I remember one hot summer day, when I was 14 years old, in a store near the ice cream refrigerator I took a fancy to one beautiful girl, she looked about 15 years old.
Next to her was her friend, who I didn’t like. And all because when she leaned towards the refrigerator for ice cream, she could not reach it because her stomach was in the way.
Now I work as a trainer and can help many chubby girls. But not to everyone, but only to those who want it themselves and are ready to work. So I decided to write an article about how to lose weight as a teenage girl, so put down the bread and mayonnaise and get comfortable.
Is it easy for a teenage girl to lose weight?
Answering this question will not be easy. Let's start with the fact that in adolescence, when you are, for example, 13 years old, your hormones are so crazy that your body can change every second. And let's end with the fact that you most likely love treats, especially sweets.
Not every girl at that age has the desire to give up treats and start training.
Even if it is interesting to play sports at first, you may quickly get bored with it.
Therefore, the answer will be this: yes, it is quite easy for a teenage girl to lose weight, but only if this is your conscious decision and you approach this issue responsibly.
How can a 12-16 year old girl lose weight without harm to her health?
The main thing to be wary of is:
- limit yourself too much in food, which will not lead to healthy weight loss, but to a deterioration in well-being;
- train incorrectly and get injured.
Until the age of 16, the spine is very vulnerable and improper load can cause great harm, so without a trainer, I recommend that you do not cross the threshold of the gym.
Most often, teenage girls want to lose weight in their thighs and hips, and also make their waist thin, i.e. lose weight in your stomach. I can say with confidence that a large part of your success will depend on nutrition, so let's start there.
Proper nutrition
The biggest problem of teenagers is that they don’t really like to eat proper food, but chocolate bars take up 90% of the space in their stomach.
Therefore, first of all, you need to somehow force yourself to stop eating tons of sweets and understand that if you don’t do this, your cheeks will continue to bounce up and down during physical education.
To lose weight, it is enough to limit harmful foods , such as:
- sweets;
- flour;
- fried in oil
and replace it all with more healthy proteins, fats and carbohydrates. also need to eat regularly , and not so that in the morning one piece of sausage with tea gets into your mouth, and then you spend the whole day at school, on the street, in a circle, then you go for a walk, and in the evening you come home and eat everything that was prepared for the whole family a week in advance.
It is necessary to have a full breakfast, lunch and dinner , and it is advisable to add 2-3 small snacks. As you can see, you need to think through your diet in advance and take food with you, as well as lunch at school. I understand that this is already in the realm of science fiction, but what can’t you do for a toned figure.
Some teenage girls want to lose weight as quickly as possible and refuse to eat at all. They may not eat for several days, or eat so little that this amount of food is hardly enough for even a frail sparrow.
Now I won’t bore you about my bad health, I’ll just say that after hunger strikes, which always end in breakdowns, the weight not only returns, but also becomes even greater.
Proper nutrition for a teenager is not much different from proper nutrition for an adult girl. Therefore, I advise you to read an article about nutrition for weight loss for a girl. There is a formula for calculating calories and examples of diet. Just enter your desired weight and calculate the amount of BZHU.
Workouts in the gym
As I already said, you can train in the gym as a teenager, but be careful. I would highly recommend doing this with a trainer.
Bring your friends and train in a group, it’s more fun and cheaper. Besides, if one of you decides to skip training to watch a TV series while enjoying Coca-Cola and chips, the rest will not just let it go.
If you train on your own, be extremely careful. The most important thing is not to put stress on the spine. You can’t give axial load or heavy weight until the muscles get stronger. I understand that you’ve seen enough videos of girls with round butts doing squats with a barbell covered with pancakes, but believe me, as a teenager this can backfire on you, so much so that you’ll have to forget about training.
First of all, you need to strengthen your back muscles; this can be done with dumbbells, some exercise equipment, or your own weight. Perfect for:
- dumbbell rows lying on a bench;
- upper block thrust;
- pull-ups in a gravitron or TRX;
- hyperextension and boat.
