I am 14 years old and trying to lose weight i have stopped eating a large meal for the day and going to go to gym will i lose weight?

Answer 1

Obviously, there are innumerable books written on this topic, but here are a few key points to follow:

1) Eat about 400 fewer calories per day than your body needs to maintain. You'll discover this amount through tracking food and weight over a period of several weeks.

2) Exercise about 400 calories-worth, 6 days a week. You can find out how much you're burning for different activities with on-line resources.

3) Eat smaller portions, but keep your foods varied with each meal.

4) Eat more often- 5 to 6 times a day. This fools your endocrine system into thinking that food is always available, and there is no need to store fat. The opposite of this: If you gorge on a couple of meals, your body thinks that food is hard to come by, and stores food as fat.

5) Drink 8 glasses of water a day. Start with 2 when you wake up.

6) Eat 5-8 servings of fruit and vegetables a day.

7) Eat lean protein sources- chicken breast, soy, protein powder, fish.

8) Eat your carbs, but make them wholegrain. 5-7 servings a day.

9) Eat 25% of your daily intake of calories as healthy fats: Mono- and Polyunsaturates, and Omega-3 fats from fish and flax seed sources.

10) Read Power Eating by Kleiner. Lots of info that will change your eating for your entire life. Take your diet seriously- it will likely save your life one day.

For exercise, because of your age, you should not do failure-level strength training as it may negatively effect the growth plates on the ends of your bones. This being said, resistance training is a good idea three days a week. I recommend a book called Power Training by Dos Remedios for Men's Health for the how-to on resistance training.

The alternate three days, do some form of interval cardio. This is where you work at 80-90% effort for 60 seconds, then 30-50% effort for 60 to 120 seconds. This form of training boosts your metabolism after the exercise ends for several more hours. You should expect to lose a pound every 4.5 days. You'll lose a bit faster in the first week, then it will be steady after that.

Remember that you can help a weight loss regime with exercise, but you can get even fatter if the proper diet is not there. Think of it as 75% diet and 25% exercise. But don't ever only diet! a good percentage of your weight loss will be muscle loss if you do that. Muscle helps you to burn fat. If you get rid of the muscle, the fat will come back fast. This is the essence of yo-yo dieting. Always exercise.