Shanker discusses how being fat should not be the most of one's worries. She blames modern society and the views that everybody makes on overweight people to explain why people are always trying to slim themselves down to make themselves socially acceptable. In a way she kind of proposes an idea that all people should just push their insecurities aside because they have more important things to pursue, such as a career, family, and friends. Being overweight should be the last of problems. Her target audience in my opinion is everybody who has given up hope for trying to lose weight.

I personally find her credibility to be non existent. Her viewpoint seem to be way too biased. In all honesty, she sounds like a woman who has dieted for way to long and received no results because of her lack of willpower and discipline. From my personal experience, dieting and losing weight is no problem because I dropped about twenty pounds over a four month period. Then again, my statement has about as much credibility as hers, so I am pretty sure that my statement is not very convincing. If she was indifferent towards either viewpoint and sounded like she had more intelligence in the subject she was talking about, then she would not have lack of persuasion that she has now.

On the other hand, we have Eleanor Randolph, who writes about overweight kids and the 10 things that we should do to cure this. I believe he targets everybody who is affected by the topic. Fast food places who advertise with little kids as their subjects, schools districts, parents, and teachers are all on the list of people she tries to target. She proposes ten ideas that these targeted people should do in order to prevent more child and teen obesity.

Her credibility seems to demolish that of Shanker's for one reason: Randolph has absolutely no bias in her proposition. She just seems to be concerned with the rising rates of child and teen obesity. She backs up her arguments with solid statistics, saying that " Over the past 30 years, obesity rates have doubled among pre-schoolers and tripled for those age to 11." She talks about how diabetes and high cholesterol and blood pressure are now becoming serious problems amongst America's youth. Her ten suggestions seem to be very solid suggestions that can easily be used to lower obesity rates. The main difference between Randolph and Shanker is that Shanker speaks too much from personal experience, which gives a really biased point of view. Randolph's use of stats and suggestion gives her a much more persuasive essay. And to be honest with you, she persuaded me a lot in this essay. Shanker just came off as a person who failed at dieting so much that she just conformed to the idea that dieting is impossible.