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Nicolas Boehme

Ms.Schell

English DP lang/lit SL

19.09.23

New Year's resolutions are always a great opportunity to envision a positive change for

the following year. One of the most common new year resolutions is starting a new diet. These

rarely work due to a variety of reasons, which author Bee Wilson addresses in her article “No

diet, No detox”, published in the guardian in 2016. The article is aimed at changing the reader's

perspective towards food altogether. This is achieved by highlighting common faults people

acquired over time and providing alternative ways to the pointed out mistakes. This leads to the

author crafting an argument to change the reader's attitude towards eating instead of making it a

complex science by cleverly applying literary devices in her arguments.

The text begins by establishing what our fundamental faults are when it comes to eating

and why we need to change them. This is shown through the use of Irony at the start of the text,

“We obsess about the properties of various ingredients: the protein, the omega oils, the vitamins.

But nutrients only count when a person picks up food and eats it.``. In this example the author

used irony to highlight a common negative habit of consumers. They buy what they think is best

for them from a nutritional standpoint, but not something they are actually willing to eat. This

highlights a problem with the aim of provoking the reader to reconsider their choices on whether

to buy said product only due to its nutritional values if they aren't willing to eat it. The author
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then goes further in depth with our relation towards food by claiming “Our tastes follow us

around like a comforting shadow”. Through the use of a metaphor she goes into the relation

between taste and a person. The comforting should imply the often stress or comfort eating

people do. Another claim the author makes is that consumers acquired, “uncannily homogenous

tastes' ' laying emphasis on uncannily. This should represent our often unhealthy and processed

food we eat everyday instead of adding a bit of variety. All these exemples should mark the

negative habits consumers display constantly with the aim of invoking a change.

Further down the text the author goes into why we need to feel good about the food we

choose and consume.This is achieved through the use of an allusion, “So many of our anxieties

around diet take the form of a search for the perfect food, the one that will cure all our ills. Eat

this! Don't eat that!”. The author not only uses an allusion here but employs the use of

hyperboles and irony to display how we often fail before we start a diet. This should show that

through our search for the “perfect food” we approach it in the wrong way by trying to avoid

doing the diet. This should show that we have a fundamentally wrong approach to food, the aim

here is to make the reader rethink the purpose of their “Diet”. She then backs up this claim that

we don’t approach food correctly by the following example, “We make frequent attempts-more

or less half hearted-to change what we eat, but almost no effort to change how we feel about

food”. Through the use of a contrast she highlights between the physical changes but not

physiological changes towards food. This implies the importance of a different approach towards

food and shows it to be as important as the physical attitude towards food. She lastly poses the

rhetorical question, “maybe there’s a near-universal conviction that it is not possible to learn new

tastes and shred old ones' '. This should imply that the common belief that adults are not able to
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learn new things is false. This goes into the habits of humans who are creatures of habit and are

often against changing but not incapable. All of these examples from the Author imply that our

psychological attitude towards food is often forgotten and ignored but the cause for a lot of failed

attempts on diets. This should show the reader the importance of their psychological attitude

towards food instead of only looking at food which is best for them per calories and proteins.

Lastly the author goes on to state the value of our choices when it comes to the food we

buy and the products we consume. She starts off by claiming that “The main influence on a

child's palate may no longer be a parent but a series of food manufactures”. Through the use of a

contrast she clearly shows a difference between common opinion and reality. The aim of this

contrast is to show the importance of the consumers choice when it comes to picking food and

make them more aware of the products they choose to buy. She further goes on to call these

products “Concoctions”. This clearly displayed her views upon these industry made products

through the use of Diction. She clearly implies that these products are often artificially made and

are a combination of many unhealthy ingredients. This should drive the costumer to look for

more natural and pure products to eat rather than industrially mixed products. She lastly goes on

to state the value of having a balanced diet by claiming that “the more frequently they eat sweets,

the more they train us to expect all food to taste this way”. Through the use of a juxtaposition she

clearly showed the negatives of over consuming sweets long term. This has the aim of

convincing the reader to pursue a more balanced diet instead of a heavily sugar based one

instead.
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In summary the author crafts an argument to changing their attitude towards eating by

cleverly applying literary devices. The use of contrasts was a common feature throughout the

article with the aim of showing the reader through examples the positive and negative aspects

instead of just telling him. The same applied to rhetorical questions with the aim of making the

reader question himself instead of just taking everything the author claims for fact. Therefore one

can say that the whole New Year diet resolution is often approached wrongly for a variety of

reasons as mentioned in the article. But with the correct knowledge, attitude towards food and

the ability to make deliberate choices on the foods we buy and consume anything is possible.