Nutrition blogs have largely negative effects on people. The main reason is that nutrition blogs overgeneralize ideas and present people with biased or inaccurate information. Adverse effects of reading nutrition blogs will progressively get worse, since many young people spend a lot of their time on the Internet.
Many of them provide only one-sided information, making people trust certain nutritional information that could be harmful for them. Nutrition blogs spread many nutrition “facts,” such as special diet methods or supposed “super foods,” that only inform us of positive aspects of these products. I am a one of the victims of following the nutrition trends of the media.
Once I started to study in the United States, I started to gain a lot of weight because of an unhealthy diet. My self-esteem decreased because of my wrong body shape, and I started to see myself as fat because my body shape didn’t fit with the standard beauty image from the American media.
Social media gave me huge pressure to feel that I should look like one of the beautiful celebrities on advertisements shown on TV and the Internet. Therefore, one day I decided to go on a diet and started to pay attention to nutrition blogs. Whenever I had a break between classes, I pulled up this website and browsed all the articles.
I found one outstanding diet method called the “one meal a day” diet, which was a well-known method in South Korea and Japan for its great outcomes. I read a book and many positive news articles about “one meal a day” saying that it not only helps people to lose weight but also makes them healthier.
After viewing all the information, I decided to try this diet method to go back to my original body shape. At the beginning it worked well, and I lost a little bit of weight. After a while, however, it brought a lot of adverse side effects on my diet. Since I was only allowed to eat once a day, I started binge eating, which made me feel frustrated. Also, I was really hungry during the night, and eventually it made me consume more food than I was supposed to eat.
In the end, I not only failed on my diet but also gained even more weight than before I started the diet. Considering my personal experience, nutritional blogs could potentially convince people to believe wrong information, which can’t be generalized for every individual who has a different body system and health condition.
Therefore, people should think twice before following the diet trends of the time without considering their body condition, doing research on nutrition and consulting a registered dietician. It could make you feel worse than before you started.
