Dan Szuba

Dr. Wielgos

Research Paper Topic

29 March 2014

Over the recent years, fitness and general health have become a main focus for many people in their lives. Individuals set out with high hopes to lose weight and create healthier bodies. The only problem being that many times these individuals get discouraged that they have not lost weight or reached a specific goal they had in mind. After contemplating on whether it is their fault or not, individuals try to find different methods to help them try and lose those undesired pounds. Walking into the nearest health and fitness store, the individual’s eyes automatically see the flashy/colorful labels with terminology on them like “hyper-shred” and “metabolic-matrix”. These flashy labels, unfortunately, are diet pills. Diet pills have been around since the early 20’s and since then have been altered and changed into hundreds of different forms with hundreds of different ingredients. The only problem here is that those pills have so many ingredients in them that individuals have never heard of or the fact that the individuals do not know the side effects. Some diet pills have even caused headaches, heart attacks, and even in some cases death.   

            I want to present the facts about diet pills and hopefully come to the conclusion that diet pills are not very safe. I do not want to make this a one sided rhetorical essay; instead I want to present the information and make it self evident that diet pills are not safe. My audience is going to be my classmates along with my English professor.  I want to look credible and knowledgeable in this essay. I want the audience to be able to come to their own conclusion and have an “AHA” moment after reading the essay. I am still contemplating on the sort of arrangement and medium I am going to use. Seeing that it has to be 10 full pages of text, I am most likely going to use a standard Microsoft word document. I will start with an introduction on the topic, then move onto any discrepancies that society has developed on the topic. Then I will go onto showing research that has been done on the topic and how much research has been done in total to show that my sources and claims are reliable. In the research I will provide different statistics with definitions and even stories related to the topic. I will make sure that all my sources are reliable and have credibility upon them so it is reflected upon my professionalism.                                                                                      

            By the end of this rhetorical paper I hope to inform people that diet pills are not what they are made to look like. Diet pills may claim to actually work and be safe but in most cases it takes a well balanced diet and workout plan for diet pills to work. Also I want individuals to understand that diet pills act very different according to each person. Everybody’s bodies work differently and not one single diet pill can have the same results on multiple individuals. The same pill that helps someone lose five pounds may also be the same pill that puts someone else in the hospital bed.

            I feel like others would have a hard time agreeing or disagreeing with me only because the amount of knowledgeable and reliable information out there on diet pills is not comparable to the amount of different kinds of diet pills. I am sure that most people will agree with me that diet pills are not necessary to loosing weight and if given the chance to take them, they would most likely say no. But this is the same story with most individuals when relating to any topic, not just diet pills. It’s the fact that the small majority of individuals who knows little about diet pills are the same ones who will disagree with me and then they will end up having migraines and diarrhea for days.

            As a fitness fanatic, I have heard a lot about diet pills from people in the gym. Many people have claimed that the diet pills have worked but at the same time those same people are eating healthy and working out. To be completely honest I feel like they are all just placebo effects. Also I have tried diet pills at one point and from my own experience I can say that for the time I was using them, I did not feel good at multiple times and found myself having ridiculous mood swings.

            To conduct my research I plan on looking at a variety of research studies of individuals on diet pills. I want hard evidence to prove whether they actually work. Then I also want hard evidence that tests the side effects of diet pills. I feel like there is a lot of research in the field of diet pills because people are actually interested in whether they are helpful or not. I will also look in books for the specifics of how diet pills work and how there are multiple forms of them.

            By the end of this research paper I want to know exactly how diet pills work on a scientific scale. (Pertaining mainly to what they affect in the body and how it supposedly causes fat burning) I also want to know how strong the evidence is to back up my argument. It would be interesting to learn more about what goes into the FDA’s process of legalizing different diet pills for individuals. Another thing I want to learn is what the FDA believes it takes to be an over the counter diet pill as opposed to a diet pill that requires a doctor’s prescription.

            I do not want to just inform somebody about this topic or even get someone to side with my final argument, instead I want to take someone who believes diet pills are safe and make them see they are not what they are made to look like.