Your Two Cents: "Is a liquid only detox for a 14-year-old a wise decision?"

I try not to criticize people's parenting choices, but sometimes there are things I see on TV that make me wonder. In an episode of The Real Housewives of New York City, mom Jill Zarin, takes her 14-year-old daughter Ally to the Martha's Vineyard  Detox Center which is the center that is the basis for the book, "21 Pounds in 21 Days: The Martha's Vineyard Diet Detox." The detox is based on a diet of liquid only vegetable juices every two hours for one week.

Now, I've done a detox likes this before and it was fantastic, but I did this as a grown adult. Ally is still a growing teenager, and the idea of a teen only drinking vegetable juices for a week doesn't sound wise, at least to me. In a newspaper article, Ally's mom said the motivation for the detox was to help Ally with an arthritis issue and on the show, she said that dropping some pounds would be great too.

Ally wanted to drop some pounds because of the "scrutiny" a teen can face starting a new year as a sophomore in high school, as well as a desire for looking good for the TV show. When I heard that, red flags went up for me because there are other ways a teenager can drop weight that don't involve liquid diets. Ally ended up shedding 11 pounds in that one week, which is an enormous amount of weight in a short period of time. Most of it was most likely water weight and results from colonics. That's another thing, should teens be doing colonics?

Doing detoxes are really a healthy thing to do for your body to help rid you of toxins, and they better serve you if your intention is for detoxification versus weight loss. My question though is the wiseness of having teenagers do a detox process because their young bodies are still growing, and mentally they may not fully understand the difference between detoxing and dieting. As well, many other teenage girls are going to see this on TV and want to do the same thing, drop 11 pounds in one week. This is a bit of a controversial subject, but time for you to weigh-in...

Your Two Cents: Are health detoxes where liquid only diets are involved a wise or beneficial choice for teenagers?