Ep 38. How To Handle Homework Stress and Unhealthy Eating.
Apr 10, 2024
Dr Jenny Gourgari
In the comprehensive Health and Behavior in Teenagers Study (HABITS), valuable insights were gathered from 4,320 students, with an average age of just under 12 years. This research sheds light on an important aspect of our children's lives: how stress influences their eating habits.
Title of manuscript: Stress and Dietary Practices in AdolescentsArticle in Health Psychology · July 2003 Martin Cartwright, Jane Wardle, Naomi Steggles, Alice E. Simon, Helen Croker, and Martin J. Jarvis
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Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
In the comprehensive Health and Behavior in Teenagers Study (HABITS), valuable insights were gathered from 4,320 students, with an average age of just under 12 years. This research sheds light on an important aspect of our children's lives: how stress influences their eating habits.
Title of manuscript: Stress and Dietary Practices in AdolescentsArticle in Health Psychology · July 2003 Martin Cartwright, Jane Wardle, Naomi Steggles, Alice E. Simon, Helen Croker, and Martin J. Jarvis
Listen to learn more
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
This is the Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens podcast. If you're a mom and want to help your child who is struggling to lose weight, you are in the right place. If you are looking for healthy lifestyle tips, dr Gorgery is here to help you understand the science around safe weight loss in teens and children, because what works for adult weight loss is not always the best for children. This podcast is for educational purposes only. Dr Gorgory does not provide medical, psychological or nutrition therapy advice. You should not use this information to diagnose or treat any health problems without consulting your own medical practitioner and now your host, dr Jenny Gorgory.
Speaker 2:
Hello, hello, welcome to another episode of the Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens podcast. This is Dr Jenny Gorgory and on this episode I will be talking about stress and dietary practices in adolescence. We all know how important it is to handle our stress so that we can make healthier choices. Now we also have scientific evidence by a group that was done a few years ago and they actually measured the stress level of teenagers and they actually measured what were some of the habits they were looking at. So this was a huge study that was done in a university college of London. It was published in Health Psychology Journal in 2003. It was part of a big study called the Health and Behavior in Teenagers Study, the Habits Study. So what they did is they had a total of 4,320 school children roughly like the boys were 2,578 and the average age was around 11.8 years. So they asked them to fill out certain questionnaires where they look at their stress level and then they categorize the kids in different categories according to their stress level. So they had the low-dose stress, the medium stress, medium-high stress and most perceived stress. So they use validated questionnaires to do that. And then they looked at different healthy habits like, for example, how much fruits and vegetables they were eating, how much fatty food they were eating, how much snacking they were eating, whether they were doing more than five morning snacks or afternoon snacks or more than five evening snacks, and how many times did they have breakfast every week. So they also look at the amount of their weight, whether they had normal weight or whether they were overweight. In general, as I mentioned before, researchers use body mass index to establish whether a child is overweight or normal weight, and if you don't know what, you can go back and listen to episode one of this podcast. But it is very interesting what the researchers found after they put all the data together. They found that the kids that had greater stress, those were the kids that were more likely to have more fatty foods. They were more likely to have less fruits and vegetables, they were more likely to have more snacks and they tend to have less frequent daily breakfast. So this is like a clear association between the amount of stress and the amount of healthy habits. It's an inverse relationship.
Speaker 2:
So what can we do about it? It is something that is obvious to everyone but is very difficult to address. Our teens are juggling a lot. They have to go to school, they have to go do their homework, they have to go to after school activities. Sometimes they have problems in their relationships or they can be very emotional about it. They can have a surge on the pubertal hormones that can exacerbate their feelings. They can have bursts of anger or sadness, and I can say that puberty is a very difficult period. Just by the fact alone that they go through all these hormonal changes, their body changes, their mind changes, they have physical changes.
Speaker 2:
So it is a lot to handle and I think what we can do as a first step is to encourage our teenagers to be more active, to get moving more. And exercise is not just for cardiovascular health, which is very important, but it is a great way to handle stress. Even if we encourage our teenagers to take a walk in the afternoon, let's say, when they come back from school, just go out or listen to the music, read a book, talk to somebody with your friends and just even go for a quick walk or a quick run or go out and participate in sports like play basketball, play volleyball, go on your bike. So something that would get them more physically active is a great way to handle stress better and it doesn't have to be necessarily one hour per day, although this is what is recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. If the child, a particular teenager or child is not currently involved in any activity, even just doing 15 or 20 minutes counts, that is a huge progress and that's how we can start and then start building on it.
Speaker 2:
The second thing that is also an important way to handle the stress and then by handling the stress, as I said, can also indirectly help with these healthy habits is to open up those lines of communication. Our kids need to know that they can talk to us about anything that is bothering them. They can talk to us about their frustrations. They can talk to us about their frustrations. They can talk to us about their disappointments. They can talk to us about why they feel upset. They can talk to us about the way they are sad. It's a great comfort for them and I know that teenagers get that support. They prefer to get that support from their friends, which is totally fine, but as parents we can also be there with them, show them our support so we can offer some insight, we can offer some help to them so they feel open towards us, so they can feel they can trust what we have to say and even if we don't always agree, just the fact that they know they have somebody that they can listen to their problems that alone is significantly important. And finally, one last thing that we could do is we can make sure that there are all these fruits and vegetables available at our homes so even if they do feel they need to have healthy snacks, or even if they do need to have a snack, they can reach for a healthier alternative that is available compared to unhealthy options. We can make those more nutritious options available to them.
Speaker 2:
And another potentially area of improvement is time management. Sometimes setting things on their schedule and looking where they're wasting their time and what they can do to save time just saving time and organizing Sometimes that also can help with their stress. And organizing sometimes that also can help with their stress. So that's all I had to say for today. I hope it was helpful. I know we keep talking about stress, but I just wanted to emphasize one more time how stress is super important in terms of creating those healthy habits. And finding what are the best strategies for every child to handle their stress is a good first step. So have a conversation with your teenager. Ask them what do you think about this? How is your stress level? Is there anything I can do to help you with your stress? What is the biggest struggle you're facing right now? What can I do to support you? Start the conversation, and that may be the first step for a better management of stress. Take care, y'all, and I will talk to you soon If you enjoyed listening to this podcast.
Speaker 1:
I invite you to come check out the Lyft program. It's Dr Gorgeri's 12-week coaching program for teens and their moms, where we take all this information, we apply it to your daily life and we work together so your teenager learns how to create a healthy lifestyle so they can feel happier, more confident, less stressed and love their body again. Visit the website at lifestyleforteenscom and click on the Work With Me and free resources to learn more about this program and get free help to start this journey right away. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you in the next episode of Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens teams.