Weight Loss Tips for Teens
Posted by Terry | Tagged as: weight loss
The whole concept of weight loss tips for teens encompasses many general ideas and methods, although the focus tends to be more on diet than anything else, mainly because many teens have a tendency to opt for junk food over a healthy, home cooked option. This is an original article written for weightlossgo.com and is copyright protected. So lets look at what causes the need for teens to need to lose weight in the first place, as this is a generation that should be far fitter and healthier than the rest of us by dint of the way their bodies are primed for growth on their way to full maturity.
Weight gain in teens is mainly thanks to a poor diet of junk food that is compounded by a more sedentary lifestyle than past generations had. The reason for this must fall fairly and squarely on the shoulders of aggressive advertisers pushing the perceived desire for a wealth of fast food outlets and the junk food they produce. Couple this with the march forward in technology and a lessening of parental control or the respect given to parents from most teens and you have a generation of teens that would rather spend all their free time riveted to a computer, laptop, games console etc than getting out in the fresh air to interact with their friends in sports and energetic games such as cycling, skating etc.
So now we know what the cause is, we need a solution!
Oh boy, this is going to be tough. How can you tell a willful teenage boy that they should spend less time on the Playstation and more time kicking a ball around with their friends in the park? They likely will not see your side of the argument even if you try to instill the fact that they are getting fat and girls don’t go for fat boys! Most will simply shrug it off and tell you they prefer playing Warcraft or whatever to trying to attract a girlfriend.
So what about the girls? Here is less of a problem simply because a huge chunk of the media is obsessed with trying to sell the perfect slim figure and every product under the sun to get it! Teenage girls are under far more pressure from TV and magazines as well as their peers to be super slim and squeeze into the latest fashion clothes while having all the fashion accessories there are. Sure, there are still plenty of overweight teenage girls, but peer pressure and the relentless pounding of media ads is often enough to force them into doing something about it, of at least obsessing over doing something about it.
The answer is easy, of course. When it comes to working with the necessary tips for weight loss, we are talking about a change of diet to good, healthy food, ditching the junk burgers, pizza etc and switching from soda to water, plus doing plenty of daily exercise. Standard stuff, but what are the actual tips for this article?
Top 10 Weight Loss Tips for Teens
- Be positive: Most of the failure to lose weight is actually caused by the fear of failure itself. Learn about how nutrition and exercise work to keep a body healthy and you will unmask the mystery that causes the fear. Remember, fear is caused by the unknown, but when ignorance is replaced by knowledge, there is no longer anything to fear! Be positive in attitude and you will find your success through sheer eagerness to succeed!
- Get Outdoors More: Getting plenty of natural daylight promotes the production of the feelgood hormone serotonin. This helps us deal better with stress and helps to dispel feelings of depression, both of which are responsible for imbalance in our metabolism that can lead to weight gain. Also, exposure to sunlight allows the body to manufacture its natural vitamin D, which is linked with weight loss (and lack of which is linked with weight gain)
- Eat Without Distractions: It has been proved that when you eat with distractions such as the TV, radio, newspapers, magazines or even other people talking around you , that the effectiveness of your digestive process is reduced. This is because your attention is not on what you are eating. Get rid of the distractions and put all your attention on your meal and you will find you digest it better, leading to less fat being stored by the body.
- Eat Slowly: Eating too fast or when on the go because you need to be someplace else is a major cause of indigestion. And that results in more fat being stored because the body is not processing the food you have eaten efficiently. Eat your food slowly and deliberately and give your digestion a chance to do its job!
- No Fast Music: Following on from the last tip, listening to music with a fast beat, even if its quiet, will make you eat faster. Fast food restaurant owners have always known this and that’s why you get that annoying soft piped music in them. Its there to get people to eat up quick and leave so their table is free for the next customers faster! So now you know that eating in silence has a lot more going for it than you probably realized.
- Brush Your Teeth Early: Don’t wait until you are just about to go to bed to brush your teeth, do it earlier in the evening instead. Brushing teeth is a psychological barrier that says you have finished eating for the day. If you do it earlier, then you are far less likely to feel like eating a calorie laden late night snack!
- Walk More: Walking is an excellent form of exercise as long as you do it at a brisk pace and for a decent length of time. It will help to boost your metabolism meaning you will burn more calories more efficiently, which is what you need to do in order to keep your weight in check.
- Drink Water: I mean plain water as a substitute for soda, juices, sports drinks etc. You need about 8 glasses every day to keep your body hydrated and your digestive system in peak condition. Diet soda is NOT an option because the artificial additives in it are worse than the sugar in regular soda. Don’t believe it? Google “the dangers of aspartame” — you’ll never want to drink diet soda ever again.
