Living with teenagers can be a funny thing, in the same way Ingmar Bergman films are funny. Funny as in "peculiar," funny as in watching scenes play out where all you can do is cock your head to the side, look over at the person sitting next to you in the Theater of Life and ask, "excuse me, but what just happened?" That kind of funny.

You can often talk to your teens and ask them about harmless, benign topics -- what's going on in their lives, how their friends are doing, only to find yourself stonewalled and denied access to even the most bland conversational subject matter.

At other times, maybe during every other full moon or during months ending in the letter "y," they engage you in conversations that are open, honest ... and guaranteed to keep you lying awake at night worrying about the next generation. And it's always an either/or proposition. There's very little in between.

My latest "lying awake at night" conversation with one of my kids centered on some friends he's known since grammar school who are currently involved in high school wrestling. He freely offered up what a tough sport it is, and exactly what two of the friends involved were attempting to do, on a fairly regular basis, to get down to their "correct" weight when their next weigh-in was imminent.

It was at this point I got the equivalent of Cliffs Notes regarding rapid weight loss techniques in the world of wrestling. One is spitting as often as possible to help reduce the water content of one's body. Another is abstaining from drinking any liquids for 24 hours prior to weigh-in. Another was -- no surprise -- not eating. One friend was even happy that, while starving herself, she felt so weak and dizzy that she actually threw up. This was considered a boon, because who knows how many bonus ounces of liquid weight were contained in the bile she vomited?

This dark side of high school wrestling may have been news to me, but the idea of wrestlers quickly dropping 5 to 10 pounds in order to stay in their current weight class is apparently nothing new. The American College of Sports Medicine puts out news releases called "Current Comments" regarding topics of interest regarding their specialty, and as I looked over their release on weight loss in wrestlers, I was astounded.

According to the Current Comment, rapid (meaning in the course of a week or less) weight loss in high school and college wrestlers has been shown to be an average of four to five pounds, but 20 percent of the wrestlers exceed 6 to 7 pounds in that same time frame. And one-third of wrestlers report repeating this practice more than 10 times in a season.

The reasons are purely competitive. Wrestlers sometimes need to stay in a certain class of weight in order to not have to compete against members of their own team in competition. Others do so in order to stay at the upper end of a particular weight range to give them a competitive advantage over others wrestling in that same class.

Yet there is no doubt that all the techniques listed above are extreme enough to bear a remarkable resemblance to the behavior found in the eating disorders of teen girls -- only in wrestling, it can affect both sexes. Wrestling simply gives some teens an athletic, rather than aesthetic, excuse to engage in unhealthy behaviors.

I should add that I'm not against high school wrestling. I think wrestling is a fun and healthy activity that most kids have been doing since they were small, which makes it something which comes naturally to them. It can promote all the best things kids' sporting activities can -- fitness, social interaction, healthy competition and team spirit. I've known two other teen wrestlers who stayed healthy and enjoyed the sport immensely.

But there is no question that any weight-based sport which encourages teens to discipline themselves to stay at one particular weight during a semester or a school year walks a dangerous line -- after all, growth spurts in both height and weight are not uncommon at this age, and fighting those inevitable changes can't be a good thing.

And while it doesn't apply to them all, when some teens in the tumult of adolescence happen upon something he or she can have complete control over -- like their weight -- it can sometimes lead to maintaining that control by using unhealthy methods.

I hope for the sake of my son's friends that someone takes notice of their behaviors before irreversible damage is done to their growing bodies.

Because even though many of our teens make it tough for us to stay informed about what's going on in their lives, we still have to watch the signs, read the signals, and perhaps even occasionally violate their privacy by monitoring how much they're eating and checking the scale.

While we want our kids to learn the lessons and have the great experiences that high school sports like wrestling provide, those things should never come at the price of their health.

Diane Sayre is a freelance writer living in Hanford. Her column appears weekly in the Sentinel. Readers can write to her at The Hanford Sentinel, P.O. Box 9, Hanford, CA 93232.

(Feb. 9, 2009)