Eating Behaviours and Body Weight Concerns among Adolescent Girl

1. Introduction Adolescent eating behaviour is a function of individual and environmental influences [1]. Individual influences are psychological as well as biological, whereas, environmental influences include immediate social environments such as family, friend, and peer networks and other factors such as school meals and fast food outlets. In addition, another important factor is social system or macrosystem which includes mass media, marketing and advertising, social and cultural norms of the society [1]. Adolescent girls in particular, because of their excessive concern with body weight or obsession with thinness, are reported with moderate level of disordered eating behaviours [2]. Disordered eating behaviours refer to many disturbed eating patterns [3] which affect the nutritional status of adolescent girls [4]. The literature shows that adolescent girls are more prone to adopt various forms of eating behaviours than boys [5, 6], because they become preoccupied with and sensitive to their changing body size, shape, and physical appearance.This growing concern has led many of them to adopt dietary modifications that potentially throw serious threat on psychosocial development, nutritional status, and development of eating disorder. A number of factors like family environment [7–9], peer pressure [10– 12], media habits [13, 14], concern over body image [15–17], sociocultural and economic context [7,16,18], gender [6], and age [19] make them feel dissatisfied with their body shape and weight. Many studies have found that adolescent girls are interested in losing weight and more than 40% have even tried to lose weight due to concern over their body weight [20, 21]. A report of Youth Risk Behavioural Surveillance System (YRBSS) showed that more than 11% of high school girls in the United States reported taking diet pills, powders, or liquids to lose weight [22]. The data of this study also revealed that about 8% of the girls reported vomit their food after having it in the past month. Study reports from USA and Europe suggested that the prevalence of disordered eating behaviours is increasing in western countries [23]. Disordered eating behaviours are associated with a number of harmful behaviours such as smoking, alcohol consumption, drug use, and suicide [24, 25] as well as physical and psychosocial consequences like poorer dietary quality [26, 27], depressive symptoms [28], weight gain and onset of obesity [29, 30], and finally the onset of eating disorders [31]. Obesity and eating disorder among adolescents are of serious public health concern owing to their high prevalence and adverse influence on psychological [32, 33] and physical health [34, 35]. The prevalence of overweight [body mass index (BMI) 95th percentile for ag