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"Four years ago, when Jenna decided she needed to lose weight, she tried every diet from Atkins to Weight Watchers. When those didn't work, she became a vegetarian. \"I read somewhere that most of the...Four years ago, when Jenna decided she needed to lose weight, she tried every diet from Atkins to Weight Watchers. When those didn't work, she became a vegetarian. \"I read somewhere that most of the fat you eat comes from meat,\" says Jenna, now sixteen, from New York City. But when she stopped eating meat, Jenna started obsessing about everything she ate--and couldn't stop.\n\n Jenna's not the only girl whose conversion to vegetarianism led to an unhealthy relationship with food. A recent University of Minnesota study found that approximately 20 percent of current and former vegetarian teens engaged in extreme weight-control behaviors like calorie restriction or bingeing and purging--compared with slightly less than 10 percent of those who never practiced vegetarianism. The trend has been gaining ground for a while. A 2001 study found that the most common reasons teens gave for vegetarianism were weight loss or maintenance, and other studies suggest similar links.\n\n \"A lot of girls at my school, including some of my close friends, say they're vegetarians to cover up their eating disorders,\" says Shirley, eighteen, from Davis, California. \"It's hard not to notice when all someone brings for lunch is a tiny block of tofu. But it's also hard to argue with someone who is justifying her eating habits on moral or political grounds.\"\n\n Living without meat can be healthful when it's practiced in a balanced, mindful way. But the relationship between dieting and eating disorders is causing growing alarm among nutritionists and adolescent psychologists. \"Posing as a vegetarian is nothing new for those with eating disorders, but it is becoming more popular,\" says Sari Shepphird, Ph.D., an adolescent psychologist and author of 100 Questions &amp;amp; Answers About Anorexia Nervosa (Jones and Bartlett)."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.teenvogue.com/story/vegetarian-disordered-eating>