How are We Willing to Define Healthy?

We ended class discussion today, attempting to answer the question, how are we wiling to define health? In Farrel's work, I was most attracted to her discussion of how diets have completely obliterated our ideas of what being a healthy individual truly means. The investment and time we spend dedicating ourselves to dieting and even surgical procedures which we tend to believe will make us an healthier individual, has only been geared toward physical fitness and the stigmas attached to acceptable appearance. Different diet plans are attractive because they are typically associated with "fit" or "perfect" body structures, not perhaps the strength of ones bones or normal functioning of body organs; but rather physical appearance.

Here, I have attached a few covers of the Men's and Women's Health magazines. These magazines are ones that I often see in the waiting rooms of the doctors office, and they always tend to grab my attention. I have yet to actually pay attention to whats surrounding the "fit" individual that's posted on the cover of the magazine, I always dive right into the diet ads inside. So for a moment, I'd like you to take a look at the words and ads surrounding the image on the front of the magazine, and think about how those words are actively defining the idea of a healthy body.

The first example here, which features Dwight Howard on the cover of the magazine, has a lot of displeasing connotations to what health should LOOK like. One thing I found completely displeasing, is the phrase on the left side of the image that says

"SEX TONIGHT-GUARANTEED". It seems as if looking healthy, which here means having a chiseled body like Dwight Howard, will not only make you look good, but make you look good enough that you will be guaranteed sex. So now, health is motivated through sexual desires, not personal concern. The next magazine cover entails the same sexual connotations to health. That being healthy will get you sex.
In the left corner it says, "Her Secret Sex thoughts", and on the Right it says "5 bold sex moves". For some reason, it seems as if the reward for having a visibly healthy body, is sex with a woman of your desire. Once again, this connection that health is more so motivated by pursuing your sexual being instead of bettering your health not just for fitness but for life.

Lastly, Id like to show a women's health magazine, which has once again the exact same sexual connotations to looking healthy.
What grabbed my attention the most from this cover was the bolded phrase at the top which says "LOOK GREAT NAKED!" a concrete reference to both sex and physical health. Then just in the right pocket of the cover, it says "confidence makes you more desirable." This assumes that if you are physically fit, than you must not have any confidence and therefore undesirable to perhaps men who would look at you if you looked like the woman on the cover of the magazine. This is truly disturbing, not only because sex motivates health, but because things that this tends to only motivate people to become more physically attractive not emotionally healthy, or internally healthy, or to have good strong bones or well working organs. Its all linked to sex, and physical appearance. If we could get rid of these stigmas linked to acceptable and desirable physical appearance, we might actually be able to change the idea of what being a health individual means. That perhaps there would be a full figured or curvy woman on the cover of these health magazines, or men who don't exactly have chiseled and muscular bodies, but are of course still healthy. So How do you define health? and how do you think we could move away from these erotic stigmas attached to what health means?