You probably know that the best exercises for burning fat are those that involve the largest muscle groups , and these are leg exercises.
But I recommend doing these exercises with your own weight at first. It can be:
- lunges;
- squats;
- stepping onto the platform.
It would also be nice, as you get used to the load, to increase the intensity of your training, add super-sets, circuit training, etc.
As the muscles become stronger and a muscle corset is formed, you can gradually add weights in the form of dumbbells and barbells, but this must be done extremely carefully.
Physical activity
With an active lifestyle and a properly organized diet, overweight teenagers do not experience problems (with the exception of endocrine diseases). However, if a girl, coming home from school, spends all her free time at the computer, ignoring sports and physical activity, then obesity is inevitable.
At this age, it will be useful for girls to sign up for swimming, aerobics or dancing classes. Visiting the sections 3 times a week will be enough to keep your body beautiful. In addition, dancing improves coordination of movements, and the girl acquires a stately posture, becomes graceful and flexible.
Due to the accelerated metabolism, getting rid of extra pounds is usually not difficult for teenagers. It is enough to introduce additional physical exercises into your usual daily routine, for example, gymnastics in the morning, and the excess weight will evaporate in a few weeks. You will be able to lose weight much faster if you exclude all “harmful” foods from your diet: confectionery, fast food.
Workouts at home
If you carefully read the previous paragraph, you can understand that at this age there is no need to use exercise equipment and heavy equipment for weight loss. The own weight of your plump body is also suitable for this.
From this it follows that you can train at home. But for this, it is advisable that someone monitor the technique so that the little plump princess does not harm her health.
At home you can do the same lunges, squats, steps, for example, on a chair. You can also do pumps, push-ups, and a lot of intense “cardio exercises,” such as rock climbers, jumping jacks, and more. Well, of course, let’s not forget about the press.
As a result, such training could look like this:
Complex No. 1
- Squats 20 times.
- Push-ups 20 times.
- Jumping jack 30 sec.
- Leg raises lying on the floor 20 times.
A few words about push-ups. Don't be afraid of this word. No one expects a 13-year-old girl to do push-ups like her dad in the army. I have useful articles for you that will greatly help in this matter:
- I told you how to teach a girl to do push-ups here.
- An alternative can be push-ups from the floor from your knees - they are simpler.
- If you can't do push-ups from the floor yet, start doing push-ups from the wall.
- A 30-day table for those girls who want to take push-ups seriously.
- And finally, the benefits of push-ups for girls.
Complex No. 2
- Lunges in place 15 times on each leg.
- Boat 20 times.
- Climber 30 sec.
- Lifting the body on the press 20 times.
Each complex must be performed 4 times without rest between exercises. Rest only at the end of the circle - 1 minute.
Causes of excess weight
The lifestyle of the average 14-year-old girl in high school is usually not devoid of physical activity. The road from home to school, walks with friends, extracurricular activities, household chores (cleaning the apartment, washing dishes) - with this daily routine, the proper amount of energy is expended to maintain normal body weight, subject to normal (not excessive) nutrition. It’s great if the child also attends sports clubs and takes walks with the dog.
READ How to lose weight properly for a woman over 50
If, with this lifestyle, a teenager gains weight, then the reason most likely lies in excess food consumption or an improperly organized diet. Hormonal imbalances at this age cannot be written off; however, they are only in rare cases the cause of excess weight.
Cardio
Since training with iron at this age is very limited, cardio comes to help in burning fat. It will definitely help you lose weight in your sides, thighs, and even your chin. You need to force yourself to run or at least walk quickly , jump rope , ride a bike, or whatever, as long as your body receives a monotonous load for a long time.
If you want to jump, but don’t have a jump rope, consider that I saved you, because I wrote an article about jumping at home without a jump rope. This type of cardio will burn all your fat very quickly.
By the way, you can also walk on the spot at home. It looks a little strange, just like jumping, but it is still very effective.
