29 Teen Weight Loss Tips
For Real Results

20 Facts on Obesity #7

The best teen weight loss tips are useful, practical and doable. Easy weight loss for teens is not hard or difficult. It requires patience and your involvement as a parent.

Your job as a parent is to be informed, patient, understanding and involved. Some children use obesity guilt to manipulate parents into "giving in." Don't take the easy way out, stand your ground. And never make the monumental mistake of showing love by rewarding your child with food. Set a good example and send the right message to your teenager.

The best diet plan is one that is non-intrusive. One that does not expose your youngster to verbal abuse, ridicule, teasing and social isolation from their peers.

Top Secret: Help teens with this tip

A teen's weight loss should NOT be community knowledge at school, church, the neighborhood, friends and anyone not in the immediate family. Make sure your child keeps weight loss private and invisible.

Overweight teens are at a high risk of anxiety, depression, anger and social withdrawal. Publicizing a teens weight loss effort adds unneeded pressure that decreases the possibility of lasting weight loss success.

I have had a great deal of success helping young people lose weight. The biggest obstacle to lasting weight loss is the reluctant parent who does not get involved and continues to set a bad example with their own poor eating habits. If you sincerely want to develop a healthy diet plan for teens, start by developing a healthy diet plan for yourself and the entire family. A child's health is the parents responsibility both morally and legally.

Tips for Parents

80% of overweight children have at least one overweight parent. If you're overweight talk to your teen about your condition. Tell them how you became overweight and why up until now you have failed to correct the problem. Be up-front about the diet mistakes you've made and what you learned from them. Be specific and spell out the consequences of your condition. Explain the suffering and pain it has caused you and that you don't want your child to suffer like you have. Be frank. Talk to your teen as you would speak to any adult. Don't be condensating, judgmental or apologetic. Communicate and teach.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #1
Be a positive role model. How you eat and behave influences how your teen eats and behaves. Your lifestyle influences just like all of your behavior habit patterns. Here's a relevant 100 year old piece of parental wisdom that's still true today. KIDS DO AS YOU DO, NOT AS YOU SAY! Use it. In psychology circles this type of leading by example is called 'pacing'.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #2
Don't single out one child for a diet in the household. More often than not it will be perceived as harassment or punishment. Consider reducing portions for the entire family as opposed to placing a child on a starve and sweat diet. A 25% to 30% portion reduction has proven unnoticeable by most people. Cut calories 25% by serving 25% less of the exact same food you're serving now. It will most likely go unnoticed by everyone, except you. See Portion Perversions for examples of portion sizes.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #3
Identify the primary cause of your teen's obesity and correct it. A 17 year old client lost 51 pounds in nine months by reducing soda consumption from three cans to one per day. Gave up her nightly chips and dip. Walked 30 minutes five days a week. Lasting weight loss success was the result. No teenage diet plan required.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #4
Virtually every overweight teen I've helped lose weight benefited from spot exchanges and eliminations like the above example. It's this simple. Why kill yourself with a starve and sweat diet when you can cut two sodas and lose 31 pounds in a year? No diet. No grueling exercise required.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #5
Children enjoy spending time with their parents. Teens are different. Many teens are as finicky as a cat about spending time with parents. Don't take it personal. It's not you. It's the overwhelming stimulus of growing through the age of discovery. The old Paul Newman movie "Cool Hand Luke" said it best when the prison guard says, "What we've got here is a failure to communicate." Your baby thinks she's an adult and wants to be respected as one. They don't want to be blamed, preached to or argue about their condition. It is what it is. Discuss it like an adult with an emphasis on what you want to do to help. Be realistic!

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #6
Communicating can be tough. Especially if you're being shut out. Here's what I've said to many young people with gratifying results.

"I can't lose weight for you. Only you can do that. But I can share my experience with you and help you make decisions that will make weight loss easy for you."

And I do!

