Hi, you’re at a normal weight for your height. 1,400 calories are not enough for an active 15 year-old girl who’s at a normal weight. And 1,200 is definitely not a healthy range. Teen girls need 1,900 to 2,300 calories (see this article from Jillian Michaels’s “Master your metabolism”). Even if you’ve finished puberty, you don’t have the same needs as an adult when it comes to calories and sleep.

If you want to shape up at your age, you need to look at the quality of the foods you’re eating. Eat more vegetables and protein instead of focusing on calorie amounts. At your age and where you’re at right now, it doesn’t make sense restricting yourself.

Hi! Why focus on a number when you’re already satisfied with the way you look? Two persons who have the same height and weight can carry it very differently. It depends on their builds, the length of their arms/legs/torso, their ratio of fat to muscle… A large chunk of body weight comes from bones (14 to 20%), and over half of your body’s weight is water. 

And even if you do need to lose a few kilos (which I really doubt), don’t wait to “finally reach your goal” to be happy with your body. You’ll be wasting tons of time that you’ll never get back. Don’t waste your teen years obsessing over a number. 

Instead of focusing on less (fewer kilos, less bread and sweets), focus on more: eating more vegetables, being more active, doing more etc. 

Hi Nicola, 

I don’t think the meal pattern is a problem (eating breakfast/lunch together) as long as the total of your daily calorie intake stays about the same. It’s not as if you were skipping meals during the day since your body is at rest. And in your specific situation, despite this late sleeping schedule, you do get enough sleep for your age because you wake up very late. 

What you’re missing however is hours of daylight. Plus you’re going to feel like a walking coma when school starts. 

Here are a few ideas that may help you fall asleep earlier:

- Since you’re on holidays, you have enough time to exercise. Try a new physical activity that you don’t usually do. For example, if you’re used to running but you never go to the swimming pool, go swim for 45 min. There’s probably a good chance that you won’t go to bed at 1 am that night because your body will probably feel unusually tired. Other new activities could be ice skating, roller skating, cycling, trying a free class at a gym etc. 

- Avoid caffeine: not only coffee, tea and energy drinks ; anything containing cocoa (chocolate milk for example) also contains a small dose of caffeine. 

- Keep the lights dim at night as bedtime approaches. Avoid screens after 10:30 pm: reading on your ipad, checking your phone… Their screens mimics daylight, convincing your brain that it’s still daytime.

Finally, keep in mind that it’s normal for your biological clock to shift forward during adolescence. It’s actually a physical thing. (http://voices.yahoo.com/teenager-cant-sleep-all-night-blame-their-biological-4300577.html) Just try to keep it under control: try to go to bed between 11 and 12 pm. Remember that as a teenager you have special needs and you do need around 9.5 hours of sleep per day, actually 1 to 2 extra hours compared to children and adults. 

Hi Shawna,

I think it is a very good idea to have recruited your friend to join you in your new lifestyle change since you live in a family that can’t / doesn’t want / doesn’t have the information to make a change. You need support and it’s great having a good friend on your side. 

You can’t choose your family, but you can try to see what’s negotiable: for example, an idea could be to tell your mom that you would like to try to make your own food for 2 weeks.

Don’t tell her you want to lose weight, just tell her: “Mom, I’m turning 17 in January, and I would like to become a bit more independent to learn how to function on my own. I respect and really appreciate all the work you did to raise me (give her compliments / show some gratitude, do not criticize or judge her own life choices), but now I’m coming to a point in my life where I would like to learn to do more things on my own and have a bit more freedom (freedom to choose your own food, freedom to go out and exercise). I think I’m mature enough for you to trust me. I know I won’t disappoint you if you give me a bit more space to make my own choices.”

Hi! Stretch marks happen during any period in human life when the body is changing rapidly -adolescence, weight gain or pregnancy. 

So no need to look at your stretch marks as degrading because it happens to anybody experiencing rapid growth. For example, bodybuilders are also prone to getting stretch marks because of the rapid body changes bodybuilding can produce.

Age plays a role with respect to skin tightening, which makes it easier for you as a teenager to see your stretch marks diminish over time. (With advancing years, skin becomes less and less resilient making it way more difficult for older people.) 

Skin responds well to proper nutrition. Avoid refined sugar and refined flours. Sugar attacks your skin, making its layers of elastic proteins (elastin & collagen) glob together. Nutrient-dense foods such as apples, eggs, nuts, beans, fish, asparagus and so on contain vitamins and minerals essential to building a healthy, resilient skin. Focus on these healthy foods and your whole body will respond and shape up.  

Hi Eliza,

Let’s just say you’re describing me another girl just by saying “She has a bit of fat on her hips, a belly you can see under clothes, a rather big butt and sorta flabby legs.” Don’t you think that would be kind of mean? So, don’t you think you’re being a bit hard on yourself talking about yourself like that?

You’re at a normal weight for your height so I don’t see the need of “losing some pounds”.

Walking 200-300 meters to the bus stop doesn’t count as exercise, but tennis two times a week is great. To “kick it up a notch”, you could try to do some strength-training exercises once or twice a week (on your days off of your tennis training). A few examples: www.coreperformance.com/daily/play-better/7-exercises-every-tennis-player-should-know.html

Saying “I try to eat healthy” is just wishful thinking. It is only when you fully commit to something – which starts by saying something like “I want…” or “I will…” that it really counts. 

“Everyone else” isn’t comfortable in their own body at your age. It’s totally normal to feel this way. When I was your age I had super bad acne on my face ; I know what it’s like being uncomfortable, but it was just a phase and I got over it.

