Tina Lond-Caulk - Eat Well and Feel Great: The Teenagers Guide to Nutrition and Health

Thank you to my darling husband Andy for your unfaltering support and encouragement. This book is dedicated to you, our beloved sons Ben & JJ and my dearest mother.

As a nutritionist myself for over 20 years, I have witnessed first-hand the problems parents experienced raising their children, because their GPs had no nutritional information and domestic science was abolished in many schools in the early 1960s. Even after I wrote The Food Doctor for Babies and Children in 2003, clients would call me in despair at the lack of readily available information to deal with weaning, teething, food intolerances and allergies, and my clinic was frequented by a plethora of young teens who simply wanted reliable information on everything from digestive disorders, skin problems and raging hormones to eating disorders.

Then along came the marvellous Tina Lond-Caulk (aka the Nutrition Guru), whose training and knowledge, determination and personal experience of motherhood have secured her place in the world of nutrition. She specialises in visiting schools up and down the country to deliver research-backed, informative lectures to students, teachers and parents alike, all in a digestible and simple-to-assimilate format. Alongside her presentations, she engages the students with practical work the first hands-on approach for over half a century.

She has now collated the best of these teachings into the glorious book you hold in your hands and she has written it in a language that teenagers can understand, but which parents and teachers can be reassured has all been carefully researched and is backed up by published medical information.

At a time when the world is looking at significant issues such as sustainability, avoiding food waste, lowering fast food consumption and encouraging us all to cook real food for proper nourishment, this book could not provide better all-round support for the health and well-being of our next generation.

Tina, I salute you on such an engaging and expertly written book!

Vicki Edgson

Retired nutritional therapist

This easy-to-use handbook is a guide on how to optimise your well-being so that you can achieve boundless energy and vitality, look and feel fantastic every day, and strive for all the things you want to do with your life.

Each year, I work with over 20,000 school students in my Food for Life education programme and over the last 20 years Ive met hundreds of people in my busy clinical practice as an evidence-based nutritionist. Drawing on the combined power of these unique experiences, in this book I want to share my knowledge with you so that you too can realise the power that food and your daily habits have over your health and well-being.

I am hugely passionate about how nutrition and lifestyle habits affect every one of us, and have a first-class honours degree in nutrition and post-graduate training in eating disorders and behavioural psychology, as well as a special interest in nutrigenomics, which is the study of how nutrients affect your bodys expression of your genes.

Through my work I meet many teenagers and young people who are struggling with health issues that are related to their understanding of nutrition, but also to their relationships with their bodies. So many people dont feel great when they first come to see me, but in a short time I get to see the rapid transformation in their energy levels, sleep quality, weight, mental well-being, skin health and confidence once they start taking better care of their incredible bodies.

Think of your body as a high-performance car. If you dont look after it and give it what it needs fuel, oil, water and so on it just cant perform. It simply wont work properly. You have a high-performance body that deserves the very best nutritional support. Without the right support you can start to feel sluggish, perhaps have low mood, develop skin issues, find it difficult to concentrate the list goes on.

In this book you will learn how to develop a healthy and joyful relationship with your body and with food. You will learn how to spot the signs that your body needs specific nutritional support, as well as how to create harmony in your body and mind through healthy lifestyle habits and a balanced approach to your food choices. Most importantly, you can learn all about self-care. I look at all the topics that may be of interest to you as a teenager, from plant-based diets, skin health, muscle gains and improving your sleep, to building a healthy relationship with food and your body, and how to change some of your behaviours should you wish to. You can also learn how to maintain a healthy weight or indeed gain weight if thats what you need.

I hope this book inspires you to develop an understanding of how amazing your body is and what it needs to thrive. Create healthy habits and your body will reward you!

Do you want to enjoy

• waking up feeling alert?
• loads of energy?
• a sharp mind?
• a balanced mood?
• good motivation?
• skin that glows?
• an effortless healthy weight?

You deserve to spring out of bed in the morning feeling totally recharged from a great nights sleep, full of energy, vitality and motivation to face each day. With this sense of wellness comes a great improvement in self-confidence too, and when you feel well, fit and strong you can achieve an enhanced sense of well-being.

Ive worked with thousands of young people to help them feel fantastic, boost their confidence, increase their concentration and focus for their academic studies, improve their skin, hair and nails, and ensure they achieve a healthy weight and create a healthy, sustainable relationship with food. Every one of us deserves to feel well every day, both inside and out, and Im going to show you how thats possible.

The three strands of overall good health

Psychological health: sharp mind, good mood and motivation

Physical health: energy and ability to enjoy physical challenges, good sleep quality

Biochemical health: optimal levels of blood sugar balance, cholesterol, stress hormones and nutrient status.

Food is information for our bodies. The chemical constituents in our foods literally tell our body how to behave, so what we eat can impact our moods, energy levels, motivation, ability to concentrate, to sleep and even whether we feel happy or sad.

Hopefully, we are all born in good health, but your lifestyle choices your food intake, water consumption, how much you sleep, whether or not you exercise regularly and get proper relaxation and fresh air will all affect whether or not you maintain that level of good health.

The following diagram shows a barometer of our health. Hopefully we are born with good health, giving us a high 'health deposit account. However, depending on our dietary intake and lifestyle habits we can either stay in optimum health or move towards disease and poor health, and we see changes such as those listed on the right-hand side. The first signs of someone being unhealthy are tiredness, sleep problems, low mood, low motivation, maybe getting coughs or colds, skin reactions or tummy problems. But you can reverse that, because our body loves to repair itself. Your bones can rebuild themselves in six weeks and, believe it or not, your skin is only 21 days old; thats ancient compared to your inner skin and gastrointestinal tract, which are just four days old, so if you burn the inside of your mouth, you will have new skin there in a mere four days.