These are common questions.  If you feel like your teen doesn’t eat as well as they should, well let’s just say you’re not alone.  As your teen begins to socialize more outside the home and at friend’s homes, you lose control over your teen’s diet. Having a well balanced dinner made by Mom on most nights isn’t enough to have a balanced diet.  Furthermore, teens skip meals especially breakfast and snack on fast food. Their diets are complicated by poor convenient choices at the mall, the school cafeteria and the neighborhood.

These are some important things your teen should start to understand about their nutrition:

Metabolism

Since your teen is no longer growing at a fast rate their food intake should decrease, however, what frequently happens is teens eat as they did when they were active and growing. If your teen is very active in sports this change is hard to notice. They seem to be able to eat anything and not gain weight.  But once sports stop and ideally before, your teen should reduce the calories and begin the transition to a healthier diet that decreases junk food and unnecessary calories like juice and sweet cereal otherwise they will gain weight. Frequently, the trouble losing weight has more to do with misunderstanding this concept rather than a sick thyroid.  The average adult will gain 1-2 lbs yearly after high school. This means by their 10th year high school reunion they could need to shed about 10-20 extra pounds.

Dietary Intake

Making dietary changes are difficult to do consistently in a way that would change weight, health or lifestyle. It takes several attempts before your teen can maintain these types of changes with little effort. Things upon which you can build a foundation are:

• Breakfast: A healthy breakfast that includes a high fiber cereal, toast or fruit is a great way to kick start the metabolism and maintain a healthy adult weight.  Even when your teen has no appetite, it is important they eat something for breakfast.

• Fiber: Women need about 26 grams of fiber daily and men need 30 -35 grams of fiber daily. This is ideally done through food, but a high fiber supplement like Metamucil Clean and Natural, Orowheat’s double fiber wheat bread or high fiber foods like those made by Fiber One are other ways to increase the fiber in the diet.  A high fiber diet prevents many colon diseases including colon cancer and diverticulitis, but also helps maintain a healthy weight and good energy.

• Drinks: Water or waterish drinks are a great way to eliminate unnecessary calories as well as hydrate. The recommendation is 6-9 glasses of waterish type drinks daily. Juice is of no nutritional value (which is no better than soda). If not water, crystal light type drinks or drinks sweetened with splenda, equal, or sweet n’ low decrease calories while giving some flavor and variety, but even diet soda or light juice can serve as a nice transition.

• Activity: your teen needs 30 minutes of activity that gets their heart rate around 150 beats per minute or more for the entire 30 minutes. Walking home from school with weights at a fast rate could be enough to do this. Alternatively, your teen can exercise in front of the T.V. doing cardio or resistance with weights instead of sitting and snacking in front of video games, computer or T.V. because studying is already one sedentary activity that is difficult to avoid.  If they do snack while studying, healthier snacks can prevent unnecessary weight gain.

These are some quick tips to reform your teen’s dietary intake. Nutrition and activity form the basis for how they will keep themselves healthy as adults. In doing so, they will help prevent common health problems of adults like diabetes, high cholesterol and stroke while feeling good and having more energy for their daily activities.

Related posts:

1. Your Teen’s First Step In Weight Loss
2. Teen Logic…Sometimes Hilarious
3. Are You Calling Your Teen Fat?