Hi Allie,

Sorry for my late answer! You eat healthy and you’re at a healthy weight. Here are a few suggestions to have your hips look the way you want:

- Focus on inches (measure your hips with a measuring tape) and not pounds. You can shrink and lose fat, but the scale will not reflect it if you also gained muscle. 

- Try to eat protein at every meal and not only for dinner or in small quantities with nuts and peanut butter. For example, some eggs along with your oatmeal for breakfast, chicken in your salad for lunch, cottage cheese or Greek yogurt along with your apple as a snack. 

- The cliff bar is not a super bad choice but it can contain up to 25g of sugar. You can totally have it as a reward after an intense workout but avoid eating it when you’re inactive, doing homework or sitting in front of a computer. 

- Do resistance training, not only cardio. Elevating your heart rate with cardio is good, but working your muscles (your glutes especially) with heavy resistance (weights, dumbbells) is key to help you shape your silhouette.

I hope this helps a bit,

Elise 

Hi! Examples of low-impact workouts are swimming, doing water aerobics (popular with older women but why not?), cycling (or spinning classes at the gym) and rowing. 

But don’t worry, a little impact during exercise won’t harm you if you’re young and healthy. Doing strength-training and high-impact exercises on a regular basis helps improve bone density, makes you stronger and less prone to injuries and fractures. 

In the end, it all comes to down to finding that physical activity that you will enjoy! To tell you the truth, I wasn’t exercising when I was your age. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I started going to the gym and enjoying it because it helped me deal with my desk job and life’s little frustrations. And it just drastically improved the quality of my life. Never say never, you could become an exercise nut too one day! :)  

Hi Brooke,

It sounds like your body type has some endomorph tendencies: http://www.weightlossforall.com/body-types-weight-loss.htm (big bones, muscles, but trouble with weight).

You could consider the following changes to your diet and fitness routine:

- Eating smaller meals but more frequently: every three hours. 6 smalls meals per day instead of 3 meals per day.  

- Doing more cardiovascular exercise: interval training, HITT training are a good way to burn fat. You should be sweating and bringing your heart rate up to the roof for 30 seconds to 1 min, and back down for 30 seconds.

- Watching your dairy and fruit intake: yes, dairy and fruit are healthy, but you wrote “apples” in plural form. Serving size for fruit should be half a fruit or maximum 1 fruit. Do not eat more than 2 to 3 servings of fruit per day. You can compensate with vegetables (cucumber, celery).

- When it comes to dairy like fat free plain yogurt or fat free Greek yogurt, they contain 7-8 grams of natural milk sugar (lactose) per serving. It’s true that these products have a low glycemic index but they paradoxically have high insulinemic responses. The dairy product with the lowest milk sugar content is cottage cheese. 

- Beans, lentils may be a better option for your carbs than whole wheat wraps or tortillas because they contain less fat, are gluten-free and you can get rid of the sodium by rinsing them.

- Finally, if you look healthy (even if you have a ‘heavy’ body frame), you may want to reconsider the way you look at yourself. If everything you want is to look ‘ripped’ like the photos of women athletes on fitspo-tumblr-blogs, consider that this means doing heavy cardio frequently + weight training + having a super clean diet + giving up your favorite healthy foods (fat free dairy, fruits) to get to that point. Looking ‘ripped to the core’ isn’t particularly healthier. Women with low body fat percentages can stop having their periods. A body fat percentage of 17 to 22 percent is necessary to maintain normal menstrual function. Having some fat reserves is also useful to have in case you suddenly get a big gastric flu or some serious illness. Having some fat on our body is part of our natural survival strategy.

Hi April,

Resistance training is key to get a toned, “Nike model” look. This means doing exercises using heavy weights (dumbbells) and/or your own body weight. You want to do exercises that are challenging enough so that you are only able to do 8 to 15 repetitions. Any exercise that you can do for more than 15 repetitions is not really ‘toning’.

Example of exercises would be: 

- push-ups on your feet (and not your knees) 

- tricep dips with leg extended 

- lunges with heavy dumbbells in your hands

- squat presses with dumbbells

I really started seeing my muscles only after I started working out like a guy: going in the weight room instead of the cardio classes at the gym, lifting weights and eating 5 serving of protein per day.  

And don’t be afraid that you’ll look “thick” or “bulky” like a guy, it won’t happen (unless you’re a naturally very muscular girl but in this case you wouldn’t ask me how to get toned.)

Cardio (your softball training) will also help giving you muscle definition by shredding fat, but you need to build muscle with resistance training to make muscles visible and thus look toned. 

I hope this helps a bit,

xxx

Elise