Overweight Troubled Teens Can Easily Go Astray
It seems like a long road from a teenager worried about their weight to becoming a teenager sentenced to time in schools for troubled teens. Unfortunately, in a culture that puts extreme value on personal appearance, those teens who feel that their body just doesn’t cut it will often use drastic measures to meet the standard that they imagine they must reach.
Unfortunately, some troubled teens will seek to lose weight as quickly as possible and therein lays the path to possible behavioral problems later on. That is because the fastest track to losing weight that many teens seek are amphetamines, or other stimulant drugs that can spin the teen out of control.
Relevant Tags:amphetamines, behavioral problems, binge eating, drastic measures, overweight girls, schools for troubled teens, stimulant drugs, troubled teens“In a five-year study of more than 2,500 teenagers, researchers found that 44 percent of girls and 29 percent of boys were overweight, habitual binge-eaters or had taken unhealthy measures to lose weight — such as abusing laxatives, using diet pills or vomiting.
In many cases, these problems overlapped. Among overweight girls, 40 percent reported binge-eating, extreme dieting or both…
“We usually look for these behaviors in very thin girls, but here we see a very high prevalence in overweight girls…
What’s more, she and her colleagues found, some of the same factors seemed to underlie the risks of becoming overweight, binge-eating or taking extreme measures to shed pounds.In particular, being teased by a family member appeared to raise the risk of all three problems in girls…
Among the other risk factors were preoccupation with weight, having a mother who dieted, and frequently reading magazine articles on weight loss.”
