Biology Blog Post
Kong Eng Hong (14)
3 Service
27th March 2007
Nowadays, bombarded with the media’s negative messages and bad celebrity influences, people around the world, self conscious teenagers in particular, are pressurized to diet and lose weight rapidly by using extreme methods which often do not work and have severe consequences. Many weight obsessed teenagers often resort to unhealthy dieting methods instead of losing weight safely. They were most likely to skip meals, use diet pills or laxatives, smoke, binge and vomit to lose weight. What these teenagers do not take into consideration are the many harmful effects of dieting on their bodies.
Many teenagers nowadays suffer from eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, in which these eating disorders are not only physical but psychological. Anorexia is an eating disorder where people usually starve themselves in a desperate attempt to lose weight; and Anorexia sufferers are often plagued with the illusion that they are very overweight and have an intense fear of becoming fat, despite the fact that most people suffering from anorexia are underweight or unhealthily thin. Bulimia is another psychological eating disorder. Bulimia is characterized by episodes of binge-eating followed by inappropriate methods of weight control (purging). Inappropriate methods of weight control include vomiting, fasting, enemas, excessive use of laxatives and diuretics, or compulsive exercising. These two eating disorders are highly rampant among teenagers today, where becoming thin is a huge priority to gain acceptance among one’s peers.
However, the harmful effects of these extreme ways of dieting are less known than the diets itself. Extreme dieting interferes with one’s metabolism and fools one’s body into thinking that it is going through a starvation cycle. If extreme dieting is continued, the body will learn to compensate for these starvation waves by evening the body metabolism out, and one would gain a lot more weight suddenly during the non-diet phase and lose less during the diet phase, in which this is a natural body reaction. The only sensible way to lose weight is to have a balanced, healthy diet; in which this is something most teenagers do not, unfortunately, realize.
3 comments:
I agree with Eng Hong. Many teenagers, especially girls, want to lose thier weight even though they are very thin. I think starving and purging in order to achieve good stature are really unadvisable. These actions will disturb the normal physiological regularity and cause many other problems in our body.
Liushu
<3 I say...,
I do believe that many teens today are in distress and are determined to lose weight despite the fact that they are already skinny and malnutritioned. However, it isn't a big problem yet in Singapore. Of course, prevention is better than cure and eating disorders can be found in 1 out of 20 people in Singapore but seriously, it isn't that serious for us yet. We may be daunted by scary photos of anorexic teen or mentally ill ones on the net or in magazines but they are still pretty far away from us.To discuss about this now just seems vague to me. In the community that i am living in, people only talk about gaining weight and the need to lose it but not much practical/drastic actions are really taken by them to do so. Therefore, i believe and i am glad that i live among a group of healthy and self-concious people who can help and support each other along to prevent health and dieting problems from occuring.
Cheryl
Coming back to our topic, i think that a way to help those people suffering from health disorder is to tempt them to consume chocolates:)
To a gradually "fattening" person, this may be a NO NO, but deadly as they are, chocolates contain the best nutrition to replenish the body, mind and soul of a person. It can be heavenly or deadly, thoroughly depending on the consumer. Therefore, 'Death by chocolate' may be the ultimate remedy for them..HaHA!
Cheryl
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