Q: Having read q&a for 3 jul 10 and another bodybuilding web site - I've noticed a lot of teenagers want to be big muscle wise - Is it healthy,normal and wise for young people to overeat and effectively force themselves to eat tons so they can have not strong muscle, but big muscles. Being active and doing sports(including weights),eating well is good for any age , but surely being clinical about everything you eat and spending many hours lifting heavy weights is a little obsessive. Aren't teenagers meant to be rather slight and then they fill out later? I wanted bigger arms - but I did grow up with media showing that men have to big and buff to look good.

A: You are absolutely right that a lot of teens these days develop unhealthy attitudes about what their and others bodies ought to look like. No doubt, most of it is media driven -- every type of magazine, from video games to sports to electronic gadgets, will feature an impossibly in-shape guy or girl on the cover. Same goes to TV and movies, of course. Whenever I get questions from teens about getting six-packs or big 'guns' I try to steer them toward everyday healthy eating and physically active lifestyle (not necessarily in the gym) and letting nature and growing up do its work. Which really does work, by the way -- it doesn't take much else for most teenagers to have good physiques.

At the same time remember that teenage years for almost everybody are inevitably marked by some sort of obsession or another. On the whole, teens could do worse than making the way they look their primary concern. Vast majority of them will stop short of danger territory of obsessive unhealthy diets and anabolic steroids and will simply develop healthy physiques (though perhaps somewhat unhealthy attitudes about those physiques). It may not be the ideal situation but it's not that horrible either compared to some alternative obsessions. In the meanwhile I think responsible parents and other influential adults would do well to encourage teens to eat healthy and stay active while at the same time tempering their expectations and obsessions with 'perfect' physiques.