The Effects of Bad Dieting free essay sample

Bad dieting is very harmful to one’s body which may acquire horrifying side effects. After really dedicating themselves for a while, people seem to be satisfied with their diets and losing weight, that is until they start getting lazy and find it hard to continue their diets, which lead them into falling for junk food or eating out or even worse, bad dieting. Bad dieting is very common since people give up on working hard maintaining their weight loss. According to the average American dieting and weight statistics, the average woman in America is 5’4’’ in height and generally weighs around 140 pounds. On the contrary the average model in America is 5’11’’ in height and weight around 117 pounds. Most fashion models remain thinner than 98% of American women. Four out of five American women say they are dissatisfied with the way they look. On any given day, almost half of the women in the United States are on some type of diet. Children as little as being in third grade say they would like to be thinner. Four out of five ten year olds are afraid of being fat. Almost half of American children between first and third grades say they want to be thinner. On any given day one in four men are on a diet. Half of eight, nine and ten year olds say that being on a diet makes them feel better about themselves. More than one out of three normal dieters progress to compulsive dieting. This typically leads to people who suffer from partial or full syndrome disorders. Americans spend an immense amount of money on dieting every year. This may range from a little over forty billion dollars a year, but can vary depending on the type of person. Between five and ten million women and girls in the US struggle with eating disorders and borderline conditions. One million men and boys struggle with eating disorders and borderline conditions. The number of people with eating disorders is triple the number of people with AIDS (approximately 664,921 people are living with AIDS). Eating disorders affect at least three times as many people as schizophrenia does (2. 2 million people are living with schizophrenia). (http://www. nch-aweigh. com/dietstats. htm). When one is asked why they want to lose weight, the answers we hear must be pretty obvious. Some people on the other hand are still unsure why they want to lose the weight. Most people might come up with answers like â€Å"I don’t really know† or â€Å"I hate the way I look† and â€Å"my clothes don’t fit right†. A main reason is that mo st Americans want to stay healthy to live a long and healthy life. A person might also feel helpless while watching fit people showing off their movie star looks and having weight loss headlines on magazines and on the news. A problem with having a little motivation is that once one meets their weight goal, it is hard to maintain the weight. Once you lose some weight people start to notice and then come the compliments, which are very nice to hear. Everywhere you go, you might run into people you know, or get stared at with looks of jealousy. Your friends will talk about you and make up weird lies that you must have gotten some kind of surgery or depended on purging and saying other mean things out of jealousy. Sooner or later people will stop talking about you and your life will resume to how it was before. This is where people tend to rely on dieting the bad way. They decide that the hard work is getting annoying and tend to find the easy way out to maintain the same results. This is where losing weight the wrong, but easy way comes in. After do ing rough work outs and eating right, there comes that point where you want to cut the effort and receive easier results, so losing weight in a hurry and using quicker methods start sounding like a good idea. If you take a look at celebrities Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie you can see that they lost weight dramatically. Towards the end they looked as if they needed to swallow an enormous amount of food. It is important to know how not to lose weight, in order to know how much you can harm your body without recognizing it. Teenagers that skip meals feel decent about themselves and consider that in the long run it will be worth the starvation. They don’t realize that by giving up food and losing a pound or two a week can cause health problems. As most of us already know, our body needs a certain amount of calories a day in order for our bodies to function the right way. The number of calorie intake can vary from male to female. If we skip a meal we might be starving when it comes down to our next meal. By then we might overeat since we cannot stop thinking about all the rumbling noises our stomach is making. It is also then harder to focus on school work and to have sufficient energy while working. By limiting your calories, you will be restricting yourself of certain classes of foods. These techniques might make you shed a little bit of weight, but most of it will be water and muscle mass, not fat. What you need to loose is fat, not water weight. This quick weight loss can cause severe problems such as bad breath, diarrhea, and nausea and hair loss. Another bad addition to bad dieting are dietary supplements and forced vomiting. These pills and powders claim to melt your pounds away, but what they are actually doing is increasing your heart rate. Most of them contain laxatives, which contain some herbs that may speed up the heart rate and the nervous system to dangerous levels. Teens think that forced vomiting will remove the weight for good as long as they keep the vomiting consistent, but what it is really doing is causing dehydration and the swelling in the salivary glands. The stomach acid will also damage your esophagus, which is the tube from the mouth to the stomach. This can also cause tooth decay. The forced vomiting is one of the first few signs that lead to bulimia (http://www. kidzworld. com/article/5399-losing-weight-the-wrong-way). These are all bad ideas and once once informed, it is easier to take positive actions to losing weight. Who wants to hurt their bodies anyway? We have one body and should know how to take caution of it the correct way. Physicians and other doctors can prove that all these negative consequences are accurate. Eating healthier and avoiding activities that will harm our bodies is the best alternative to wanting to shed pounds the fast and incorrect way. Eating smaller portions, while eating regularly will help weight loss. Trying new and fun activities can also maximize the amount of weight being lost. We have one body, one life, and it’s time to make sure that if we want to lose weight, we are going to do it the correct way!