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

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.