When determining a healthy diet for your teenager, there are a few important things that you need to consider.

If you miss any of these you’re in trouble.

When you are trying to determine a healthy diet for your teenager, there are a few important things that you need to consider.

 

• First, consider how easily the diet will fit into your teenager’s lifestyle.

The last thing that a teen wants to do is be on a diet that will make them stand out from their peers.

Remember, teens must cope with the teasing, social isolation, verbal abuse, and emotional torture that often result from being overweight, as well as their negative self-images.

 

• Consider a diet that a teenager could stick.

Something unrealistic or too restrictive will make them resentful and likely to give up, which would not only give them further health problems, but self-esteem issues to boot.

 

• A healthy diet for teenagers should also have some “fun” in it.

Not many teenagers want to stick to a basic low-calorie diet of the same boring foods all the time.

Also, the average 11-year-old requires a minimum of 1800 calories.

This increases with age and gender to about 2700 calories for 18-year-old teenage boys.

The reason that adolescents and teenagers need these calories is to satisfy the nutritional demands of the intense development and growth they experience during this period.

A very low-calorie diet (less than 1000 calories) can lead to serious nutritional deficiencies, involving extreme tiredness, bone weakness, skin and hair problems, as well as hormonal problems and worse.

 

• If the teenager is a picky eater, that needs to be taken into consideration, as well as if they need support.

Unless your teen is seriously overweight, the most effective way to reduce weight is to eat healthily and get regular exercise.

 

Amazingly, many teenagers don’t choose this tried-and-tested method.

Instead, they prefer “instant solutions” to their weight concerns – solutions that typically cause ill-health and weight gain.

Sound Familiar?

One diet meets all of these criteria.

The diet, called calorie cycling, is a new spin on a popular bodybuilding tactic.

Calorie cycling allows people to lose weight very quickly and is highly recommended by doctors and psychologists.

The reason that this is so highly recommended is because there’s a lot of leeway in it.

5 days a week, the teenager would eat a moderate amount of calories (it’s calculated based on the age, weight, and activity level of each person).

For 2 days, they get to have “cheat” days.

Teenagers generally love this diet because they don’t feel as if they have to be strict all the time.

It doesn’t seem like it would help but the high-calorie days allow dieters to lose even more weight by “tricking” the metabolism into believing that food is abundant.

You need to find creative ways to encourage teens to adopt healthy habits. But it’s hard enough to get adults to take responsibility for their weight and health.

Fortunately, teens are not as set in their habits as most adults.

Good Luck,
Rachel