Jessica Simpson Bragging about Unhealthy Weight Loss

In this week's US Weekly Jessica Simpson lets America in on the secret on how she lost eight pounds in two weeks. Jessica recently quickly shed pounds for her hosting gig on Sunday night's Teen Choice Awards with Dane Cook. Audience members started talking immediately after her initial appearance on stage about her newly slimmed-down shape. Now was this connected to all the publicity showered upon her younger sister Ashley now artificially adorable post much-hyped cosmestic surgery.

Doctors recommend that a healthy weight loss is between one or two pounds a week. That means that if someone is losing weight in a healthy manner it should take them at least one month to lose eight pounds. Jessica cut that time in half. For her already slight frame (she wears a waist size 26), 8 pounds is a tremendous amount of weight to lose in just 2 weeks.

Jessica claims she whittled down the pounds by doing 2-hour workouts 5 days a week. She also revamped her diet after a pre-diet binge of Caesar salad, sea bass, shrimp cocktail, and chocolate lava cake at the Lodge Steakhouse on August 1. She has favored the Zone and South Beach diets in the past, but eight pounds seems to be a little too much weight for even eating restrictively for two weeks. Her trainer, Mike Alexander, also brags that he has put Jessica on a junk food-free regime....hmm, note to self: very innovative?

This most recent example of unhealthy celebrity weight loss is profoundly distressing. One, Jessica is a beautiful woman who seemed to be healthily recovering from her divorce from Nick Lachey. Two, she is one of the biggest stars that teens emulate today and by dramatically losing so much weight and then publishing it seems extremely irresponsible with concern to her core audience. With so many issues about skeleton celebrities (such as Nicole Richie pictured here in a recent US weekly)  it seems hypocritical to congratulate Jessica on being unhealthy yet successful in her quick-ditch weight loss  boot camp. 

Anorexia is rampant in young celebrity culture as well as teens and the last thing we should be doing is embracing or celebrating its results. Jessica's binging seems just as dangerous as her obvious lack of calorie intake after the binge. Whether stars are admitting to not eating for two weeks or denying they are too skinny as their bones show, it is time for Hollywood to take a more critical look at the dangerous disease encouraged in its young women.

Images: US Weekly