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Teens and Dieting

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Submitted By mvdm1928
Words 2356
Pages 10
Research Paper Final Draft
Megan Vandermark
English 135
Professor Skeen
23 February, 2012

Teens and Dieting
As a model, Nina was dying to be thin. She lived off of her looks: “That was a lifestyle for me. Just like an athlete trains for a goal, it’s the same thing with my weight.” Her goal was to be the thinnest African-American model at 5’10’ and 100 pounds. As her weight dropped, she began to book more jobs. To make the weight drop faster, Nina turned to diet pills to help her lose the last 15 pounds. Nina said “When I took the pills, it was a euphoric feeling. Your body is in constant motion. There’s no slowing down, no desire to eat. It’s like being intoxicated and you can get used to that feeling if you’re taking the pills on a daily basis.” The euphoric feeling masked the problems that were going on in Nina’s body. At the age of 29, Nina had a heart attack, “It felt like an arm was punching through my chest.” But even a heart attack wasn’t enough to bring her destructive behavior to a complete stop. “It still took some time for the full wake-up to come,” Nina said (Ray, 2007).
Stories such as this one should not happen, and we have the power to stop it from happening, so that no one should have to go through such a life changing experience. If Nina and other teens had known the risks of extreme dieting practices prior to using them, maybe there would not be so many incidents today. Teens have easy access to dieting methods and don't understand the risks of abusing them; two solutions to these problems are to increase the knowledge about the consequences of abuse and to make access to diets more difficult for teens.
First, teens should not use dieting to lose weight because their bodies are still growing and require many nutrients. Teens face mounting pressure every day, especially in a school setting, to fit in and look like everyone else (Smith, 2011); they

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