Dieting is on the rise among the younger generations. Dieting is changing your daily intake to fit a certain standard, that is often unhealthy and extreme. Young, school aged girls are starving themselves because it’s “cool” and their peers make them feel like they’d be the only ones not doing it. Everyone wants to be thin and beautiful, but the age that girls diet keeps decreasing. Young girls that used to play around on the playground and dress up barbies are too busy hating themselves to have any harmless fun. People think that they’ll only make friends if they’re thinner or that they won’t be truly happy until they lose 10 pounds. As someone who babysits constantly, I’m exposed first hand to young girls who don’t like the way they look. The girls I’ve grown up taking care of change their entire outlook on life when they start thinking this way. I can see how unhappy they become and it is very disheartening. All I want to do when I see this happening is tell them that they’re beautiful the way they are. But when the rest of the world is against them it’s not surprising that they don’t believe it.

I was lucky, I grew up without thinking about things like my weight or what I was eating.

I was carefree and I loved myself, my friends, and my life. I was a generation before social media took over. I didn’t have a flip phone till I was 14, but there are girls now with iPhones at age 5. Technology is one factor that shapes these kids’ outlooks. My insecurities didn’t kick in till late middle school, like most people of my generation. Sure, I tried to diet here and there in high school, but it was never extreme and it never lasted more than a week. Luckily, I wasn’t too pressed on losing weight or looking thinner, like many other girls my age were. Now there are girls that have started feeling these thigs years earlier than I ever did. As soon as kids are exposed to social media, they begin comparing themselves to others. Many girls believe they don’t have enough followers because they aren’t pretty enough or because they’re too fat. They believe that getting a certain number of likes means they aren’t good enough. They start to diet to look better for Instagram and twitter and face book so that others will tell them how good they look. Due to their peers’ own insecurities rubbing off on them, the media displaying images of what they should look like, and sometimes even adults telling them they need to lose weight. Don’t get me wrong dieting can help if you’re overweight and an adult, but as a child you should be focused on the fun parts of life not how many calories are in a fruit snack. Children need nutrition in order to grow and be healthy. Children need to be proud of who they are. They should be taught to love themselves no matter their size. 

People diet for many different reasons. Surprisingly enough, the motivation behind dieting can have just as much impact as the diet itself. Appearance and health are the two main reasons most people diet. Dieting for health is the only reason that should be supported. When one’s health is at stake, it’s smart to alter their eating habits to better themselves. But when dieting takes place simply to lose weight or appear thinner, it often becomes unhealthy. This is because these two motivations also influence the way people diet. When dieting for appearance, the person dieting tends to take it to the extreme while the one who does it for health is typically just eating healthier. When influenced by peers, dieting is solely for appearance. In this case it is extremely unhealthy because not only are they physically hurt but also mentally. Peers have been shown to have more influence on young girls as they enter the school system than their own families. All they want is to fit in and make friends, making them even more susceptible to influence. Although peers have a lot of control in the school system, parents can also cause a big problem in self-confidence. If a parent shows their kids at a young age, the need for dieting, the kids are more likely to grow up with mental issues involving weight and diet. However, if they grow up eating healthy and exercising with no connection to losing weight, they will learn to do these things as a second nature. This creates healthy and happy kids that become confident as they age. One of my best friends from middle school, Mary struggled with this. She developed an eating disorder and I believe it had a lot to do with her mom. Her mother was overweight and dieted and exercised regularly because of this. Mary grew up seeing that dieting and exercise could only be done to solve the problem of weight. Despite the fact that she was far from overweight, growing up with her mother acting like that led her to diet and exercise regularly and unhealthily. Mary developed anorexia because she was so worried about becoming overweight like her mother. This led to her becoming very unhealthy. 

Many diet plans are ineffective. Calorie counting, for one, has been proven to be inaccurate. Labels and packaging have been found to be off on their calorie counts, making this even harder to do. Another dieting mistake many make is daily weigh ins. Weigh ins should be restricted to no more than once a week, as weight fluctuates daily it would be an inaccurate reading. These daily weigh ins also add stress to the dieter, causing them to feel unsuccessful and possibly even give up. Drastic dieting such as fasting or cutting out meals altogether should be avoided. These diets do nothing other than hurt the health of the dieter. Diets like these often lead to eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia and binge eating. These eating disorders happen mainly because of dieting for the wrong reasons. When someone is so self-conscious about their body that they’ll do anything to change it, they take drastic measures. The results are sad, unhealthy women who hate themselves even more than before they started. Often when dieting this drastically, the dieter will cheat and splurge on junk food, causing the diet to be ruined. These diets are ineffective and cause more harm than good on the dieter. 

The negative mental and physical health that results from drastic dieting are to great to be ignored. Intense dieters have a mindset of what beauty is and when they fail to meet that, they feel as if all is over. When they expect a diet to result in a thinner waist after five days, they’re upset. Mentally, diets are very straining. Dieters already have to be negatively thinking in order to begin a diet, and as the diet goes on it does nothing but tear them down. 