Maintaining A Healthy Lifestyle Essay

All these factors may be affected or influenced by various elements such as culture, family, reference groups, social class, and other elements in a person’s environment, which may also define if a person’s lifestyle is healthy or unhealthy (Jacobs, 2010). Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is vital for a person as according to numerous publications, it reduces disease occurrences, morality rates and can even encourage a positive outlook in life (Wang, et al., 2013). Important components of maintaining a healthy lifestyle include eating healthily, having an active lifestyle, managing stress, self-love, taking control of one’s mind and body and finally balancing all these components (Lewis, 2010). An individual aims to achieve this healthy lifestyle, although this is not usually the case for students. The lifestyle of a student prioritizes studies causing late nights and take outs but at the same time also prioritizes maintaining a social life, which means indulging and exposing oneself to various forms of media (Phillips,

The individual style of a person is based on their decisions of what to wear. Simmel (1957) describes fashion as a “form of imitation and social equalization.” It changes incessantly as it differentiates from one era to another. Meanwhile, attitude is what determines a person’s personality. According to Schneider (1988), ‘Attitudes are evaluative reactions to persons, objects, and events.’ Attitude is what affects a person’s behavior and how they perceive the people around them. It plays a major role in the social interaction of an individual. Moreover, Vaughan & Hogg (1995) defined attitude as, ‘A relatively enduring organization of beliefs, feelings and behavioral tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols or A general feeling or evaluation (positive/negative) about some person, object or issue.’ And lastly, eating habits refers to an individual’s food preference, why and how an individual eats and with whom an individual eats. All these different components of a person’s lifestyle are influenced by social, cultural, economic, religious, environmental and even political factors surrounding an individual. This research focuses on the impact of media, specifically fashion magazines, on the lifestyles of De La Salle University’s College of Liberal Arts students. This is due to the fact that fashion magazines have been enjoying millions of readerships from young