Drop the Teen magazine, turn of the TV, shut up about Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, and eat.

That’s my message to girls obsessed with weight loss and looking like cover girls. Weight loss can easily become an obsession that can lead to anorexia, depression, and in the case of one 21-year-old girl, death.

On March 21, 2001, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported the death of Anna Westin of Chaska, Minn., who took her life that same year. Her parents attributed her death to depression caused by anorexia. They produced notes from her journal to back up their claim.

“What the hell is wrong with me? I’m so stuck in a world of hatred and disgust within me and it’s seriously affecting my personality and soul. Whatever happened to my energy and self-respect? I desperately want them back,” she wrote in the fall of 1999.

Westin underwent a nine-month treatment for anorexia and depression. But not even treatment was enough to pull her out of this abyss of anorexia. On Feb. 16, 2001, after a night out with friends, she took a fatal dose of Tylenol and went to her bedroom to die.

Westin’s case is not an isolated one. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, about 20 percent of anorexia patients die for various reasons. The number could possibly be higher because doctors sometimes file anorexia-related deaths as heart failure, liver failure and other health problems associated with the disease.

Media images of thin celebrities and commercials advertising low-fat, low-calorie foods make it difficult to have an objective view on this issue. Studies have been done that show larger girls who exercise regularly are healthier than skinny girls who don’t. It makes sense, therefore, that weight loss should be a byproduct of living a healthy lifestyle and not a goal on its own. The more weight loss is made a goal, the more the potential benefits are missed and the more it becomes an obsession — which can lead to all kinds of problems.

The result of living a healthy life style won’t look the same for everyone. Not everyone can or should have the figures of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton or other celebrities.

The amount of pressure on people in this society to be perfect is ridiculous. Judgments are made based on outer appearances because no one wants to associate himself or herself with failure (or what society has deemed as failure).

Last year, 8.3 million people had some sort of plastic surgery, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. No one should internalize this stupidity; ignoring idiots who make judgments based on outer appearances is the best revenge.

“We are all chameleons, our nature changing with the landscape … masking our true faces to fit in. Our disguises we use for protection,” Westin wrote in her journal in the spring of 1998. If one’s happiness and character is built on a foundation that shifts and changes with the attitudes of others, then that foundation is only strong enough to hold a bungalow of a person.

“Saying good-bye to such an unfriendly place can’t be as hard as believing in it every day. And essentially, my spirit has fled already,” Westin also wrote in her journal on Dec. 28, 1999.

Westin was obviously struggling with the pressure that media images and others had put on her and was contemplating suicide.

No one was meant to be defined by 30-second commercials or broomstick-thin girls. So drop the magazine, turn off the TV and eat.

Eat healthy, exercise and untangle yourself from the web of foolishness and misinformation that says you have to be skinny to be healthy and happy.