Am I fat? How many calories is this? What’s the lowest-calorie meal you have? I can’t eat this; I should not gain weight.
These are the questions I hear daily as a 16-year-old teen in high school. As social media dominates lives, people feel obligated to look a certain way. People go as far as starving themselves all day just because they want to lose weight. However, the desire to do so is not enough for one to accomplish this goal healthily. Humankind has a way of thinking in which the desire to reach a goal blinds them from seeing the potential dangers in the process of reaching it.
For a high school student, it is easy to realize that consuming foods with higher calories leads to a higher weight. However, they refuse to see this mindset as just the tip of the iceberg. As “eat less, live longer” becomes a motto people live by, having a low-calorie diet has evolved from being an action most would call “extra” ten years before to a necessity.
The problem with trying to eat less is one doesn’t know to what extent they should go. As “eat less” becomes a phrase carved into people’s minds without any reasoning, you start hearing your classmates gloat about only eating a pack of nuts in a day. A day becomes two. Two becomes a week. Although the main goal of starting a low-calorie diet is to eat enough but healthily, its conception in teenagers’ lives has evolved into a challenge, pushing them to test the least amount of calories they can consume, leading them to forget their true purpose and turn it into a game of eating fewer calories. “How much farther can I go?”
The path of reducing calories becomes addictive and dangerous as people push themselves to decrease their calorie intake day by day. Without realizing when or at what value to stop, eventually they’ll find themselves trying to zero out calories. In other words, they realize they are starving themselves and reach a point where that value of “0” in their calorie intake becomes irreversible and inescapable. The value “zero” signifies the uselessness and harm of the goal they’ve strived to achieve- through constant pain and hunger. Those packs of nuts that become your weekly meal from your daily one, contribute to your aim of reaching that number zero.
The satisfaction one gets from seeing that they can go a week by only eating a pack of nuts, pulls them into a black hole they can never get out of. As the desire for zero calories turns into a satisfaction of zeros, people refuse to leave it. In contrast to a balanced diet involving 3 meals a day, people’s mindset of consuming “zero calories” shifts them from living healthily to finding themselves prettier in society but starving. The danger of the zero value involved in so many people's lives as calorie intakes, far from its inescapability, is the health consequences it brings.
One may get excited by the daily drops of the value they see on their scale; however, they would refuse to see the obstacles the exponentially decreasing kilograms create for their health. The motto “eat less, live longer” at this point seems ironic since humankind proves to be unaware of when to stop; in this case, their calorie deficit. Approximately 15.3 percent of women tend to develop eating disorders in their lifetime.
The big fat zero that appears more and more often on one’s calorie intake, is the only red alarm that has the power to make one afraid of going any further in weight loss. Overall, as “eat less, live longer” may be a phrase true until one point, it is a dangerous way to end up at point zero.