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #7
Make sure your youngster has a physical check-up and medical evaluation before beginning any weight reduction or exercise program.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #8
Help your teen determine what their ideal goal weight should be. How much weight is to be lost and a reasonable time table to lose it.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #9
Discuss a healthy diet plan with your teen. Work together to find out what you can eliminate or reduce from the diet and what foods to emphasize. Keep the "can't have" foods to a small list that mostly includes high calorie bag snacks like chips. Everything else can be allowed providing portions are reduced a minimum 25% and physical activity is increased, 30 consecutive minutes, five days per week.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #10
A teenage diet plan is no different than a healthy diet plan. Both are essentially the same. Breakfast, lunch and dinner plus snacks. Have realistic goals and expectations for your teen. Don't expect instantaneous changes. Allow them to evolve and grow. Forced behavior doesn't work. Don't push and be patient. Remember what that age was like for you.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #11
It's imperative you explain that reaching and maintaining ideal weight is a lifetime pursuit. Maintaining ideal weight is no different than maintaining proper dental hygiene by brushing your teeth everyday.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #12
Avoid discussions about being fat or thin. Focus on discussions that will lead to making better choices. Emphasize they can lose weight and regain every ounce. Or they have every resource within them necessary to lose weight. I tell my kids, "You're an adult. I have every confidence you will make the smart decisions."

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #13
Reward your teen for good decisions and losing weight. Make it good and try to play a part in the reward itself. The father of one of my overweight kids rewarded his son with father and son guitars and taking lessons TOGETHER. Ask your teen how they want to be rewarded. Make it good.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #14
Use your own experience to teach your child how people eat in response to their emotions like boredom, frustration, stress, disappointment and anger. Explain why those emotions trigger the unnecessary eating response.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #15
Encourage physical activity. Set a good example. Stress the benefits of exercise. Point out the dangers and disadvantages of a sedentary lifestyle.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #16
People who don't eat breakfast are four times more likely to be overweight than those that do. Beat the odds. Eat breakfast and your odds for losing weight increase 400%.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #17
What determines easy weight loss for teens is how they feel about themselves while losing weight. Not necessarily how they feel about a healthy diet plan.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #18
Constantly emphasize physical activities. Not exercise, per se, but activities like yard work, cleaning out the garage or playing a game of catch, badminton, basketball or volleyball. Get involved. Use your imagination. Teenagers love excitement and adventure. So spend quality time with your teen. Have fun and your teen will lose weight. Get them moving!

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #19
In my experience, teenagers have four opportunities for improved nutrition and weight loss results…

• Reduce soda and fast food consumption a mere 25%. Instead of ordering a 16 ounce soda, order 12 ounces.
• Instead of eating four fast food meals per week, eat three.
• Now for really big time weight loss results eliminate junk food and bag snacks from your home. Here's why... bag snacks will destroy a weight loss effort. Four and a half ounces of Fritos corn chips has 720 calories, 180 more calories than a Big Mac. About six handfuls and you rack up 720 calories.
• The last of the four big opportunities is to increase physical activity. The result will be surefire easy weight loss for teens.

I've used this formula for helping hundreds of teens reach their ideal weight. This "invisible" strategy is painless compared to the old, outdated, all-or-nothing, starve, sweat, suffer and regain dieting routine.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #20
Have a meal schedule and eat as many meals at home as possible. Try to eat at least 75% of your total meals at home. Enlist your teen to assist you in the kitchen. Give them real responsibility. Your odds for success improve in proportion to the amount of meals you eat at home.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #21
In my 28 years experience as a weight loss coach and consultant I have not known a single person to reach and maintain ideal weight without making significant changes to their snacking habits and preferences. My young clients switched snacks easily after I introduced them to my snack alternative. It's cold, crunchy, salty and sweet. It has chocolate covered raisins. For this magic snack recipe, check my book, Barb's Foolproof Weight Loss Solution. It can be the difference between success and failure. Worth the price of admission

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #22
Don't search for a magic bullet. It doesn't exist unless you consider a healthy diet plan and low impact, moderate intensity physical activity a magic bullet. Pills, supplements, gizmos, gadgets and gurus fall far short of quality information in designing an effective teenage diet plan.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #23
If your teen experiences hunger, cravings, deprivation or emotional turmoil while dieting, it's the wrong diet. You can't force a square peg in a round hole. Hunger and cravings guarantee weight loss failure. FACT!

