Your teenager doesn’t need to become a member of Weight Watchers

Cathie Miller has counselled teenage girls who are starving themselves on 600 calories a day.

A nurse practitioner for the Canadian Mental Health Association Waterloo Wellington, Miller knows that those frantic attempts to be thin have deadly consequences.

Children in their teens are still growing. Without nutrients, their hormones are suppressed and menstruation doesn’t happen. They lose bone mass and won’t grow properly. Brain function and heart health suffer.

Starving yourself is a form of mental illness. Eating disorders carry the highest risk of killing you than any other mental illness, Miller says. Higher than depression.

That’s why teenage girls shouldn’t be on diets, ever.

That’s why Weight Watchers shouldn’t be offering free mem-

berships to teens.

Weight Watchers is a large global business, and it is offering the free memberships this summer to children 13 to 17 as part of its strategy to more than double revenue by the end of 2020.

Yes, fans of the company’s programs — and there are many — will tell you it’s not a diet so much as a wellness plan. Foods are assigned points. Healthy foods like fruits and vegetables, lentils and eggs, don’t have any points so you can eat freely from them.

Weight Watchers may offer a healthier and more sustainable way to live than the “cabbage soup” diet or those misleadingly-named “cleanses,” but make no mistake. It’s a diet too.

Otherwise, why are they calling it “Weight Watchers?”

Just check out weightwatchers.com. The website boasts that experts from U.S. News & World Report gave the company top spot in three categories. Those were “Best Diet for Weight Loss,” “Best Diet for Fast Weight Loss” and “Best Commercial Diet.”

Anyway, we know that dieting doesn’t work, say Miller and her colleague, registered dietitian Michelle Johnson.

Eighty per cent of the time, the weight doesn’t stay off.

That’s because you stop listening to your body. When you’re losing weight, you might feel hungry but you don’t eat. Your body thinks there’s a famine coming so it goes into survival mode and slows its metabolism right down. Then when you eat more, it rushes to store the food as fat.

A new study from the University of Minnesota Medical School shows adults who were pressured by their parents to diet during adolescence have a higher risk of obesity and eating disorders.

“When adolescents were encouraged to diet by their parents, they were more likely to be overweight, engage in unhealthy weight control behaviours, binge eat and diet, and to have lower body satisfaction as adults,” said lead study author Jerica Berge.

Children who had been pushed to diet by their parents were 25 per cent more likely to be overweight and 37 per cent more likely to be obese than adults who weren’t pushed to lose weight in childhood.

“These results suggest that a pattern is created and passed from one generation to the next,” Berge said to Reuters news agency.

Think about that before you sign up your child to join you at Weight Watchers.

I’ve always thought of the people who want to curb obesity and the people who are concerned about eating disorders as being on opposite sides of a debate.

But they should be on the same side. And that’s the side of optimal health. Listen to your body and eat when you want. Enjoy your food. Stop “hating” the way you look and start trying to feel neutral and accepting about your body, Johnson says. Try to move around more and get plenty of sleep.

If you would like help with eating disorders or other mental health issues, call this hotline any time: 1-844-437-3247.