And yet by the age of six, about half of girls are worried about being “too fat.”1 By age eleven, it’s up to two-thirds, and by full adolescence almost all girls will have engaged in some kind of “weight control” behavior.2 One recent study of more than 4,500 adolescents found that nearly all of them (92 percent) engaged in some kind of weight-control behavior, and almost half (44 percent) of girls engaged in unhealthy weight-control behaviors.3 It hasn’t always been like this, and it isn’t like this everywhere; it happens because our culture makes it happen.
