Being obsessive about checking weight may cause you to end up with unhealthy dietary habits and cause more weight gain than desired.
A study conducted by Minnesota students have revealed that, those teenagers who are obsessive about weighing themselves daily are more prone to develop eating disorders. They were also likely to adopt unhealthy crash diets. In spite of dieting, they end up gaining almost twice as much weight as well. Obsessed about weight loss, teenagers skip meals, resort to using laxatives to make them selves vomit, and use diet pills in order to lose weight. Preoccupied about weight gain, they end up with harmful habits like smoking and binge eating. Lead researcher Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, from the university's School of Public Health opined that young teenagers overly concerned about their weight are at great risk, endangering themselves with unhealthy weight control measures. The study was reported in Journal of Adolescent Health. It surveyed 2,516 girls and boys from Minnesota junior high school from the batch of 1998-1999. They were followed up in the year 2003-2004.
Almost one tenth of the girls agreed that they were obsessed about weighing themselves regularly. The follow up survey revealed that 92% of these girls were habituated to extreme weight control measures. Researchers point out that this reflects the hidden anxiety of the girls regarding weight gain. The girls from junior high, who constantly weighed themselves showed, ended up adding about 33.3 pounds to their frame in five years. Whereas those girls who didn’t don’t indulge in frequent weighing gained only 18.6 pounds after five years.Among boys, the weight gain was quite insignificant. However those preoccupied with body weight did indulge in unhealthy diet routines, and other unhealthy measures to lose weight, like the girls.
Source-Medindia
MST
