Diets for Teenagers

What Can Influence Diets for Teenagers?

Teenage Growth Spurts

• Steer them towards healthy sandwiches.
• Let them eat (wholegrain, low in sugar) breakfast cereal anytime of the day.
• Stock the fruit bowl and fridge with loads of seasonal fruits.
• Sometimes it helps to have the fruit cut and/or peeled ready to go to make it more appealing.
• When the growth spurt tapers off so should their appetite.

Body Image

• They may copy their friends and favorite celebrities and wish to look like them.
• Remind your teenager that growth and changes to their bodies are all part of being a teenager.
• Some teens develop earlier than their friends and can feel very self-conscious, likewise, they may be the last to have a growth spurt, or develop breasts, and so on. Talk to them about your own experiences.
• Work on having a positive attitude to your own body.
• Avoid drawing attention to your teenager’s appearance.

Concentrate your praise on things that they do rather than on how they look. You may have called your daughter “my beautiful princess” her entire life. As a teen it will start to grate and sound false. It may even send the message that you only love her if she’s beautiful.

Overweight teenagers can feel very self-conscious and pressured about their appearance. Show them you love them just as they are. Encourage them to eat healthily and to build up a habit of daily exercise. Go walking with them, or riding together. Lead by example.

Extreme weight loss or fad diets never work in the long term. Forget what you read in the magazines. They just don’t work!!!

Teenage Skin

It’s a common problem but that doesn’t stop teasing from their peers.

Fad diets and teenagers low self esteem can make the problem worse.

The best thing your teen can do for their skin (besides not pick at it) is to maintain a healthy balanced diet.

No Time to Eat

• Have clear rules about how often everyone must be home for dinner each night. It may be every night, or certain nights of the week. You may say you need at least an hours warning if someone is missing a meal.
• Advise that skipping meals does not help with weight loss if you think this may be an added attraction. It makes weight loss more difficult.
• Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It sets you up with energy to keep going, study effectively and gets the metabolism going for the day.

Doing It My Way

• They may decide that they should be a vegetarian, or only eat red foods, or never touch carbohydrates again.
• Respect their right to explore this, but put the responsibility on them to alter family meals to suit themselves and to do the research to make sure they have a balanced diet.
• You are not running a restaurant and shouldn’t be expected to make up special meals just to suit your teenager.

Remember, eating only one type of food like all fruit or all meat is not a safe way to eat. We all need a variety of foods to be healthy.

This is particularly serious in diets for teenagers as they are building on their future health. For example, the strength of a woman’s bones as she goes into menopause and beyond is determined by her diet as a child and teenager.

Keep trying to guide diets for teenagers towards healthy choices. You won't win all the time, but sometimes is better than never.

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