According to this article from WebMD, Drop in Physical Activity in Adolescence May Promote Childhood Obesity, it’s not the calories taken in, it’s the calories not burned.
I really hate studies like this, or maybe what I hate is the articles that report them because I don’t have time or energy to go and track down the full study and see what REALLY happened.
I am just not buying the idea that it’s only a lack of exercise and not a combination of diet and lack of exercise. Actually, I’m not buying that it isn’t an overall change in lifestyle.
The teen years are the years when kids take more control over their food. They’re in the cupboards after school and they’re choosing “interesting” lunches while at school. They’re hanging out at the mall or the corner coffee shop and they are definitely taking in a different TYPE of calories. That’s GOT to play a role.
I believe, generally speaking, that the way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you eat and I’m generally of the belief that the TYPE of calories doesn’t much matter. BUT, I have my limits there.
If my teen daughter ate 500 calories worth of fast food and friend ate 500 calories worth of fruits and vegetables and both were just as “sedentary” I fully believe that after 6 months of that, my daughter would no longer be skin and bones.
And let’s take that further. Let’s pretend M ate 500 calories worth of fast food AND got a wee bit of exercise. She likes to skateboard; she occasionally does some Tae Bo and might even do some yoga. Let’s pretend that her pal still at 500 calories worth of veggies and fruit and just sat back and watched M… I don’t think we’d see the pal gaining weight anyway and I’m not sure we’d see M holding her own. All of that fat, all of those simple carbohydrates and all of the sugar have to be processed differently by the body – both when hanging on to create fat and then again when being burned by exercise.
Articles like this and studies like this just drive me nuts. It’s not as simple as saying “teen girls aren’t getting any exercise” and tada there’s the answer to childhood obesity.