fall for it over and over again.
ReplyDeleteI'm all for that research baby. I know I have fallen victim to health fads everyone once in a while and then I usually come to find out that the fad doesn't even have anything to do with what the claims are, ie coconut oil. I'm interested to see where you go with this.
ReplyDeleteI am also fascinated by this. One of the things I have struggled to understand is who to know to trust. One of the problems I personally face is trying to figure out what things are actually helpful and which is a bunch of jargon wrapped up in an enigma. Its an easy field to make confusing because there is a certain level of scientific understanding that is needed and most people (myself included) probably won't understand when people use impressive sounding molecule names. Compound that with the idea that the body really is complicated and there really is no end all diet, because people are different and have different needs and you wind up with people like me who are just extremely confused.
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