The Way Food, Diet, and Exercise Are Communicated in Women’s Health Magazine: From a Critical Perspective

Women’s Health Magazine creates a fantasy world for many women, in which they can attach themselves to the ideal beauty standards, and work towards reaching those ideals by engaging in diet and exercise. The advertisements in this magazine mostly give value to the Western ideal of white beauty, which is about the slenderness of the feminine physical body. However, the white beauty ideal makes women in different cultures such as the Turkish and Latin women to resemble this ideal by changing their darker hair colors to blonde, changing their darker eye colors to blue, and changing their curvy body types to slim; even though, their curviness represents sexual desire in their specific culture, and thus it leads these women to lose their cultural characteristics that make them more feminine (Mendible, 2007, pp. 3-8). In other words, the white ideal beauty causes many women in other cultures to have some kind of cultural assimilation in terms of their own beauty standards, and instead cause them to embrace an international standard of beauty that is Western, and many women such as the Turkish and Hispanic, as well as, the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese, undergo some kind of a process of cultural assimilation related to their cultural body characteristics, as a result (Yan & Bissell, 2014, p. 197). In other words, these women lose their indigenous body characteristics and they instead try to resemble the slender ideal body of the West with the spread of globalization, which has a major influence on that (Hoskins, 2014, p. 110). The aim of this paper is to show how the Women’s Health Magazine, a popular contemporary magazine, crates a discourse on food, diet, and exercise, which have a major influence in shaping and assimilating the body type of Turkish women from a critical perspective.