What are your core traits, skills and abilities? What do you love about yourself? Try to embrace those characteristics and focus on what you have to offer instead of pinpointing your flaws. 

Hi Elizabeth,

Since you’re only 14, already at a healthy weight, active and eating healthy, I wouldn’t recommend trying to become “very defined & toned” like the fitspo pictures you see on tumblr. 

The teenage body is very different from the adult body. You’re still growing, hormones are changing your body’s structure. Try to wait till your weight and height finally stabilize (around 17-18 years old). Focus on staying active, sleeping a lot and making the right food choices to finish developing the new release of “your body 2.0” the best you can. Once your body is ‘finished’, you’ll be free to try to look “super defined”.

But please don’t assume that female fitness models with defined arms and visible 6-pack look the way they look on their pictures all the time. It’s part of their job to look this way, so of course they do everything that is required to look the way their clients expect them to look for a photoshoot. But their level of training and dieting is beyond the typical “healthy eating” and is meant to be temporary to prepare themselves before a photoshoot or a fitness competition. 

Hi!

Here are a few ideas of foods that can help your weight loss efforts: 
- Green tea
- Yerba maté (a kind of herbal tea)
- Leeks
- Spinach
- Broccoli (I know… no fun foods sorry!)
- Egg whites
- Shrimps
- Turkey 

Your teenage years are a period of rapid growth and development, so your diet must stay super healthy and provide a good balance of the macronutrients.

However, no food can burn fat, no matter what, it’s still food and calories even if it’s super healthy! The best way to increase your metabolism and burn fat is to consume more energy: i.e. exercise helps a lot! Ask yourself how to get yourself motivated to move again.

Set yourself small goals (like for example, exercising 3 times this week) and use non-food rewards when you reach them: watching your favorite tv-show, going to the movie, buying yourself some cheap cute jewelry at H&M, buying a new song on iTunes…

Hi Kellie,  

During the workouts, you have to make the difference between ‘good’ pain and ‘bad’ pain: ‘good pain’ means your muscles are working as they should and you have to push yourself to perform the exercise, which is normal. ‘Bad pain’ means you’re hurting your joints, tendons, muscles or ligaments because either you didn’t warm-up long enough, or the exercise is too violent/high-impact, or you’re not performing the move with proper form.

Try to avoid ‘bad pain’ by asking the trainer for low-impact exercises or beginner variations. It’s much better and more effective to perform a beginner variation of a move correctly than to perform a hardcore move with bad form. The trainer will understand that someone who carries extra weight cannot perform body weight exercises or jumps as well as someone with no extra weight. It’s not even a matter of being in shape or not: if you’d put ankle & wrist weights on a person who isn’t overweight, she too would have difficulty performing the move.

About the weight issue: educate yourself about nutrition and don’t get discouraged. Weight loss (as well as many other things in life) is a chain of continued efforts, a process that occurs slowly over time. Think of yourself as a work of art in progress!

Hi! It’s ok to have ‘weak’ moments. It happens to everybody. If you eat some unhealthy stuff, the key is to brush off the small slip-up and make the most out of the choices that follow. For example, this can mean throwing an unfinished package of candy in the garbage rather than finishing it. That stuff has no interesting nutritional value for your body anyway (by interesting nutritional value I mean vitamins or nutrients your body actually needs). 

Don’t follow the slippery slope and call the day a “treat day”. It’s a huge win when you’re able to stop the downward spiral and change the direction of your day for the better after you feel like you messed up.

Oh and by the way: you’re at a normal weight so stop worrying about the scale. Try noticing the inner dialogues that you have with yourself about your body. Continuous negative self-talk just takes too much energy and time. Your attention is wasted on small unimportant incidents. Stop the negative self-talk. Self-depreciation serves absolutely no purpose except to make you feel bad. So stop it. Making good choices is much easier when you’re in a positive state of mind!

Hi Nynne,

It depends on what you mean by “I don’t do an awful lot of exercise”. Does this mean you don’t exercise regularly? I’m not saying that you should do “an awful lot of exercise”, I’m just saying you may want to kick it up a notch ; as trainer Jillian Michael says: “Results don’t come for free!”

Here is a video about model Alessandra Ambrosio’s workout. http://leandrofitness.com/index.php?/Recent-News/aletrain.html She’s naturally very skinny (personally I don’t think she looks nice ; she lacks muscle tone but that’s what the model industry is looking for) but the video may give you an idea of what skinny model girls do for butt/leg exercises. 

I personally prefer traditional weight training and cardio: http://fitnesstreats.tumblr.com/tagged/butt

Hi! I’m very sorry in advance for my ‘though-love’ answer: Stop the self-doubt “I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up with it!”-thing: if you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will. 

Here are a few tips to avoid quitting:

#1 Make it fun: download your favorite music for your workouts, go to your favorite classes at the gym, go workout with your best friend, notice cute guys at the gym, buy yourself a new pair of Nikes or a new workout outfit. Anything that makes you look forward to your workouts.

#2 Define your priorities: put yourself and your workouts first. Don’t do second things (surfing on the internet, on tumblr, watching tv…) first. There is no point in saying we don’t have time for something because we make time for whatever is important to us. If you are not doing something, it’s because it isn’t a priority in your life. 

#3 Stay consistent without being too hard on yourself: your life is not controlled by what you do some of the time, it’s controlled by what you do consistently 80% of the time. “Small things, done consistently, create major impact.”

#4 Discipline actually helps you: you may be thinking, Yes, but it sure hurts. That is true, but is also brings results and makes your life simple and organized.  

Go out there and prove yourself to the world and to yourself. You CAN and WILL achieve what you set out to do. The only time you fail is when you quit.