Reflection #5 Eating Disorders

Eating disorders are most of all a mental sickness but eventually will affect the whole body. People look at themselves on a mirror and they don’t see themselves as they really are, instead they see themselves fat and never feel good with how they look. Eating disorders afflict millions of people, thousands of which will die from them yearly. There is good news though, eating disorders can be beaten. But first you have to know what you are dealing with.

These problems are product of our own vanity. The press, and many ways of communication have made public many stereotypes of beauty. And with time many women, and an increasing number of men, started to think that if they don’t look like models they are not beautiful. So they start to eat less or eat followed by purging.

There are different kinds of eating disorders. One of them is Anorexia; this is characterized by a significant weight loss resulting from excessive dieting. They do this because Anorexics consider themselves to be fat, no matter what their actual weight is. Often anorexics do not recognize they are underweight and may still "feel fat" at 80 lbs.

Another example is bulimia, Bulimia is characterized by a cycle of binge eating followed by purging to try and rid the body of unwanted calories. Purging methods usually involve vomiting and laxative abuse which can be very dangerous. And sometimes bulimics do excessive exercise. Unlike anorexics, bulimics do realize they have a problem and are more likely to seek help.

There are many institutions made for helping people with eating disorders. But first these people have to accept that they have a problem and are willing to deal with it.

People have to accept themselves as they are; get rid of all the stereotypes that make them feel ugly or fat and understand that no one is perfect.

Reflection #4 The Veiled Threat

This essay is about the life of women in Iran, a country where they don’t have any rights. Men totally rule their lives and every time they make an attempt to rise and gain their respect they are forced down to nothingness. But they never lost faith in the belief that some day Iran will be a country of justice.

What the mainly expresses in this essay is that every time men tries to make women invisible and powerless, they actually made them more visible and powerful. By trying to control women’s lives, men gave them a powerful weapon: every private act or gesture in defiance of official rules is now a strong political statement. This means that while government completely controls women’s life men’s life is also affected since they interact with each other. Even men who initially supported the revolution were affected.

The paragraphs 27 to 30 of this essay are important to this essay because they because of a man who came to the power started to give women some rights like, for example he demanded for women to stop using their veils. Later they started to get many other rights and women where working in every field except clergy. But they started to be accused of betraying their culture and their tradition and after this they started to fall again. Even though they where exempt of their rights gain they made themselves visible to the world in other ways.

These paragraphs are important because they show one of the time when Iranian women raised and fell for their rights and even though they had some support it wasn’t enough. But they never stopped fighting they know that they deserve to be free and will fight for it no matter what happens.

Reflection #3 Spanglish

Spanglish is the fusion of two languages, Spanish and English. When people started immigrating from all over the world to the United States they brought their language and their traditions with them. This people from different countries with very different cultures and traditions started to interact with each other and they started mixing their language. This is how spanglish was formed.

Even though it is commonly used by the Hispanic-Americans in the United States with time it has been spreading through many Hispanics countries. For example, in Puerto Rico the official language is Spanish but there has been implemented the English language. But most people never completely learned English, but since almost everything here is in English they started adopting only some words, or the making up words from English.

In the essay Spanglish: the making of a new American language by the Mexican Ilan Stavans he narrates how spanglish came into his life, how was it to live in a community of Hispanics in the U.S. By the time he was there spanlish had already spread across the country and over the years he had grown an admiration to it. This is what brought him to write the essay itself in spanglish. Also this is one of the aspects of the essay that makes it unique.

It is very commonly said that spanglish is a langage used by the uneducated people, but, does this make Stavans an uneducated just because he used spanglish in his essay? If you look into his biography I wouldn’t say that. In fact I don’t think that because you use spanglish you are uneducated at all. For what I see this days people that use spanglish usually speak very well English and Spanish so they are educated and, since they are bilingual, have many more opportunities in life than many others.