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #24
Teach your child to pay special attention to portion sizes, liquid calories, snacks and fast food. These are the battle fields a teens weight loss war is waged, won or lost. Win these battles and your teen is a mere 30 minute daily walk away from living a naturally thin life.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #25
The majority of overweight teens I've known were shy and quiet. When questioned about it, many admitted they didn't want to "draw attention" to themselves. It is vitally important and required for your teen to seek out and enjoy social interaction. The more socially active your teen, the less time and need for boredom or emotional eating.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #26
If your teen seems unhappy, distant or preoccupied, gently emphasize the importance of participation and being involved. I have had young clients lose weight for the only reason of acquiring a new friend. With the new friend came new interests. And new interests reduced the emotional need for food. Participate, be involved, seek social interaction. The result is your teen climbs out of the rut or off the couch and loses weight because food becomes less important in their life and warrants less interest because of it!

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #27
Talk to your teen daily about progress. Give out hugs liberally. Listen. Feel what your child is feeling so you can advise them what actions they can take that will serve their goals interest and desires best.

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #28
Think about your own dieting experiences and history. What worked for you? What failed? Why? Save your child the dieting pain, misery and suffering you've experienced. Explain to your teen diets fail because they end. A temporary diet produces temporary results. To keep your teen from eventually regaining weight, convince him that a healthy diet plan is for life. It never ends. Once your child reaches his ideal weight, he must maintain it for life or he will regain every ounce. FACT!

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Best Teen Weight Loss Tips #29
Dieting causes obesity because starving, craving and hunger do not produce lasting weight loss results. It's all negative and painful. Instead of focusing on a diet, or losing weight, I recommend focusing on being positive. Work at improving your teens confidence and self-esteem. Give him tasks that can be easily accomplished. Put him in a position to succeed. Develop a habit of success. Teach him to win and ENJOY THE MANY FRUITS OF VICTORY.

More

There is so much more you need to know about helping your child or teen live a naturally thin life. I've attempted to cover the basics with 29 Teen Weight Loss Tips!

I also recommend these two books...

How to Get Your Kid to Eat... But Not Too Much by Ellyn Satter

This is a comprehensive book every parent should read. I don't recommend books often, but this book warrants an exception.

Barb's Foolproof Weight Loss Solution by Barbara Yarnell

I authored this book because I was in the unique position of talking to hundreds of overweight people every month. I observed what worked for them and asked questions. I learned what didn't work and why it failed. My book is the cumulative result of 20 plus years of one on one interviews with people suffering overweight and obesity.
The Foolproof Weight Loss Solution is the system that resulted from my research. It's so simple, Dr. John Gullo, a clinical psychologist with 50 years experience helping the overweight said, "A mature 10 year old can understand and implement the weight loss system contained within these pages."

A Misery Index of Zero

It's true. I wrote Foolproof Weight Loss Solution because I watched it work for my clients for more than 20 years. It's a simple way for any healthy person to lose weight easily in a reasonable amount of time with a MISERY INDEX OF ZERO!

It's "invisible" because you can easily conceal your weight loss effort until lost pounds make your weight loss obvious and everyone will take notice.

The invisibility factor is what has helped my clients and their children lose weight without the added pressure and resulting emotional rebellion of a "tell the town" diet.

Foolproof Weight Loss Solution

The ultimate family weight reduction system. It's a no-brainer for a family with children or teens. Easy to understand. Simple to follow. It works for everyone when followed. It's been called the complete guide to weight loss and living thin naturally.

For more valuable information about easy weight loss for teens or a healthy diet plan, I recommend 110 Quick Weight Loss Tips. Also look at portion sizes and how they've changed in 20 years, Portion Perversions, and my 28 Day Diet Diary. Then take the Facts About Obesity Survey and see how your answers compare to the 5,000 participants who have taken it.

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