Hi! Thanks for your message which gives me a pretty realistic idea of what you’re eating and what you’re doing.

Here are a couple of suggestions to lose the stomach flat:
- Eat plain oatmeal instead of commercial cereals for breakfast.
- Stop light snacking throughout the day. Just stick to 2 snacks maximum. Ditch the pretzels and the cheerios. Snacks on fresh raw veggies (cucumber, celery, carrots) and lean protein (tuna, cottage cheese).
- Kick it up a notch when it comes to exercise. If you want to lose belly fat you need to do some kind of cardio intervals and some kind of weight training. Yoga is very good for you but if your goal is fat loss – it should be an “extra” when you’ve done your strength/metabolic/cardio work.

Hi! I find 64kg for 1m74 pretty normal. 60kg or less would be almost underweight. A woman with a heavy skeleton and a developed lean muscle mass could definitely look slim weighing 64kg for 1m74. 

For the weight you’re at right now, I don’t think looking at the scale will help you if all you want is to look a bit slimmer. It’s more a matter of body composition: less fat and more lean muscle mass, but still weighing around the same weight to look the way you want. 

About being hungry all the time: focus on foods that have a high satiating effect:

- Include protein in every meal: eggs at breakfast, Greek yogurt or cottage cheese as snacks, and turkey, chicken or fish at lunch and dinner.

- Eat enough foods that are high in water (all fresh vegetables) and make sure you’re drinking enough during the day. 

- Choose high fiber, low-glycemic foods as your carbs: beans, lentils and whole grains.

Hi! If you are hungry, you’re probably not eating enough protein and vegetables at each meal. This is an common self-sabotaging behavior that I see many women doing when trying to lose weight. I’ve been there too. Eat more lean protein and vegetables and less of all the other stuff.

You can eat unlimited quantities of the following vegetables without having to worry about the calories because these foods are very difficult to overeat anyway: 
- spinach
- lettuce
- asparagus
- brussel sprouts
- kale
- collard greens
- broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables
- celery
- cucumber 

People who are accustomed to eating small portions of calorically dense carbs (think bagel or pasta) often think that they have to eat the same volume when it comes to vegetables. But you can actually eat 2 to 3 times as much volume when it comes to raw or steamed veggies. 

Eating enough protein is also key to feel full. Protein protects you from losing muscle and decreases your appetite. You can consume between 0.6 and 1 gram of protein per pound of your target body weight (very active women trying to gain muscle can even eat up to 1.6 g of protein per pound).

Please check if you’re actually eating around 90 to 140 grams of protein per day (chicken breast, turkey, fish, shrimp, egg whites) and incorporate proteins and vegetables in each and every meal. 

Hi Audrey,

Yes, you should definitely be lifting weight, unless you’re still very young and growing. [If you’re still in the middle of puberty and experiencing rapid growth, you don’t want to be lifting heavy weight but you can still do basic body weight exercises (push-ups, lunges) to do some kind of resistance training.]  

Gaining weight by gaining lean muscle mass is actually a good thing, look: 

This photo is taken from this blogpost by Chichi from Fitvillains about the numbers on the scale: “Muscle is more dense than fat: pound for pound it takes up less room. You can lose fat & inches without the scale moving. You can get the body you want without losing weight.”
Her entire post is here: http://fitvillains.tumblr.com/post/18076332857/for-those-of-you-who-are-still-putting-more

Hi! Just as too much exercise can hamper your results, too little food will do the same. Your resting metabolic rate drops because your body gets used to getting less food so it just starts burning less calories to preserve itself. The less you eat, the better your body gets at storing calories. Your body is designed to protect you and it will slow down your metabolism to save energy for survival.

Skipping meals, not eating healthy snacks and getting hungry and as you wrote “eating almost nothing all the time” are definitely not a good strategy. There’s no need to go hungry. Here is an example of what you could eat and drink daily (taken from the Eat Clean Diet Book by Tosca Reno):

I don’t think you’ll still be hungry after a breakfast with 1/2 cup of oatmeal, berries, 4 egg whites, 1 yolk and a ton of water! In your case, the key to trimming down is not to eat less, but to actually eat more sensible and regular meals.

Hi! These last kilos always seem to be the most difficult to shed. Our bodies hang on to them because we are genetically programmed that way to have some reserves if we get really sick, pregnant or if there is a famine. It’s just a survival thing. So first thing you need to do is to calculate your BMI to see if you really have to lose these kilos you think you need to lose or if you already reached an healthy weight: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index

According to me, if you already lost some weight and if you have a normal BMI now, you shouldn’t consider the number on the scale as a measurement for your progress anymore. When you gain or lose weight, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you gained or lost body fat, it could be that you gained or lost muscle mass or/and water. The only thing that matters to me is my body fat percentage. I don’t care about how much I weigh at all.

You can get your body fat percentage measured with a digital scale or at a gym. If you’re between 25-28% body fat, you’re already in a healthy range. If you wanna look more ‘toned’ like Cassey from Blogilates or the ‘Tone it up’-girls, you’ll have to get it down to 18-23% .  

What should you do to get to that point? This requires a little extra push from you in just about everything you do, from eating to training: 

- Challenge yourself to bring your workouts to the next level. If you can’t do push-ups on your feet, train to be able to do them on your feet. If you can do 10, train to be able to do 20. If you have a pair of light dumbbells, buy a new pair of heavier dumbbells. You wrote “walking” as part of your cardio activity but to me walking is no cardio, unless you walk extremely fast and uphill. Cardio to me is an activity that significantly elevates your heart rate and makes you out-of-breath.

- Portion control: Fruit and fat-free dairy are part of a healthy diet, but if you overeat them they’re going to make you gain weight. Actually, any healthy food will make you gain weight if you overeat it. It’s just that it’s very difficult to overeat a plain salad, tuna or cucumber because they aren’t as exciting as yogurt with berries for example. Reasonable portion sizes are key. http://fitnesstreats.tumblr.com/post/7929337460/portion-control-tosca-renos-tricks-to-make-sure

Thanks for your feedback Emilee! I agree, if this can make a girl feel more confident, she should go for it!