Well, you can also tie a Snickers to the bus with the longest route and run after it until all the fat is gone, but this is probably inhumane. Therefore, we will make do with more traditional methods: running, walking, jumping, cycling.
I recommend running only on special treadmills and in good running shoes.
I think that losing your knees at 15 years old is not part of your plans. If you can’t run safely, then also pay attention to swimming. With the right approach, you can both lose weight and have fun (if, of course, you like swimming in the pool). I compared the effectiveness of running and swimming for weight loss here.
Losing weight without dieting
At the age of 14, the body goes through an intensive stage of growth and development, so any diet is contraindicated during this period.
It is much safer, more effective and more expedient to adjust your diet by removing from it:
- instant noodles;
- crackers and chips;
- French fries;
- sweet soda;
- hamburgers and stuff.
The usual white soft bread, which is eaten simply for pleasure, should be replaced with a whole grain product, instead of three teaspoons of sugar, put only one per cup of tea.
Snacks consisting of cakes and pies should be replaced with bananas, apples and other fruits.
There is no need to convince a teenager that he should give up his favorite buns or sweet foods. Just limit their daily amount to a tolerable level, or better yet, allow them to eat a pie once every few days.
It turns out that a sample menu should look like this:
- Breakfast consisting of one banana, a cup of tea with honey, a couple of boiled eggs and one slice of whole grain bread;
- For second breakfast, you can give half a bar of dark chocolate, or send your child to the school canteen;
- Lunch may consist of a portion of lean borscht with boiled chicken, a side dish of buckwheat or durum pasta;
- For an afternoon snack, fruits, low-fat cottage cheese, sour cream and yogurt are allowed;
- Dinner consists of stewed vegetables, steamed fish or vegetable salad.
To prevent your child from falling asleep hungry, and to ensure that the weight loss process takes place with minimal negative emotions, allow him to drink a glass of skim milk or kefir before bed, eat yogurt, or drink tea with honey.
Remember that no matter what your new menu is, you need to eat at the same time.
The duration of sleep plays a huge role, which should be at least 8-9 hours in a row.
Leisure
When I was a schoolboy, the boys and I ran around construction sites, fought with rebar and caught pigeons.
All this consumed such a large number of calories that we only heard about fat from the lips of our parents when they discussed Americans with their McDonald's. It seems to me that the Spartan children were not as retarded as we were.
But now, of course, I will suggest you ask your parents for rollerblades or a bicycle, and definitely a helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, and gloves.
Roller skating, cycling, football, dancing and other types of active recreation and games are very good for losing weight. Therefore, if you have an idea to go to some section , then this is a very good idea.
What should a teenage girl not do to lose weight?
It would seem that all methods are good in the fight against excess weight, but there is a line that cannot be crossed.
Diets
To begin with, I want to say that everything that I described above about nutrition is not a diet, it’s just proper nutrition . And all these fashionable diets that models go on and recommend to everyone will only help to worsen their well-being and create the image of a dying person.
If during the whole day you can look at sausage twice, chew a piece of cheese once during the day, and then drink kefir or eat a quarter of an apple at night, then in a month you will lose ten kilograms and several tens of thousands for treatment.
If a person your age does this, then the rest of his life he will spend money not on food, but on pills. If this is the method of losing weight that you expect, then the result will be justified.
Starvation
This is generally a very bad way. At first, of course, the weight will go down, but then everything that gets into your mouth will instantly turn into fat.
Because our body is designed for self-preservation, unlike you, if you decide to use the fasting method in order to lose weight.
If your body realizes that there is a catastrophic lack of energy, then it will begin to store everything that is possible in fat deposits and at the same time get rid of everything unnecessary, namely muscles, because they spend a lot of energy, which is not in the body anyway. As a result, you will, of course, be able to lose weight, but the quality of your body will become much worse. In particular, forget about the buttocks.
Use pills and fat burners
Absolutely forbidden. These pills are dangerous even for adults and have many side effects. They can cause such harm that later the problem of losing weight will fade into the background.
