Why Teens Shouldn't Diet

Why Teens Shouldn't Diet Dieting can be defined as restricting calories or food groups (Deal with Diets: kidshealth.org). With the number of obese people growing, it's no wonder that people are starting to diet, and "in 1988, Americans spent 32 billion dollars on diets and diet products (Baird: Women's Health Fact Sheet)." A problem arises when teens start restricting their food, because dieting can be very harmful to a teenager's still-developing body. It can also be harmful to the teen's psychological health as well. "80% of teen girls are unhappy with their bodies and weight (Community Action: 27% of Teens in Peril from Dieting), and 50% of teen girls incorrectly believe that they are overweight, increasing the likelihood that they will diet (Strauss 741)." Dieting comes with its own host of problems which is why teens should definitely not diet because it can cause obesity, eating disorders, and nutrient deficiencies. Some people may be surprised by the fact that dieting can actually cause obesity later. It seems like a paradox, but it really isn't. When someone else controls the way you eat, it's very natural to rebel. Also, when someone diets, it slows down their metabolism, and when a person starts eating like they used to, the metabolism doesn't have any time to adjust to that, and there is a weight gain. Plus, dieting lowers a person's blood sugar, which can trigger depression, then trigger binge eating, which leads to weight gain (Drohan 30-32). This may all seem like theory, but there have been two recent studies to explore it further. Harvard Medical School put together a study, testing this theory, and the results were surprising. What they found after testing 8,203 girls and 6,769 boys was that the adolescents who dieted frequently actually gained more weight each year than other children. Both the males and females suffered from the boomerang effect of dieting, and gained, on average, two pounds more than the non-dieters. They then