The Internet makes me feel fat

Lets be real, this is just utter nonsense, we are a country of fat people and we are continuing to gain more weight with each passing year! To say that the internet is a problem or to say that any other media outlet is a problem with image is so lame and utterly unbelievable! If it were such a problem as you and everyone seems to be pointing out over an over, year after year, then where is the proof? Every where I go people are overweight and have major medical problems due to obesity!

It's time to get on the bus and stop blaming the media, you would have thought after all these years, it would have made a impact in the other direction! It hasn't happened in this country and it sure isn't happening around the world. We are fat and there is no picture, cartoon or advertisement that will change that.

Morpheus didn't pick the way he looked. His "avatar" in the matrix was an exact replica of his actual body in the real world (but without the body plugs down the head, neck and spine). He was harvested by machines and grew to look the way he did. His appearance in the Matrix program was dictated by the code of that program, written by machines, which decided everyone would look like their real-life counterpart. Agent Smith explained that originally the Matrix was different. Everyone was beautiful and the world was a Utopia, but it was a disaster because humanity could not accept that it was reality. Nobody in the Matrix picked how they looked. Do you really think Cypher would choose to look like creepy, bald-headed Joe Pantoliano? To my knowledge, the only one who picked their look was the Oracle (who was a program, and not an actual human), and she chose to look like an old overweight black woman... Probably so as to not bring attention to herself (it didn't work, so after she was killed she chose to come back as ANOTHER old overweight black woman). This may not be the best comment for the meat of your story, but it sure does poke a huge hole in your title and first paragraph.

Actually with all the perfect images of what men think women should look like,yes it makes me feel fat.This day in age you can go and click on your instant willing person without thinking about any emotions behind it.You don't have to care if it would possibly hurt your spouse,its just a fantasy right.But more and more you her about marriages ending over such stuff,it makes the woman in your life not feel perfect enough!

......?

The hell is this article on about?

And how the hell is Morpheus fat? You might as well tell Kate Moss that she needs to lose a few pounds.

...

I will now massage my head in the hopes of making this article disappear as quickly as possible from my brain, just in case the silliness is contagious.

Does the Internet make me feel fat?

No, because I'm not stupid.

Clear?

I agree with the poster above, in the matrix you look as you are. However, your point is taken. I online video games as well as second life. I spent 8 hours yesterday running around a forest and as I was driving home from a fast food run I felt guilty that I didn't go the gym today and run. I am chubby not overboard but absolutely too overnight for my own good. I went the day before and felt good about it. Anyway my point is I really did feel some pressure as I started up my game that if my character was doing this why didn't I go to the gym today. I guess because it is so boring there. I can't read there, too much bouncing on the machines and audiobooks are expensive. I liked your article. I do think you should keep your avatar as is; your boss is wrong.

Dookie Head! Stinky Poo-Poo Face.

This article is not about one game but the internet in general,to the replier above real mature.

I'm not fat.

I'm online quite a bit, so I wouldn't say that the internet "makes" you fat.

I've never seen The Matrix, though, or any of its sequels. Maybe The Matrix "makes" you fat.

Or maybe, like the person in the first post noted, it's not the internet itself that makes us, or makes us feel fat. We are very unhealthy as a society....however...insofar as what does the media have to do with this? Well, we have raised a generation of children who don't know how to amuse themselves (for the most part!) without video games, do schoolwork without computers and in which we need Wii games to entice us to get off the sofa. We also have a society of preteens and middle-aged boys/girls and men/women becoming ill with eating disorders to measure up to an impossible ideal of perfection.

I see a few things at play here...an unwillingness to get off our collective bottoms because of the ease with which media is used....and an all-too-willingness to blame said same media for our ills. Media is a tool...we choose how to employ it, or not.

Responsibility.....hmmm, now there is a concept.

An as for the ideal of perfection....I watched a Marilyn Monroe movie the other night....now there is an ideal we can live up to (she was a size 16 and worshipped!). Health, not beauty is the ideal.

As a High School Student, and an older sibling with a mom who pushes for me to lose weight, I constantly feel the pressure. The Matrix seems like an world that if humans were given the chance to control their appearance, we would all weigh 90 pounds, we would be built, and curved in all the right places. But true beauty is found in our flaws.

With the Internet, T.V., Video Games, and Cell Phones, everything is at our fingertips. Many feel that why work for what can be given to you? Often not earning things can even cause a sense of depression, not feeling pride for what they have.

That's my 2 cents. Thanks.

Wait a minute. There is barely a positive correlation between media and obesity. Taft and Roosevelt were fat before radio. My grandparents stopped exercising regularly and started to gain weight before color television. The baby boomers are pre-diabetic, and most of them still think the internet is a "series of tubes." If the only way to get kids to exercise, so they aren't cirrhotic at 22, is to make them feel bad about looking fat, then maybe it's not a bad thing. In Indiana, going to an empty gym is a highly ambivalent experience. On the one hand, it's empty, and on the other, you don't need to wait to get on equipment. If getting dumped in real life because you think loafing on a stairmaster for 20 min/week makes you fit doesn't inspire one to exercise more, perhaps it is reasonable to hope getting virtually hit on for appearing fit will inspire people to try to actually be fit.

The Internet definitely can mess with peoples head. It’s become a mass media source with so much advertising it doesn’t help people – kids in particular – develop good body images. I’ve always been “freakishly” small, with little effort on my part, even after 4 babies I’m a size 5 and I’m just under the wire of 40. Not all of my girls got my skinny genes, so I’ve did an anti-media blitz on them when they were old enough, when they started pointing out all the skinny pretty people on magazines and TV. Over the years, we’ve covered all the media tricks like airbrushing and Photoshop body lengthens. I told them that I was freakishly skinny and they would probably look more like their aunts (minus my middle daughter, she is a toothpick!) their aunts are beautiful, and normal sized.

I told them they need to be healthy, not skinny. I make them exercise outside most days; they run and play with the dog in the back yard (under the thin guise of “walking” the dog). They help in the yard on the weekends. They have learned what a healthy diet is. The also spend a lot of time on the computer and playing video games. None of them are fat, they are normal (excepting the middle girl who must have a wooden leg, only explanation for her food intake and toothpick legs).

Yes, I blame the media and the Internet for putting these idea’s in my girls head that “normal” is a cover girl – or that they can buy a product to look *just* like them. But, in many ways it is the consumers’ fault; if that kind of advertising didn’t work they wouldn’t use it. I blame other parents even more for not teaching their kids that these things are lies (aka advertising) and for most kids, impossible to achieve. It’s impossible to filter out these images without chaining your kid to a metal bed frame in the basement; parents have to teach kids the difference between fact and fantasy. And, if they took the time to do that they may learn it too.