How Teenagers Can Lose Weight

lose weight

Now I'm going to talk to you about how teenagers can lose weight.

Now if you're a teenager the first thing that you want to do is find out if you truly need to lose weight, if you're truly overweight. As a teenager your body is going through a lot of changes, you still have potential for growth so unless you are truly overweight, diets really are not recommended for teenagers or for children of any age.

Now if your pediatrician has said that you do need to lose weight, the best thing to do is again not really go on a diet, but start to learn healthy eating techniques and make sure that you're getting a lot of physical activity.

Teenagers and children in general need a lot more physical activity than the average adult. They need a minimum of one hour daily. So if you are trying to lose weight as a teenager, you actually want more physical activity than that.

It could be any type of physical activity, whether it's bike riding, swimming, playing tennis, playing some type of organized sport like basketball or football or volleyball or again any type of physical activity is fine, but you need more than an hour of it most days. Now as far as the eating goes, you really want to make sure that you are choosing healthy foods.

A lot of times teenagers end up consuming a lot of excess calories from beverages from things like a lot of regular soda water or a lot of sports drinks or even a lot of milk. Now milk is a healthy food but if you are drinking whole milk that can be a lot of excess calories.

So you want to look at your beverages and if you're drinking a lot of regular soda or a lot of sports drinks, try to cut back and actually drink a lot more plain water, you don't want to switch from Coke or other soda to drinking a lot of juice because juice still has a lot of calories, even though it's healthier it's got more vitamins, it has more minerals, it still has a lot of natural sugar in it so if you drink juice you still want to limit it to just one glass per day.

Really one cup would be best, about an eight ounce serving of juice, drink primarily water and drink a lot of other beverages that don't have calories, and focus on getting foods from all of your major groups. You want to make sure you include fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and by whole grains I mean things like wheat breads, brown rice, oatmeal, whole grain cereals, those types of things.

Beans are another source of whole grains. And for the proteins, make sure they're lean sources of protein. If you eat meat, things like lean cuts of pork or lean cuts of beef, poultry without the skin on, fish, those are all very nice lean sources, so the main thing to remember for teenagers wanting to lose weight, physical activity and healthy eating.

Share this post