n and what you must eat at certain times make it difficult for people to recognize when they are comfortably full.

Someone who is willing to take extreme steps to be thinner could have an eating disorder. These include anorexia nervosa (starving one's self) or bulimia nervosa (eating and then deliberately throwing up). They are serious conditions that need a doctor's attention. People with the eating disorder anorexia are obsessed with food and being thi

The number you see on the scale doesn't necessarily tell you whether you need to lose weight. That's because two people of the same height and weight can have different bone structures. They may carry different amounts of muscle and body fat. To find out if you are at a healthy weight, your health care provider usually calculates your body mass index (BMI). BMI uses your height and weight to estimate how much fat is on your body. Once you know your BMI, you can chart it on a BMI for Age growth chart to see if you are a healthy weight.

Some people may diet because they think they are supposed to look a certain way. Actors and actresses are thin, and most fashions are shown off by very thin models. But this look is unrealistic for most people — not to mention physically damaging to the models and stars who struggle to maintain it.

A survey of 10th-grade students finds that 60 percent have made conscious efforts to lose weight. In response to the question “Have you ever tried to lose weight?” 36.5 percent of the boys said yes, compared with 73.6 percent of the girls.

By the time they turn 12 or 13, most teen girls start to go through body changes that are natural and necessary: Their hips broaden, their breasts develop, and suddenly the way they look may not match girls on TV or in magazine ads. Guys develop at different rates, too. Those guys with washboard abs you see in clothing ads are usually in their twenties.Certain family dynamics along with the challenge of developing a separate self identity contribute to disordered eating.

There are serious consequences of starvation or fad diets for a person that is still growing. Unrealistic goals lead to feelings of failure and sometimes disordered eating. Fad diets or dieting can also throw your teen's hunger cues off track. Restrictive diets that say when and what you must eat at certain times make it difficult for people to recognize when they are comfortably full.

Someone who is willing to take extreme steps to be thinner could have an eating disorder. These include anorexia nervosa (starving one's self) or bulimia nervosa (eating and then deliberately throwing up). They are serious conditions that need a doctor's attention. People with the eating disorder anorexia are obsessed with food and being thin

n chart it on a BMI for Age growth chart to see if you are a healthy weight.

Some people may diet because they think they are supposed to look a certain way. Actors and actresses are thin, and most fashions are shown off by very thin models. But this look is unrealistic for most people — not to mention physically damaging to the models and stars who struggle to maintain it.

A survey of 10th-grade students finds that 60 percent have made conscious efforts to lose weight. In response to the question “Have you ever tried to lose weight?” 36.5 percent of the boys said yes, compared with 73.6 percent of the girls.

By the time they turn 12 or 13, most teen girls start to go through body changes that are natural and necessary: Their hips broaden, their breasts develop, and suddenly the way they look may not match girls on TV or in magazine ads. Guys develop at different rates, too. Those guys with washboard abs you see in clothing ads are usually in their twenties.Certain family dynamics along with the challenge of developing a separate self identity contribute to disordered eating.

There are serious consequences of starvation or fad diets for a person that is still growing. Unrealistic goals lead to feelings of failure and sometimes disordered eating. Fad diets or dieting can also throw your teen's hunger cues off track. Restrictive diets that say when and what you must eat at certain times make it difficult for people to recognize when they are comfortably full.

Someone who is willing to take extreme steps to be thinner could have an eating disorder. These include anorexia nervosa (starving one's self) or bulimia nervosa (eating and then deliberately throwing up). They are serious conditions that need a doctor's attention. People with the eating disorder anorexia are obsessed with food and being thi

fforts to lose weight. In response to the question “Have you ever tried to lose weight?” 36.5 percent of the boys said yes, compared with 73.6 percent of the girls.

By the time they turn 12 or 13, most teen girls start to go through body changes that are natural and necessary: Their hips broaden, their breasts develop, and suddenly the way they look may not match girls on TV or in magazine ads. Guys develop at different rates, too. Those guys with washboard abs you see in clothing ads are usually in their twenties.Certain family dynamics along with the challenge of developing a separate self identity contribute to disordered eating.

There are serious consequences of starvation or fad diets for a person that is still growing. Unrealistic goals lead to feelings of failure and sometimes disordered eating. Fad diets or dieting can also throw your teen's hunger cues off track. Restrictive diets that say when and what you must eat at certain times make it difficult for people to recognize when they are comfortably full.

Someone who is willing to take extreme steps to be thinner could have an eating disorder. These include anorexia nervosa (starving one's self) or bulimia nervosa (eating and then deliberately throwing up). They are serious conditions that need a doctor's attention. People with the eating disorder anorexia are obsessed with food and being thi

oard abs you see in clothing ads are usually in their twenties.Certain family dynamics along with the challenge of developing a separate self identity contribute to disordered eating.

There are serious consequences of starvation or fad diets for a person that is still growing. Unrealistic goals lead to feelings of failure and sometimes disordered eating. Fad diets or dieting can also throw your teen's hunger cues off track. Restrictive diets that say when and what you must eat at certain times make it difficult for people to recognize when they are comfortably full.

Someone who is willing to take extreme steps to be thinner could have an eating disorder. These include anorexia nervosa (starving one's self) or bulimia nervosa (eating and then deliberately throwing up). They are serious conditions that need a doctor's attention. People with the eating disorder anorexia are obsessed with food and being thi

n and what you must eat at certain times make it difficult for people to recognize when they are comfortably full.

Someone who is willing to take extreme steps to be thinner could have an eating disorder. These include anorexia nervosa (starving one's self) or bulimia nervosa (eating and then deliberately throwing up). They are serious conditions that need a doctor's attention. People with the eating disorder anorexia are obsessed with food and being thin. They don't maintain a body weight that's normal for their age and height. Indeed, they may be skeletally thin but still think they're fat. To prevent weight gain or to continue losing weight, people with anorexia may starve themselves or exercise excessively.

Weight-loss diets restrict the intake of specific foods, or food in general, to reduce body weight. What works to reduce body weight for one person will not necessarily work for another, due to metabolic differences and lifestyle factors. Also, for a variety of reasons, most people find it very difficult to maintain significant weight loss over time. There is some thought that losing weight quickly may actually make it more difficult to maintain the loss over time.

Teens who go on diets to drop some pounds are more likely to skip breakfast and binge eat -- which may at least partly explain why they put on more weight over time than their peers who don't diet, a new study shows.

The researchers set out to uncover the reasons why dieting by adolescents has been shown in previous studies to predict later weight gain.

The behaviors they identified, however, don't entirely answer the question, Dr. Dianne Neumark-Sztainer of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, the study's lead author, told Reuters Health.

It's possible, she explained, that people who are at greater risk of becoming overweight are also more likely to be dieters, although their initial weight was taken into account in the study's analysis.

Nevertheless, the findings show that dieting is a short-term fix that teens choose instead of longer-term, healthier -- and more effective -- strategies like eating more fruits and vegetables and getting more exercise, Neumark-Sztainer said.

"We really want to discourage teenagers from dieting," she added, noting that she an