There are two points to think about here

• One is to do with health and fitness
• The other is do to with ideas about attractiveness, looking good, and people's opinions about what looks good

These two points aren't completely separate, as maybe you'll see later.

The first thing to be clear about is that there is a range of weights which are perfectly healthy for a particular height. Compared to adults, it's a bit more complicated to say what these are for young people because people grow at different speeds. Sometimes teenagers can grow very quickly in a short time and it takes a little while for the body to adjust to a proper weight. Even so, the healthy weight for a 14 year old girl who's 1.6m or 5'3" tall is between 44kilos (6 stone 13 oz) and 57 kilos (9 stone).

The same figures apply to males

If you are above or below these weights there might be something wrong:

• you might be eating too much
• or eating too little
• maybe you're eating the wrong things?
• you might be exercising too much
• or you might be exercising too little
• you might have an illness that makes you bigger or smaller than average (though this is much less common than the other explanations)

Ideas about what sort of weight looks good have changed, (we know this from looking at paintings through the centuries - women who were thought by the artists to be attractive were never thin). This particularly effects girls. In the past it was always thought that the most beautiful women had figures as curvy as Marilyn Monroe (who wore at least a size 14 dress). These days that would be more like Kate Winslet rather than Cameron Diaz, though several really successful and rich stars have still felt the pressure to be thin and gone on diets. Kate Winslet deliberately lost weight even after a film as successful as Titanic, so did Geri Halliwell when she left the Spice Girls.

For some reason this began to change in the late 1960s. It's not possible to say there was just one simple cause for this, but a trend began for models, actresses and pop singers to be thin. This is most obvious if you look at models.

What seems to have happened since is that most people's ideas about what sort of size is attractive, or looks good, has changed. The 'ideal woman' or 'ideal girl' has shrunk!

One of the effects of this has been that many girls want to be a lower weight than their biologically healthy 'natural' weight. Many girls who are exactly the weight they should be think they are fat, so they diet. This starts young: one study showed that loads of nine year old girls with perfectly healthy weights had already been on a diet because they thought they were too fat. The idea that 'thin is beautiful' is a constant, undermining threat to girls' self esteem, leading many to dislike their bodies for no good reason.

If you diet to try to lower your weight below its natural level a number of things can happen.

• You may become obsessed with it and develop an eating disorder (anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa)
• You may find it harder and harder to lose weight because dieting slows down the rate at which your body burns up food.

Either way, you might feel better about yourself for a while but it is unlikely that this will last.

So what can you do?

• You can't change the world's idea of what's beautiful or attractive, but you can try not to be taken in by it.
• You can't help it if lots of models and actresses look under-fed, but you needn't copy them
• You may think someone's a bit chubbier than average, but you don't have to tease them about it
• You can eat healthily
• You can get healthy exercise (but not so much that you get obsessed and end up looking like a human greyhound)
• Don't smoke to reduce your appetite

http://www.teenagehealthfreak.org/homepage/index.asp

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