YOU(r) Teen: Losing Weight: The Owner's Manual to Simple and Healthy Weight Management at Any Age

Contents

Introduction: Weight Management

Part 1: Biology Lessons

Part 2: Your Strategies

Part 3: The Plan

Appendix: The 24 Best Health Tips for Teens

Index

About the Authors

To all those who think regaining your life is hard—we hope this makes it much easier. You are worth it.

DISCLAIMER

This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its authors. It is intended to provide helpful and informative material on the subjects addressed in the publication. It is sold with the understanding that the authors and publisher are not engaged in rendering medical, health, or any other kind of personal professional services in the book. The reader should consult his or her medical, health, or other competent professional before adopting any of the suggestions in this book or drawing inferences from it. The authors and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss, or risk, personal or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this book.

INTRODUCTION

Weight Management

Every stage of life has its share of obstacles. As a middle-aged adult, you may experience all kinds of life stress—from emotional to financial and everything in between. As an older adult, you may have a little more trouble walking or seeing or doing any number of things that you used to be able to do. As an infant, it would be nice if you could articulate (in a way other than wailing your brains out) that, yeah, you could use a diaper change right about now.

But of all the stages in life, many folks would argue that the teen years—with all of the ups, downs, and in-betweens of freaky and fiery hormones—can be, well, more complex than a rocket engine.

Of course, at this age there are plenty of joys and triumphs, and life is full of energy and possibilities. But it is also tricky to navigate the physical and emotional waters of school, of sports, of trying to fit in, of deciding between the blue or purple shirt, of wigging out about the fact that now is not exactly the best time for a nose zit to take center stage.

For many of us, it’s hard to remember—and really appreciate—the angst that teenagers go through every day.

When you throw in an added element—that of being overweight or obese, which some 40 percent of teens in our country are—you’ve just swirled up that emotional concoction and put the blender on high.

That’s what YOU(r) Teen: Losing Weight is all about: slowing down the blender and learning to put all the pieces together to help your teens live a healthy life.

We want to help. We want to give you a quick and simple-to-navigate guidebook that will teach you the ins and outs of fat, nutrition, exercise, emotions, and all of the important elements that go into a weight loss system. We know that this is a hard thing to talk about. You don’t want to talk about weight, ask for help, or ask for tonight’s dinner to be carrot burgers and spinach because that’s what’s most healthful.

But you do want to change.

And the great news—to contrast with many of the other challenges that teens have—is that if teens are able to make a change their bodies are more plastic (more responsive) to that change than your body may be.

So what our goal is here is to teach you not only what works in terms of weight loss but how to create an environment so that weight loss isn’t a struggle but rather something that comes as naturally as that aforementioned pimple (but with more desired results). As a bonus, of course, many of these strategies are things that will work for anyone trying to lose weight, so it can also be used as a way to help the whole family change if need be.

In this book, we’ll first take you through the biology of weight gain and loss, because we always feel that the why element is an important precursor to the what. We don’t especially think you need to dole out biology lessons across the dinner table every night (Pass the broccoli, and let’s activate some GLP-1!), but we do believe that being armed with this information will give you teaching moments to discuss the body and how it works. After learning the biology, we’ll give you the strategies and tips that you can employ to lose weight. At the back of the book, we’ll provide some great recipes, a sample two-week diet plan, and three workouts that will help burn calories and build stronger bodies. Hey, maybe your teen will even let you work out with her.

There’s little doubt that we’re a country that has some tremendous health issues. We want to set you on the right track with behaviors that will help for a lifetime. We believe that dieting doesn’t have to be hard (though we know that getting through to any teen can be more difficult than trying to hammer a nail with a banana) but rather has to be smart. And we hope that’s what you will get out of this book—the knowledge that can make it easier to sustain your weight loss—and that can lead to motivation that can lead to action that helps you achieve and sustain the weight you want.

And that’s what can lead to a healthy, happy life.

PART 1

Biology Lessons

Before any discussion about how hunger and exercise work, it’s important to take a look at the offender that’s at the center (quite literally) of this whole issue: fat.

Of course, for overweight folks, the extra fat is sure to manifest itself in some outward side effects, such as lack of energy or lack of self-esteem. But many of the risk factors associated with carrying too much fat don’t have any outward symptoms at all—meaning that the only way to tell whether being overweight is threatening your life is by taking a microscope underneath the flub and chub and focusing on what’s happening at your body’s core levels. This is especially tricky for teens, who typically don’t focus on the future but rather have the mentality What have you done for me lately? So they don’t see the dangers lurking in their bodies. But they’re real, and they need to be understood before starting any discussion.

The key anatomical player in all of this is an organ called the omentum. Why should we care about that organ that sounds as though it’s missing the letter m? Because the omentum can store fat that is quickly accessible to the liver (meaning that it can cause bad cholesterol and triglyceride levels to rise), and it also sucks insulin out of circulation (preventing it from acting elsewhere and making your blood sugar rise)—meaning that the fat sets up shop in the omentum and puts your organs at risk of being damaged by that fat.

See, what’s important about fat is like what’s important about real estate: it’s all about location, location, location.

We