Teenage Girls Just Aren’t Eating Enough

Remember when you used to come home from high school, exhausted and starving? Lunch had been at like 10:30 that morning, and so by the time the afternoon bell rang, your stomach was growling so loudly you had to sit hunched over to dull the gurgles.

By Jess

Home meant snacks. It might refueling yourself for sports or theater club or smoking stolen cigarettes under a tree while sneering at all organized things. Afternoon snack was an event I looked forward to from kindergarten to twelfth grade.

Hell, I still look forward to it!

Sadly, today’s teenage girls aren’t allowing themselves the joy of snack time – or any meal – at all. A report from the UK’s Independent Online showed that over “a third of 13 to 18-year-old girls” polled for a study indicated they had been on a diet or were currently dieting, and “45 per cent [ate] less than 1,200 calories per day”, which is below the healthy amount for growing women.

About a quarter of the boys in the survey admitted to eating less calories than the daily recommended amount, but girls were the ones worrying researchers most of all.

“These results show that teenagers struggle to understand what constitutes a balanced diet” a nutritionist connected to the study explained, raising concerns that the recent influx of ‘healthy’ advertisements and public service announcements are no match against the pull of glossy magazines and stick-thin celebrities.

Girls between the ages of 15 and 18 need about 2,755 calories a day.

Dieting when you’re overweight can help keep you healthy, but dieting to look like Ashley Olsen (and really, why would you want to?) is just going to send your body into starvation mode; storing fat and shutting down necessary processes.

If you feel strange about grabbing a cookie after class, grab a healthy meal replacement bar, fruit, or whole grain bread with peanut putter…just promise me you’ll grab something.

Treating yourself like a prisoner in some forgotten jail in the 1700’s is a strange way to live—especially when there’s a whole channel devoted to the amazingess that is eating.