Low Calorie & Low Sugar Diets for Teens

Teens generally need the same nutrients as adults, just in different proportions. When putting your teen-ager on a diet, ensure that his nutritional needs are being met. A "low-calorie" diet for a teen might still be far higher in calories than a comparable diet for an adult. The key is swapping healthful food choices for unhealthful alternatives.

1800-Calorie Diet Plan

• An 1800-calorie-per-day diet offered by Weight-Loss-Center.net is designed to help a teen lose weight. The diet comes with two days' worth of suggested meals. After getting a feel for the types of foods allowed on the 1800-calorie plan, you can extend the diet by either mixing and matching the food choices listed in the two-day plan on subsequent days, or substituting similar foods with roughly the same nutritional content. The diet replaces a teen's typical meal choices with more natural alternatives to stimulate weight loss by keeping calorie and sugar intake low.

  Breakfast on Day 1 consists of wheat cereal biscuits, fat-free milk, pumpkin seeds, raisins and a chopped apple. Lunch is a whole-wheat pita, tuna with some mayo, a carrot and lettuce salad and vegetable juice. Dinner is a chicken breast sandwich with salsa, tomato, lettuce and onion. Wheat crackers and cheese are a suggested dessert. Snacks on the plan include yogurt, wheat crackers and grapes.

Everydiet's Suggestions for Children

• Everydiet.com has a plan with a similar take on a teen's eating habits. After reminding you that a teen needs healthful fats to support her normal bodily functions, Everydiet takes the approach that children should diet by consuming moderate amounts of protein and a fair amount of healthful carbohydrates. Natural sources of carbs are superior to processed carbohydrates. Feed your teen whole grains, fruits and vegetables whenever possible

  A sample breakfast under the Everydiet guidelines includes scrambled eggs on toast with yogurt and berries. Lunch suggestions are chicken and lentil soup or shepherd's pie with green veggies. For dinner, offer grilled chicken in a pita with peppers and veggies. If you keep the meal choices natural, calories and sugar content will automatically remain low, facilitating weight loss.

Teen Diet Blueprint

• Another low-calorie, low-sugar approach to teen dieting comes from TeenBodyBuilding.com. Bodybuilders are known for their rigorous approach to healthful eating in order to maintain extremely low levels of body fat for competition. Thus, a more stringent approach to help your teen lose weight is to model his diet after that of a teen athlete or bodybuilder. Much like the other suggested diets, this approach strives to replace processed foods with natural alternatives.

  Breakfast on a teen bodybuilding plan will consist of eggs or egg whites with oatmeal and a glass of orange juice. Lunch is chicken, lean beef or fish with brown rice or whole-grain toast. Dinner is another helping of lean meat with vegetables and a serving of peanuts. For a snack, your child can have peanuts, walnuts, almonds or cashews. Despite how bland this diet might appear, it is nutritionally stable, containing a healthy balance of natural carbs, lean protein and fats. The sample day's menu is just a model. Vary the plan as needed by rotating the protein selections and substituting such other carbs as fruit, sweet potatoes and whole-grain foods.