High School Girls Have Experienced The Peer Pressure Of Losing Weight

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High school girls have experienced the peer pressure of losing weight and becoming thin like those “cheerleader popular girls”. Several researchers have demonstrated the importance of friends, suggesting that the weight-related attributes and behavior among friendship groups may predict body image, dieting onset, chronic dieting, and eating disorder symptoms, even after controlling for various family, friends, and individual factors (Eisenburg, Neumark-Sztainer, Story and Perry, 2005, p. 1116). High school girls often feel isolated because of their weight and rely on their friends for advice. Some of those friends suggest dieting or other ways to reduce weight and those girls take it very seriously and develop eating disorders and unhealthy weight. However, eventually, these girls realize that becoming thin and losing weight is not as important as others make it out to be. These girls are often pressure indirectly to lose weight to “fit-in”, which cause growth developmental problems and causes a disturbance in brain development. Self-harm is another key component in high school students. Students often choose to self-harm because they are unable to handle stressful situations and rely on self-harm to release the stress that they have kept in all this time. The author of this study compared adolescent self -injuries with non-injuries and found that self-injuries showed higher physiological reactivity during a distressing task, a poorer ability to tolerate this distress, and deficits in several social problem-solving abilities (Nock and Mendes, 2008, p. 28). Students who are unable to handle the stress of high school rely on self-harm to make them feel better. This not only causes physical but also mental problems. In addition, s... ... middle of paper ... ...nts are involved in romantic relationships. According to Greca and Harrison (2005), by late adolescence, adolescents report greater closeness with romantic partners than with best friends, parents, and siblings (p. 49). Juniors and seniors in high school tend to share their feelings and problems to their romantic partner. Communicating with someone benefits the brain development positively because when one talks to others about their feeling, they do not keep it all bottled up which is unhealthy. However, when someone who is very close to their romantic partner goes through a break-up will keep their feeling to themselves and often end up doing things they will regret later, but this is not the case for everyone who goes through a bad break-up. It is important for students to communicate with someone whether it is a romantic partner, best friends, parents or siblings.

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