Every modern teenage girl has an image in her mind of what it is to be beautiful and healthy. While beauty may be in the eyes of the beholder, there is no question that some of these girls are striving to reach unhealthy and impossible goals. Society, their friends, and the media give girls these images and berate anyone who fluctuates from what they consider to be the norm. So they are driven to extreme weight-loss diets or the occasional "miracle cure" diet pill, which has become socially acceptable, and the results can be eating disorders, social exclusion, and even hospitalization. They very rarely even know what they are getting themselves into. This is a serious issue affecting teenage girls today and can not be ignored.

The pressure is constant and comes from all around them. Society has told girls that it is incredibly important to be attractive. Women are judged harshly on appearance, and as a result teenage girls, soon to become women, react harshly. The media has told them that to be attractive, they must look like models that are often at an unhealthy weight themselves. It is simply marketing. The advertiser first makes the girl feel ugly, then offers many products to solve her problem, which they have created for her. The worse the consumer feels, the more motivated a shopper they become, the higher the price can be. Finally, their friends and family add the competitive edge when they are told both when they are gaining and losing weight. Teenage girls have often been brought up to see each other as competition in the great beauty contest of life, which can drive them to do almost anything to win.

When the social pressure become to much to handle, the girl usually tries to do something, anything, to make the situation better. The concept of the diet has become socially acceptable but not well defined. Many girls no doubt believe that the term diet means whatever makes them lose weight. They don't appreciate the difference between a healthy diet and a risky extreme weight-loss diet. Many don't even know they are doing it, or simply choose to ignore it. Too many girls do not know that "unsupervised diets require great skill because elimination of foods to reduce calories can also result in elimination of vital nutrients". Such diets, called "fad diets" by The Prentice-Hall Dictionary of Nutrition & Health, come in all shapes and forms and are often difficult to spot. Skipping meals is the most common story, but weight loss pills and other more organized activities such as anorexia or bulimia are also popular. "Anorexics typically weigh less than eighty-five percent of the normal minimum for their age and height and ninety-five percent of them are female". The advertisements that forced this mind set on the girl, having offered her a quick fix, has her expecting a quick fix. She begins to watch her weight on a daily basis. She notices what makes her weight go up and down, totally ignoring her health, and making her own homemade destructive weight-loss diet. Diet pills or programs offer her amazing results at a nominal price, so naturally she's game. It's an attractive trap to fall into and society is pushing teenage girls in to it. In fact, an estimated ninety percent of all women feel bad about their bodies according to the Eating Disorder Information Centre. They often don't even know how far they've gone until it's too late. She doesn't care about the side effects because, to her, it is how you look that counts.

The results can be devastating: Eating disorders, personality changes, lost opportunities, social exclusion, hospitalization, and death. Diet and other performance enhancing pills have ruined many aspiring young women's sports careers. Other side effects result in poor performance at school, loss of jobs, and permanently ruined relationships with family and friends. Some girls permanently damage parts of their bodies which make later life harder for them. The average girl may be willing to look past physical side effects for the desired goal and doesn't realize what they are doing and whom they are hurting. It is not even effective. "The National Institutes of Health�found little evidence that popular weight-loss tools, anything from appetite suppressants to liquid diets, offered much chance for long term success". Ninety-five percent of all dieters gain all the weight they lost back within five years. There needs to be more information available to these young ladies, like the healthy weight for their age and height. Doctors need to be consulted before any action is taken.

Far too many teenage girls have become obsessed with their bodies. Our society has told them it is one of the most important things about them. It has driven them into everything from fits of depression, sometimes on the brink of suicide, to the most extreme of rapid weight-loss diets. These girls usually pay a huge price to avoid this constant pressure because they would have done anything to get away from it. These girls feel that they have no choice. That it is the order of things and that's just how it is. For most, the emotional and physical scars and the memories of this battle with themselves will last a lifetime and cannot be tolerated. Society needs to think about the view it is giving of women to these, the most sensitive of viewers. Information on what is healthy and safe as opposed to what is not needs to be made readily available and easy to access. The time for accepting the status quo is gone and it is time for us to begin giving life back into these girls and showing them who they really are. They are our daughters, sisters, cousins, nieces, and friends, not our models nor subjects for judgement. It needs to be understood that we would rather have someone healthy, than someone dangerously underweight.