The teenage years: these are the fastest changing, most self-conscious, most confusing days of our lives. Peers, school, hormones, weight fluctuations, awareness of the opposite sex all arrive on our plates. And then, unfairly, a sudden and shocking awareness of our bodies arrives. It’s not easy being a teenager, or their worrying parents.
Nineteen to twenty percent of Australian teenagers are either overweight or obese. A sedentary lifestyle, watching lots of television, spending time on Facebook and socialising via computer games, are all very common among teenagers. Add that to a high fat diet, lots of soft drinks, takeaway food and unhealthy snack foods and it’s no surprise an increasing number of teenagers are watching the scales go up and up.
The eating habits we have as adults are well established before our teenage years, but that doesn’t mean teenagers and their parents can’t work together to develop new attitudes to health, nutrition and exercise.
Diet dilemma
The first step, says Deakin University dietetics and nutrition lecturer Adam Walsh, is to absolutely forget dieting. Easily done? Yes. But the real solution is much, much bigger, and means completely overhauling the way teenagers see food and exercise.
“Fad dieting is known to be unsuccessful for losing weight in the long term. It has a start point and an end point. It doesn’t change eating habits. Beyond the end point people usually go back to old eating habits. They get down to their desired weight and they think the diet is over. With fad diets, people tend to put on more weight after the diet. It’s the body’s response to going through a phase of starvation and also you tend to over-eat when you get off the diet,” says Walsh.
This is the same case for everyone, young or old. But actually teenagers are different, as many parents have long suspected, and a different set of rules apply to them.
“Skipping breakfast is common, and eating out with peers occurs more frequently during the teenage years. Also, a new disposable income means teenagers can purchase their own food. They tend not to consider health benefits of the food they are eating. They eat for taste more than for any other reason and have little thought about the consequences. So they are different,” says Walsh.
Researchers at New York University found in February this year that calorie posting in fast-food restaurants, for example, has little impact on the foods teenagers order. They found that more than half notice calorie postings at McDonalds and KFC, for example, but only 9% said the labelling made them buy lower-calorie foods.
The New York University study, published in the online International Journal of Obesity, found that the vast majority of teenagers – more than 70% – said that taste is the most important consideration in their fast-food purchases, followed by cost. As well, it found that the majority of teenagers underestimate the number of calories they consume, thinking the fast-food is not as bad for them as it is.
“Teenagers often don’t understand that the way they eat now dramatically impacts their health in the long term. Obese teenagers often develop cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes, which leads to eye problems, circulation problems that can lead to amputation, and serious complications with kidney health that can lead to a need for transplants,” says Walsh.
Mind-body connection
Eating well and exercising regularly is important, nutritionists agree. But parents should also be aware of the big picture when considering their teenagers weight and overall health.
Obesity and depression, for example, often go hand in hand. A 2010 study found that young people, especially teenagers, who reported symptoms of depression like feeling sad or hopeless gained weight more rapidly over a 15 year period. The study, published in The American Journal of Public Health, found a strong connection between mind and body.
“We tend to separate the mind and the body in our culture, but they’re much more connected than we realise,” says Dr Belinda Needham, and assistant professor of sociology at the University of Alabama, the United States. “We’re not going to understand how to treat obesity if all we focus on is diet and exercise.”
Another link in the body and mind matter may sate some parents’ frustrations about the choices their teenagers make about their diets. Why do kids choose to eat fatty deep-fried chicken after school, using their precious pocket money to buy something that is only going to make them feel bad about themselves later?
The fact is that teenagers are prone to taking risks, risks that appear foolish to the rest of us. The brain’s prefrontal cortex, which governs decision-making, is still developing in adolescence. There is not much that can be done about this, of course, but it does shed some light on the behaviour of teenagers and the choices they make about food (and, parent might joke, boyfriends).
Optimistically, a new paper suggests that given the choice, bright or self-aware teenagers admit they would rather get a boost to their ego – like a compliment about their figure – than eat a favourite food. The paper, published this year in the US journal The Journal of Personality, gives weight to the idea that they would rather the long-term benefits of looking slim and being given a compliment and the immediate, short-term gratification often associated with teenagers.
A family affair
Karen and Robert, an Australian couple who recently lost 12kg and 22kg respectively with The Biggest Loser Club, have two teenage daughters who were very overweight. The daughters Rebecca (19) and Victoria (17) set out to lose about 30kg each to be a healthy normal weight for their ages.
“The kids were my main motivation,” Karen says. “I wanted the whole family to be healthier and doing it together made it so much easier. We would motivate each other.”
Robert says the best thing to do is to lead by example. “Because we were eating healthily we could instil that habit on our daughters. It’s also about reminding them to exercise.”
Robert and Karen first took the radical step of banning all unhealthy things, particularly packets of chips, all biscuits, packets of lollies and chocolate, from the house. There was no nagging, just support. And part of that support was providing healthy things for the girls to eat and snack on instead of unhealthy nutritionally empty things. But, Robert warns, you can get all the unhealthy things out of the house, but they can buy it themselves, they need to have the inner strength to carry the habits into time out of the family home.
The two teenage women did lose the weight, one of them keeping the 30kg off and the other gaining it back again to be her original weight. Robert says this daughter is frustrated with herself, but she gave up on the diet, resorting to bad eating habits when with her friends, and neglecting exercise.
Robert says his daughter, now 18, has tantrums and often feels angry about her weight. This very real example gives some weight to the idea that parents can only go so far in helping teenagers lose weight, and keep it off. “They can make the wrong choices themselves. They’re young and they think they are invincible,” says Karen.
Deakin University’s Walsh agrees that the whole-family approach is most effective. “We don’t want a particular child or teenager individualised by following a restricted diet while nobody else in the family has to. That is setting them up to fail. Setting an example is very, very important.”
If teenagers can see parents act upon their own words, they are more likely to follow suit, Walsh says. Parents should flip the adage “do as I say, not as I do” on its head, and actually start doing as they say. Offering support is not nagging or begging or berating, it’s showing how it’s done. Who knows, parents may even shed a few unwanted kilos themselves.