Essay 8 - Some teenagers have poor eating habits. Discuss why this happens and suggest how teenagers should take care of their health.

 

The teenager's era seems to indicate joy and a time to try new things eagerly. They tend to explore the world out of curiosity and hungry for freedom. This act could lead to major drawbacks in many aspects especially to their health. Nowadays, a visit to a convenient store or a fast food restaurant daily is not an odd thing to do for most teenagers. Also, not having breakfast and a proper eating time has now become their everyday routine. Not to mention how they love to spend most of their time in front of a bright screen and become a couch potato. Instead of having a good night's sleep, they rather waste the time playing video games or surfing the internet and also fiddling through their social media accounts. There is no smoke without fire. The habits that are mentioned above are caused by several reasons and to balance it out, there are many ways for teenagers to take care of their health. 

The main reason why teenagers these days are having a bad eating habit and could not lead a healthy lifestyle is the lack of parental supervision. For those teens who have working parents, their parents usually leave the house to head over to their workplace early in the morning and come home late at night. Therefore, their parents could not prepare breakfast or other meals to eat for lunch and dinner. Also, most parents trust their children so much and think that their children are responsible to take care of themselves. Furthermore, teenagers often find themselves with a tight schedule full of responsibilities like schoolwork, extra curricular activities and studying which hinders them from eating at the right time. Not only that, they often overlook the importance of caring for themselves. They think it is all right to eat sausages and cookies for lunch. As a result, fast foods such as burgers, pizza and instant noodles become a number one choice of food for teenagers.

One of the ways that teenagers could take care of their health is consuming a healthy and balanced diet. During this time of life, teenagers are in a time of rapid growth and development. So a healthy balanced diet is particularly essential for them to ensure a smooth growth. Practicing a good diet also benefits the teens by providing an adequate amount of energy to stay active all day to study and engage themselves in various school projects. Teenagers cannot neglect the importance of eating a healthy diet because bad consequences will follow them soon as they grow older. The chance to suffer from a deadly disease like obesity, high blood pressure and heart attack is high. So, they should start a healthy diet from an early age to avoid such things. Teenagers must eat three main meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They could replace junk foods, snacks and sugary drinks with fruits and fruit juice. On top of that, they also need to drink a lot of plain water to prevent dehydration and long-term results like kidney stone. In short, teenagers need to practice a healthy balanced diet as a way to ensure good health always.

The next step for teenagers to take care of their health is exercising regularly. Most teens nowadays spend countless hours in front of their gadgets and eventually become a couch potato because they rarely exercise. If this situation goes on, this could expose themselves to various types of disease such as obesity and heart attack. By exercising, teenagers could reduce the risk of developing these deadly diseases. Also, study shows that exercise can promote brain development and improve concentration. These are the crucial aspects that teenagers need to own, especially when they need to study. When exercising, the brain will produce proteins which prompts the body to grow new nerves and helps existing brain cells to survive. In other words, this could make their brain stronger and ready to take up information. For those who are a beginner to exercise, try to do something easy like jogging, jumping jacks, lunges and stretching or even do some house chores. There are also many videos regarding exercise that they could find on the internet, so basically teenagers have no excuse to not exercise. Furthermore, they must do it properly in order to prevent some injuries that may cause long-term consequences. In short, exercising really plays a vital role when it comes to teenagers' health.  

Besides eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly, having a sufficient amount of sleep is also one of the ways teenagers could do in sequence to have a healthy body. As everyone may know, teenagers these days sleep around three to four hours every night due to many reasons and one of them is the temptation of the internet and gadgets. This situation is not relevant particularly for students mostly because they have to go to school the next day and study.  Studying requires a lot of thinking and memorising assorted information from multiple subjects. An adequate amount of sleep could help to boost the teenagers brain function. Sleeping is actually a rest time for our brain to prepare a space to properly store an upcoming knowledge so that we can pull them out smoothly later. In that note, teenagers should sleep between seven to eight hours per night to gain a sharper brain. If they find it hard to sleep early, they should dim their bedroom lights a few minutes before going to bed. By doing this, it could help them to prepare to sleep. Overall, having a good night sleep with the right amount of time could lead teenagers towards a healthier life. 

In conclusion, health is important and something that we need to look after. No matter how young we are, without good health, we can never do something smoothly. We all know that not all are plain sailing which in this case, there must be a lot of challenges for teenagers to face on the way to have a healthy body. This is the moment when parents should play their role as a guidance for their children. Parents must encourage their children to eat healthy food, engage them in exercising and monitor their children's sleep time. By doing this, the teenagers will be one step closer to having a healthy body.

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