- No Potato Chips: These snacks are laden with calories and don’t fill you up unless you eat several packets of them, which the sure road to obesity city! If you must eat snacks, switch to healthy options like celery or carrot sticks, a piece of fruit like an apple (tons of goodness and weight busting properties) or a pear, peach or whatever you like. Even bananas are better for you than salty, processed snacks. Better still, if you feel peckish, drink a glass of water. Often, thirst is mistaken for between meal hunger and a glass of water will quell the need to snack at all.
- Sleep: Its not called beauty sleep for nothing! It is known that lack of sleep is responsible for imbalances in hormone levels (just what you want to hear), blood sugar levels and insulin production. This is important as this affects the way your body processes food and stores fat. Lack of sleep is also responsible for mood swings, lack of concentration. Get a good eight hours of uninterrupted sleep at night (in the dark because that’s the way you sleep best) and you will look and feel great during the day!
These are the tips, although you may find implementing them is the problem. How do you convince a hormone fueled teen that they should not drink soda or eat pizza? Or that they should get out of the house and go for a daily run? Well, you probably can’t! What has to happen is they have to convince themselves. If a teen can do that, then they don’t need pressure from parents to do things but will be able to work on their own health and weight loss plans in their own way and because they are doing it for themselves and not because they have been forced to. When you are self-empowered, you can achieve amazing things!
Nice blog, I like the ideas you put forward for teenage weight loss and all that goes with it. This must have been a difficult subject to broach as teens tend to think they know it all and us older folks are over the hill even when we’re only in our late 20s! Thanks for an interesting read.
That was an interesting take on weight loss for teens. With two teenage daughters of my own, I can fully appreciate the problems they face being pulled in two directions at once. On the one side is the peer pressure to be thin according to the gospel written by the glossy magazines and TV ads. On the other are the fast food restaurants that male it look so tempting to go eat a burger and fries with a huge milk shake and thousands of empty calories. And all this while they sit around all day either in front of the TV or a laptop. In my day, we used to get together and go out to actually enjoy outdoor pursuits that kept us fit and healthy. What happened?
This is the second time I have visited your Weight Loss Tips blog and found this to be an interesting article perfectly matching what I was searching for. I know how difficult it can be sometimes to convince a teenage daughter that she should look after her weight but to stay within boundaries that include not trying to look like those sick looking catwalk models that are painfully thin. Thanks for your hard work!
Jean
Hi jean, yep teenagers think they know it all and can be pretty single minded at times, but as long as you show them what works best in a way they can understand and make sense of, then you have a pretty good chance of getting them to see your point of view.
This is an informative post on weight loss for teenagers. Many people take regular medicines for their weight problem and this practice is filtering down to teens. There are life-long patients of weight loss, blood pressure, heart diseases, arthritis and other conditions and illnesses. These people get stuck on taking medicines on a daily basis for their entire life and why do they do it? Its really not necessary and if you have teenagers, don’t get them started on this road to misery.
Carl, its true that natural is best – all you have to do is convince your teenagers that you are right and those glossy magazines that promote pills and potions are wrong…
When you are trying to lose weight, the best way to do it is still by proper dieting and exercise. Avoid taking slimming pills at all cost, they do more harm than good.
Good advice Ally, pills are definitely a waste of money and potentially damaging to your health
Hi there, its true that many parents do not like to deal with obesity in children especially their own. Your blog is an eye opener!
Obese teenagers are often that way because of lax parental control, so its no wonder parents don’t like to talk about it in case people view them as failures. That’s not the way it should be and really, education is the way but the tough part is finding a way to get that education through to the teenagers who need it, as they are most often the ones resistant to being told what to do!
Hey, recently discovered this post about teens and weight loss and I have to say that it looks great. I fully agree with you that teens are the toughest to get to do anything you say to them. They are always right and you are always wrong, so maybe some reverse psychology will work there – like telling them to eat more junk food and drink more soda LOL! Have a great day, keep up the great work and I’ll definitely follow it. Lacy
Hi Lacy, your right on the mark there. I remember what a pain in the rear I was when I was a teenager, so why should anything have changed. Only difference is that I didn’t have techno gadgets to play with, so at least I spent a lot of time outdoors playing with friends doing energetic stuff like playing football, climbing trees and generally running around which kept my weight at the right balance. Teens today lead much more sedentary lifestyles because of computers, video games and TV, and that plus a diet of junk is why they’re the fattest generation of teens yet. Of course they won’t agree with that…
Many fat people are happy of being fat!
I understand where you’re coming from with two teen boys of my own who have problems with weight issues. A big part of that comes from too little exercise as they sit around the house watching TV and playing computer games far too much. I try to explain to them the damage they are doing to themselves in their developing years, but they don’t listen cause they think they know everything and I’m just a stupid adult!
Well, I got them to read your article and they actually sat up and took notice! Well, I don’t know what you have that I don’t, but they started going out more and using their skateboards that I bought them last Christmas and never used! They have made some new friends and have even become more interested in things they were never interested in before.
