Blog Post 1 for Ind. Viewing Project

Bibliography:  Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead. Dir. Joe Cross. Dir. Kurt Engfehr. Joe Cross, 2010. DVD.

The documentary I chose to watch for my independent viewing is called “Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead”.  The documentary is cut in half, one half of the documentary focuses on the life of a man named Joe who realizes his death may come prematurely because of his rare auto-immune disease and his severe obesity.  He finally decides to do something about it by going on a “Reboot” diet where he drinks nothing but vegetable and fruit juice that he squeezes himself and drinks for every meal.  He does this for 60 days and reaches a healthy mark.  The next half of the documentary is about a different man named Phil,  Joe is the creator of this documentary and he meets Phil at a truck stop and they begin talking about Joe’s diet.  Soon Phil begins to do the same diet because he happens to have the same disease and is more than 200 pounds over weight.  This documentary shares their success stories and how this new diet has helped people all over the world to achieve the success that these two men have achieved.

The most prominent rhetorical device from this documentary is ethos.  Throughout the entire documentary the credibility of the diet and this one man’s mission to lose weight and become healthy is conveyed through evidence such as a doctor weighing him and telling him how much weight his diet has made him lose, to the end where the film closes with saying all these mini success stories of other men and women who have lost certain amounts of weight because of this diet. With evidence like this, it is hard to turn away from hard facts and it proves that this new juice diet actually works and could help save America’ obese population. The appeal of ethos affects the audience by having a large movement where more people start doing this diet and more people start to exercise and try to make a healthier life for themselves.  The use of statistical data on how many colors of chicken fill up your stomach compared to how many calories of vegetable fill up your stomach is astounding. This data affects the audience and pushes them to take action to save their health and their lives before they end up being a “cheese burger away from a heart attack” as Phil said during the film when he was in the middle of his diet.

The second most used rhetorical device was logos.  Logos was used every time a doctor was being filmed or a trained physician was giving facts.  The logical facts of what the doctors said cannot be false, otherwise that would be illegal.  These facts help the video because it states this basic general concept, “if a doctor is saying I will die at the age of 45 if I eat 20 hamburgers a day, then it must be true, and I need to take action to stop myself eating too many hamburgers and dying an early death” (this was not said in the video, but it is an example of logos used).  The statistics the doctors use move the audience to take action because it is a reliable source that is telling them to change, which relates back to the idea of credibility and ethos which made the movie as effective as it was.