With every year that passes, the media seems to promote being skinny more and more.  No magazine covers features an overweight person and clothing sizes seem to decrease more and more.  Some may even argue that size zero is practically overweight!  What is very sad about this is that teenage girls, the market for all those clothing stores and magazines, have begun to believe that unless your ribcage and back bones are showing, you are overweight and this trend of extreme weight loss is not only unattractive, but very dangerous to your health.

In England, model Anna Schwarz was commissioned by Channel 4 to complete three different extreme diets and see what the effects were.  Along with the diets themselves, her results were startling.

The first week was called The Grape Diet.  She was allowed to have one grape each day along with black coffee.  On just the second day, she felt faint and exhausted by the time she went to bed.  After only four days, Anna gave in and binged on every possible food she could find, made herself vomit it all up again, and then gave up on the grape diet and decided to eat sensibly for the rest of the week.

For the second week, Anna tried The Quick-Fix Diet.  On this diet, she was allowed to eat whatever she wanted as long as she allowed doctors to perform whatever methods they wanted to her body to help her lose the weight quickly.  First was the Green Tea Abdominal Massage which ended up making Anna have the most enormous gas and bowel movement she has ever had and she had it before she could reach the bathroom.  That can’t be healthy.  Another process in this diet is called Laser-Lipo which is similar to liposuction in that a laser is used to burst fat cells, but instead of taking weeks to recover, the recovery time for this process is fairly immediate.  The final procedure Anna went through in this extreme weight loss diet was by having a doctor slice open part of her buttocks and feed a laser into it to begin melting away her fat cells.  Extremely painful, Anna was very relived when this diet ended.

Another extreme diet she tried was The Baby Food Diet.  She realized early on that not only is she not allowed to make this food taste better with salt, pepper, and other condiments and spices, but her daily calorie intake is cut down to 400 calories per day by replacing all but one meal per day with baby food.  She was hungry, bad-tempered, and constipated through lack of fiber.

Extreme weight loss is dangerous and unhealthy and should be avoided at all costs.