A big thanks to you for planting a good seed in their heads cause they are starting to grow into great young men already!
Dee
Well, maybe this was a humorous and helpful article for parents of teenagers. I am a teen myself, and, I am not glued to the TV or the computer, but I am looking for ways to lose those extra pounds of blubber for the dance. The name of this article misled me a little bit. Not all teens are like you describe them, is pretty much what I’m saying.
You’re right Eva, not all teens are as I described them, but unfortunately many American teens are exactly that way and they are that way because of how I described the way the media manipulates them to be that way with TV shows and ads.
If you’re getting plenty of outdoors activity and eating a healthy diet, then you shouldn’t need my advice on how to lose weight because you’re getting enough exercise to burn the calories you are consuming through your diet.
If you need my advice on how to lose weight (there are way more articles in here that focus on individual tips to do that for everyone) then something is NOT perfectly in balance and you need to look at what is out of whack. If its something in your diet, then you have to take a long hard look at what you are eating (and drinking) and isolate the high calorie or high saturated fat content and eliminate it. I might be an adult now but, like everyone alive on this planet I was also a teen and I know my diet left a lot to be desired. I ate candy bars, sandwiches with not so great stuff in them, cakes, cookies, pizza, fries, hamburgers and just about everything you should avoid and washed it all down with plenty of soda and juice.
If anyone would’ve come up to me and told me that what I was eating was causing me to be unhealthy and have acne, I would not have listened and probably would have got angry that some adult who could not possibly understand me had the audacity to tell me what to do! Well, I might have been unhealthy from a diet point of view, but I was not overweight – mainly because I was involved in a lot of sports at school and cycled everywhere. I think that might have been a trick by my parents so I would not rely on being driven in the car, but on the other hand, I liked the freedom of being able to ride wherever I wanted without having to wait for a parent to get the car out.
So my main point of this article was to show how thing are and can be for teens as seen through the eyes of a parent who remembers very well how it was to be a teen (whether you believe that or not) and to highlight that getting the right balance of good diet and exercise will help you maintain the right weight. I’m not talking about slimming down to a size zero or even a smaller size than your physical makeup should allow you to be, but to have a healthy weight and body shape that is right for you. We’re all different in that respect and should work with our own height/build to achieve the correct weight. That may not be the same for everyone, but it will feel right because you will look right in good clothes and not feel constrained or uncomfortable because those clothes are too tight.
Maintaining the right weight is also a state of mind. When you are positive about your weight and your desire to stay relatively slim, then you won’t feel so tempted to eat things that you know you shouldn’t plus you will feel more motivated and eager to get out of the house and be active enough so that nature can take over and keep you the way that you should be.
Hope that all makes sense.
PS: In fact, in response to your comment Eva, I have updated this article extensively to include 10 really usable tips for weight loss for teens.
Great article with some excellent information. I think the big part of that list is to be positive. There is even more great information online than I realized.
This is definitely an effective list of things for people to lose weight. One idea I like the most is to eat slowly so that you body has enough time to feel the fullness. Thanks so much for your information!
BTW, eating small meals in a total of 8-10 a day will also help you lose more weight because your will keep your metabolism rate high and burn a lot more calories
Thanks again!
The biggest problem is that kids today interact online and are not physically active.
It is even worse because their parents are as unhealthy as they are.
I feel that the cure for the obesity epidemic…and the key for us to stop passing this along to the younger generation…is for the parents to start being good role models to their children.
Im 13 and weigh 130 pounds. Am I fat?
Hey SOS, without knowing your height, build and possibly fat to muscle ratio, I can’t tell if your fat or not.
Put it this way, to be in the “normal” BMI bracket of 18.5–24.9 for a weight of 130, you should be 5ft 1in (BMI 24.6) or above. Its only a rough guide because BMI only measure the ratio of height to weight and doesn’t factor in build, fat to muscle ratio or anything else such as water retention levels.
Bottom line is if you’re at an average fitness level and over 5ft 1in, then your not fat!
There are so many problems that teenagers face when it comes to their today that our generation didn’t. The schools are filled with advertisements for junk food and soda so they are bombarded with these images.
Combine this with the fact that kids no longer socialize face-to-face but online and this leads to a sedentary lifestyle. Typing or texting away is not an aerobic activity.
The solution is proper parenting. It is a parent’s responsibility to…
1) Be a good role model. If the parents eat right and the parents exercise, then their are likely to. How many times have you seen a thin and in shape set of parents with fat kids?
2) Get them involved in extra curricular activities. The local soccer club will have them running around a few days a week.
3) Make family outings physical. Whether its going to the park or just kicking a ball around in the backyard, makes them do something physical.
4) Keep the junk out of the house. They are going to eat enough garbage when they are out…at the very least make sure what they eat at home is good for them.