The number you see on the scale doesn’t necessarily tell you whether you need to lose weight. That’s because two people of the same height and weight can have different bone structures. They may carry different amounts of muscle and body fat. To find out if you are at a healthy weight, your health care provider usually calculates your body mass index (BMI). BMI uses your height and weight to estimate how much fat is on your body. Once you know your BMI, you can chart it on a BMI for Age growth chart to see if you are a healthy weight.
Some people may diet because they think they are supposed to look a certain way. Actors and actresses are thin, and most fashions are shown off by very thin models. But this look is unrealistic for most people — not to mention physically damaging to the models and stars who struggle to maintain it.
A survey of 10th-grade students finds that 60 percent have made conscious efforts to lose weight. In response to the question “Have you ever tried to lose weight?” 36.5 percent of the boys said yes, compared with 73.6 percent of the girls.
By the time they turn 12 or 13, most teen girls start to go through body changes that are natural and necessary: Their hips broaden, their breasts develop, and suddenly the way they look may not match girls on TV or in magazine ads. Guys develop at different rates, too. Those guys with washboard abs you see in clothing ads are usually in their twenties.Certain family dynamics along with the challenge of developing a separate self identity contribute to disordered eating.
There are serious consequences of starvation or fad diets for a person that is still growing. Unrealistic goals lead to feelings of failure and sometimes disordered eating. Fad diets or dieting can also throw your teen’s hunger cues off track. Restrictive diets that say when and what you must eat at certain times make it difficult for people to recognize when they are comfortably full.
Someone who is willing to take extreme steps to be thinner could have an eating disorder. These include anorexia nervosa (starving one’s self) or bulimia nervosa (eating and then deliberately throwing up). They are serious conditions that need a doctor’s attention. People with the eating disorder anorexia are obsessed with food and being thin. They don’t maintain a body weight that’s normal for their age and height. Indeed, they may be skeletally thin but still think they’re fat. To prevent weight gain or to continue losing weight, people with anorexia may starve themselves or exercise excessively.
Weight-loss diets restrict the intake of specific foods, or food in general, to reduce body weight. What works to reduce body weight for one person will not necessarily work for another, due to metabolic differences and lifestyle factors. Also, for a variety of reasons, most people find it very difficult to maintain significant weight loss over time. There is some thought that losing weight quickly may actually make it more difficult to maintain the loss over time.
Teens who go on diets to drop some pounds are more likely to skip breakfast and binge eat — which may at least partly explain why they put on more weight over time than their peers who don’t diet, a new study shows.
The researchers set out to uncover the reasons why dieting by adolescents has been shown in previous studies to predict later weight gain.
The behaviors they identified, however, don’t entirely answer the question, Dr. Dianne Neumark-Sztainer of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, the study’s lead author, told Reuters Health.
It’s possible, she explained, that people who are at greater risk of becoming overweight are also more likely to be dieters, although their initial weight was taken into account in the study’s analysis.
Nevertheless, the findings show that dieting is a short-term fix that teens choose instead of longer-term, healthier — and more effective — strategies like eating more fruits and vegetables and getting more exercise, Neumark-Sztainer said.
“We really want to discourage teenagers from dieting,” she added, noting that she and her colleagues previously found most teen dieters used unhealthy weight control strategies like smoking, fasting, and skipping meals.
For their study, published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Neumark-Sztainer and her colleagues interviewed 2,516 teens in 1999 and again five years later.
At the earlier time point, 56 percent of girls reported dieting while 25 percent of boys said they had dieted at least once.
Five years later, female dieters were less likely to eat breakfast and were more likely to binge eat, and they had gained 0.69 more body mass index (BMI) points than their non-dieting classmates. Boys who dieted were more likely to binge eat, spent less time engaging in moderate to vigorous physical activity, and put on .77 more BMI points than boys who didn’t try to control their weight by dieting.
The findings suggest, Neumark-Sztainer and her colleagues conclude, that kids who diet are in danger of developing unhealthy physical activity and eating behaviors.
“My advice to parents is to redirect their children’s efforts away from dieting toward the adoption of eating and physical activity behaviors that they can engage in over the long term,” she told Reuters Health.
Another research suggests teens who diet frequently tend to gain more weight each year than children who don’t diet. One likely explanation: Many teens resort to diets that greatly limit what and how much they can eat. Then they abandon those food plans with a vengeance, overeating and regaining all the lost weight — and often more
Neumark-Sztainer has written a book for the parents of teens called “I’m, Like So Fat! Helping your teen make healthy choices about eating and exercise in a weight-obsessed world.” She advised, “I encourage people to think less about weight, talk less about weight per se, and really place the emphasis on engaging in these behaviors for long-term health, of which a healthy weight will be one of the outcomes.”
Losing weight and getting in better shape takes effort. Have open-ended conversations about the habits that lead to gaining too much weight such as not enough exercise, skipping meals, drinking too many soft drinks, or eating a lot of fast food. Tell your teen about how weight and body shape run in families. If a healthy size for your family is a size 14, with healthy eating and exercise that should be acceptable.It may take time for the child to find something they like to do. Some kids need more positive experiences than others before they enjoy an activity.
The study found that the girls who followed a calcium-rich diet, including dairy foods and calcium-fortified foods, did not experience greater increases in body weight or body mass index compared with girls on their usual diet. Drink milk, including fat-free or low-fat milk. (Many teens mistakenly think that milk has more calories than other drinks like soda. But a cup of skim milk has only 80 calories as well as protein and calcium. A can of soda has 150 calories of sugar and no other nutrients at all.)
Focus on the quality of your diet and make sure you feel satisfied at the end of the day. You can eat good food in reasonable quantities and still lose weight. Stay away from refined carbohydrates and sugars and keep an eye on the calories, whether from fat or carbohydrates. Also, exercise is very important. You should develop a plan that you can maintain permanently.If a teen wants to lose weight, he or she should look to the Food Guide Pyramid for guidance. Choosing more of the lower-fat options from the grains, fruit, vegetable and protein groups of the Pyramid will provide the energy and nutrients teens need without extra calories
Unfortunately, people often find diets hard to sustain, in part because they tire of avoiding certain foods, loading up on others or feeling deprived and hungry. And their diet is often temporary, something to endure for a while before returning to former ways. As a result, any lost pounds come right back once the diet stops.
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Source by Richard Bann
