From my own experience I recognize that life as a teenager is not easy.

It is a time when you have the stresses of studies, peer pressure, and often discord at home with your parents. You have to be an achiever at school or college, you have to keep up with the latest gadgets and gizmos, and endure the rules and restrictions of your parents who you believe treat you as if you are still a child and not a developing adult. If you are an overweight teenager, then you may also face other challenges.

People can be cruel and may not only taunt you about your size behind your back, but often insult and taunt you openly. This in turn lowers your self-esteem and makes you irritable and depressed. If you are a teenager suffering from weight gain problems, this article is for you.

If your weight is an issue the responsibility has to be shared equally by you and your parents. Your parents are probably too busy to cook healthy meals for you, and even if they are not busy, they perhaps do not like to cook. Left without the choice of healthy, natural food, you resort to eating fast foods and takeaways. Parents must take on board their part in any weight gain of their teenage offspring if they failed to offer you healthy food choices.

If you choose to eat junk foods when you do not need to, for example, at a friend’s party, or with your classmates at a school canteen, etc., then you also need to take responsibility for the results of those choices. A diet which consists mainly of highly processed, fast and convenient junk foods without regular exercise will result in weight gain. The cycle of comfort eating to assuage low self esteem which in turn results in further weight gain is soon established and seems unbreakable.

However it is not unbreakable. You are an intelligent person. You know that some of the effects of junk food consumption would have worn off if you had taken the time to workout a little instead of being a couch potato or a slave to computers and video games. Unhealthy food habits, coupled with a sedentary lifestyle, result in poor health, lack of energy and weight gain.

So now that your weight is an issue, you need to lose it. Consider the following options:

a) Visit a doctor to make sure that you are really overweight. If you are overweight, then ask about your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate), for it would determine how much you need to workout and by what percentage you need to reduce your food intake on a daily basis.

b) Try to convince your parents to start cooking healthy meals. Tell them how the additional weight makes you feel, how it can burden a person with diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary disease, etc. If you fail to convince them, then learn to cook yourself. Once you start eating healthy meals, half of your extra weight would be gone even before you know it.

You may need to bid goodbye to your junk food buddies and team up with other like minded teenagers who do not wish to remain on the course of bad diet/no exercise regime resulting in weight gain and poor health but instead want to maintain a trim and healthy body.

c) Stop being a couch potato. Get rid of your addiction to PSPs, TVs and PCs. Instead, do some exercises everyday; it can be in the form of walking, running, jogging, swimming or working out in the gym, whatever you feel most comfortable with.

Just pick up a suitable exercise for yourself and DO it daily. If you lead an active lifestyle, the other half of your extra weight would be gone too and you would become the slim and sexy teen you know is within you and trying to get out.

Life is not a dress rehearsal. It is in your teens that you should be building the foundation of a lifelong commitment to eating healthily and exercising regularly. That does not mean that you cannot also have some fun the 80/20 rule should serve you well i.e. 80% commitment to your new regime with a 20% allowance to ensure you lead a happy, healthy and fulfilling life.