Take Charge of your Health: A Guide for Teenagers
Take Charge of your Health: A Guide for Teenagers
September 2006
Weight-control Information Network
Does your life move at a hectic pace?
You may feel stressed from school, after-school activities, peer pressure, and family relationships. Your busy schedule may lead you to skip breakfast, buy lunch from vending machines, and grab whatever is in the refrigerator for dinner when you get home.
Where is the time to think about your health?
Yet healthy behaviors, like nutritious eating and regular physical activity, may help you meet the challenges of your life. In fact, healthy eating and regular exercise may help you feel energized, learn better, and stay alert in class. These healthy habits may also lower your risk for diseases such as diabetes, asthma, heart disease, and some forms of cancer.
Did you know?
From 2003 to 2004, approximately 17.4 percent of U.S. teens between the ages of 12 and 19 were overweight.
Overweight children and teens are at high risk for developing serious diseases. Type 2 diabetes and heart disease were considered adult diseases, but they are now being reported in children and teens.
Dieting is not the answer.
The best way to lose weight is to eat healthfully and be physically active. It is a good idea to talk with your health care provider if you want to lose weight.
Many teens turn to unhealthy dieting methods to lose weight, including eating very little, cutting out whole groups of foods (like grain products), skipping meals, and fasting. These methods can leave out important foods you need to grow. Other weight-loss tactics such as smoking, self-induced vomiting, or using diet pills or laxatives can lead to health problems.
In fact, unhealthy dieting can actually cause you to gain more weight because it often leads to a cycle of eating very little, then overeating or binge eating. Also, unhealthy dieting can put you at greater risk for growth and emotional problems.
Take Charge.
What You Can Do
This booklet is designed to help you take small and simple steps to keep a healthy weight. It gives you basic facts about nutrition and physical activity, and offers practical tools that you can use in your everyday life, from reading food labels and selecting how much and what foods to eat, to replacing TV time with physical activities.
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Healthy Eating
Eating healthfully means getting the right balance of nutrients your body needs to perform every day. You can find out more about your nutritional needs by checking out the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Published by the U.S. Government, this publication explains how much of each type of food you should eat, along with great information on nutrition and physical activity. The guidelines suggest the number of calories you should eat daily based on your gender, age, and activity level...
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