The Teen Weight-Loss Solution: The Safe and Effective Path to Health and Self-Confidence [Hardcover]

Erika Schwartz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 2004

Dr. Erika Schwartz provides parents with insight into the hormonal challenges that fuel teens' battles with weight and outlines her plan for protection from the perilous side effects of obesity in The Teen Weight-Loss Solution. This inspirational and scientifically sound book reveals how teens can lose weight by understanding their changing bodies and addressing their health needs from the inside out.

The Teen Weight-Loss Solution offers the stories of real teens coping with the heartbreaking physical and emotional consequences of obesity. Dr. Schwartz reveals that the trigger for budding weight problems in teens can often be traced to the beginning of puberty, when their bodies are overloaded with hormones that impact mood, energy, motivation, and weight gain. Teens feel condemned to exist in their fuller figures and cannot understand the hormonal correlation between their emotional havoc and their expanding bodies.

Dr. Schwartz's weight-loss solution teaches parents that they must look beyond the notion of managing their teen's weight problem with an old-fashioned forced diet and address not only body weight, but the whole individual. Parents must make the hormonal connection to obesity for their teen and help their doctor devise a plan that will help their child manage his or her health by monitoring diet, exercise, and lifestyle choices. Dr. Schwartz also reveals a revolutionary step-by-step, dose-by-dose plan for how natural hormones and supplements can be used to help achieve optimal balance of a teen's raging hormones for improved mood, energy level, and weight loss.

The Teen Weight-Loss Solution offers new hope and a tried-and-proven plan that parents can implement today to start teens on the path to both a brighter future and a lifetime of health and self-confidence.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Schwartz, a physician who specializes in women's health, takes a holistic approach to the physical ailments that plague adolescent girls. In a perfunctory five-page nod to boys at the book's end ("Boys Are Teens, Too"), Schwartz claims boys aren't the victims of peer pressure or intimidation as often as are girls—an assertion that could annoy boy experts such as William Pollack (Real Boys) or Michael Gurian (A Fine Young Man). That said, Schwartz does cover her territory well when it comes to mothers and daughters, investigating the ways hormones affect girls physically and emotionally. For problems like bloating, mood swings, acne, weight gain, irregular periods and depression, she prescribes natural progesterone, certain supplements (calcium, folate, etc.), exercise, nutrition and lifestyle changes. Schwartz comes down hard on birth control pills (which may have undesirable side effects) and Prozac—both, she says, are often over-prescribed by doctors. In fact, Schwartz explains, many doctors are unfamiliar with natural progesterone and don't know how to administer it, though it's clearly helped hundreds of girls in Schwartz's own practice. This is an eye-opening book for parents who want to help their teenage daughters explore natural methods of safely managing the weight gain, acne and hormonal changes common to female adolescence. Illus.
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Review

“A revolutionary program to address teen obesity.” (Boston Herald )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (August 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060739320
• ISBN-13: 978-0060739324
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,464,005 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Educational, but is natural hormone therapy the best way?, January 18, 2005

By 

Jon Henshaw (Nashville, TN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Teen Weight-Loss Solution: The Safe and Effective Path to Health and Self-Confidence (Hardcover)

The idea of dieting is often accompanied with exercising more, eating less, and sometimes even using appetite suppressants. What it's not usually associated with is hormones. A new book by Dr. Erika Schwartz strongly suggests that what's missing from overweight teenage girls' lives is natural hormone therapy.

The Teen Weight-Loss Solution, by Erika Schwartz, M.D., is a diet book written for parents of overweight and/or obese teenage girls. Dr. Schwartz begins her book by offering a fairly straight forward, no-nonsense approach for helping parents know if their teenage daughter is overweight and/or obese. She then focuses on 7 main areas for losing weight, which include Diet, Exercise, Lifestyle, Stress Management, Socialization, Supplements and Natural Progesterone.

The first few chapters help bring parents up-to-speed regarding what's going on in their teenage daughter's body. She does an excellent job explaining the role of hormones, and what occurs when teenage girls go through puberty. She also helps the reader connect those changes to more observable changes, like weight gain, and moodiness.

Although the book is very educational for parents, I couldn't shake several concerns regarding the overall push for natural hormone therapy. Many parents may not be interested in having their daughter take hormones for weight-loss. There's also a concern about how their daughter will respond to taking hormones because she's overweight and/or obese. Ultimately, my main concern centers on the potential for overkill. A parent who takes everything to heart that Dr. Schwartz suggests may end up creating more grief than they had before. Pushing supplements like vitamins, encouraging (or making) them take natural hormones, and having a poor confrontation regarding her weight has all of the ingredients for a major explosion. This is especially true for parents who may already have a fragile relationship with their daughter.

Even with my concerns about pushing for natural hormone therapy, I still think the book can help parents with teenage girls who have weight problems. Overall, the book is educational and informative, contains helpful parenting tips, and offers excellent healthy recipes. In the end, Dr. Schwartz's approach may be the perfect weight-loss solution for many teenage girls, but probably not for all of them.