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Dieting and the Drive for Thinness
©2006, National Eating Disorders Association. All Rights Reserved. The following material is copyrighted and may be reproduced or used for educational and non-profit purposes only.
www.NationalEatingDisorders.org.
Did you know that:
- Over one-half of teenage girls and nearly one-third of teenage boys use unhealthy weight control behaviors such as skipping meals, fasting, smoking cigarettes, vomiting, and taking laxatives (Neumark-Sztainer, 2005).
- Girls who diet frequently are 12 times as likely to binge as girls who don’t diet (Neumark-Sztainer, 2005).
- 42% of 1st - 3rd grade girls want to be thinner (Collins, 1991).
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- 81% of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat (Mellin et al., 1991)
- The average American woman is 5’4” tall and weighs 140 pounds. The average American model is 5’11” tall and weighs 117 pounds.
- Most fashion models are thinner than 98% of American women (Smolak, 1996).
- 46% of 9 - 11 year-olds are “sometimes” or “very often” on diets, and 82% of their families are “sometimes” or “very often” on diets (Gustafson-Larson & Terry, 1992).
- 91% of women recently surveyed on a college campus had attempted to control their weight through dieting, 22% dieted “often” or “always” (Kurth et al., 1995).
- 95% of all dieters will regain their lost weight in 1-5 years (Grodstein, et al., 1996).
- 35% of “normal dieters” progress to pathological dieting. Of those, 20-25% progress to partial or full-syndrome eating disorders (Shisslak & Crago, 1995).
- 25% of American men and 45% of American women are on a diet on any given day (Smolak, 1996).
- Americans spend over $40 billion on dieting and diet-related products each year (Smolak, 1996).
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