Group program helps teens keep weight down ‎

"There's not a lot of evidence (for programs that work) among this group," said Geoff Ball, director of the Pediatric Centre for Weight and Health at the University of Alberta in Canada, who was not involved in this study.

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Teens are considered a tough group to work with on weight loss because they have more liberty in making choices about what they eat and how they spend their time than younger kids.

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"At the same time, they don't have the same cognitive maturity as adults, so it's harder for them to make positive choices," said Elissa Jelalian, one of the authors of the study from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

So Jelalian's group designed a weight-loss program aimed at teenagers and tracked the participants for two years to see how well it worked.

The program involved 16 weekly group meetings, where 118 obese teens learned about appropriate eating, exercise and strategies to make healthy choices easier.

They were asked to keep their diet to 1400 to 1600 calories per day and to aim for at least 30 minutes of exercise on most days.

Once a week the teens, all 13 to 16 years old, also participated in physical activity programs.

Half of the group took aerobics classes, which included activities like relay races or dancing. The other half took part in an adventure-based program that involved mental and physical challenges, such as navigating through a maze or climbing over logs using ropes.

At the beginning of the study, the teens weighed an average of 187 pounds.

By the end of the four-month program, that had dropped to 181 pounds among teens in the aerobics group and 179 in those who went through the adventure-based classes.