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About Martin M
Expertise
Health is in the body, it`s in the mind and it`s in the emotions. About the body you can ask anyone, the other two are not so easy to discuss. Genitals are tricky subjects as well. So, just when sex is new and relationships become complex, who can you talk to? Teens need to grow up healthily in ALL respects. Your sex-life has just started, don`t let it start all knotted up. If you worry about the first time, kissing, virginity, STD`s, love, genital size, masturbation, homosexuality, self-confidence, oral sex or any such matter, ask away. Get it off your chest, don`t worry, be happy.
Experience
I?m not a doctor, but I learned much about much. On this site I advised and helped hundreds of people who had problems and questions about their body, sexuality and relationships. I specialize in questions that are SILLY, PRIVATE, EMBARRASSING, DIRTY and STUPID. Somewhere in your teens, you run into puberty and sex gets to be an item. You learn the basics about puberty and sex at school and at home, but where do you get the details? The weird and naughty bits? Who do you ask those private and embarrassing questions? You don?t want to look dirty-minded asking a teacher, you don?t want to look silly and stupid asking a friend. If you don?t ask, you worry and blunder. That?s where I come in. Old enough to know, young enough (at heart) to understand you.
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You are here: Experts > Teens > Health for Teens > Teen Health > Weight
Expert: Martin M
Date: 6/17/2005
Subject: Weight
Question
I am 16 years old and am very overweight. I have been eating very healthy (not starving myself or anything) and have been exercising for about 1 hr. and 20 minutes every day, but am having trouble losing weight. I am very unhappy and have no self-confidence. And I do not want to go through another year of school feeling like this. Please help. Thanks.
Answer
Dear Lauren,
Bit of a fix here. I do ‘sexual problems' in Teen Health and I don't know much about weight loss. I could help some (I know something about everything) but then I run into the info you give me. Does ‘very overweight' read like ‘cuddly' or ‘chubby' or ‘hippo'? Is the exercise finger-knitting or marathon-running? Eating very healthy could mean anything from a plate of pork-and-pasta to one raw carrot per meal. You will agree there's some room in the interpretation here and there. Rest easy, I love teasing and the more serious I take a question, the more I tease.
I could ask you to be more precise and then sit back to let you do the work but, as usual, I will now start guessing blindly and writing general things at random. Only the confidence-bit is absolutely to the point and true. Then, you decide whether it might be worth it to come back with more info so I can try to be more precise. Here goes.
Overweight can be measured by a formula. Weight in kilograms divided by the square of the length in meters. The result (the index) should be 25 or less. So if you weigh 70 kg and measure 170 cm you figure 70 / 2.89 = 24.2 which is dandy. If you weigh 80 a similar sum will get you a 27.7 which is worse news. Your striving weight could be worked out by turning the math inside out: square of length times 25. If you're 1.70 m tall, you aim at a weight of 1.7 x 1.7 x 25. That's 72 kg and a bit.
Mind, this does not allow for big bones. Some people are broader of build than others and you can't get any slimmer than your skeleton is. Me, I got bird-bones, I'm the ultimate stick-figure. My index is 22 but the love-handles and pot-belly are there all right. I could grow ten kilos of pure fat and still keep clear of the 25-mark.
See what happens if you leave me starved of info? (pun intended) I get over-expansive (yup, intended) You ain't seen nothing yet.
I'll tackle the points you gave me, including the confidence.
Basics:
You eat to generate energy, to grow and to keep your system working. The energy is made from sugar and fat, the growing comes from protein and the system works on vitamins and minerals. Fiber is useless filling that the body can't use, but it makes the intestine work hard. Which is which?
Eating healthy:
FIBRE is the tough stuff like peels and other chewy, wiry stuff. Vegetable matter contains a lot of it, not the least in the skin of the cells, the celluloid. The more fiber you eat, the healthier your bowel AND the sooner you stop eating – without getting too much digestible food inside. If you boil vegetables, that fiber gets digestible and adds to your energy-intake.
VITAMINS and MINERALS are in about everything, vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, cereals and beans, dairy etc. They keep your body-processes working and you need very little amounts of them. They get to be a problem if you go to extremes (total starvation or 100% junk-food).The more you cook stuff, the more vitamins you lose. If you eat a bit of all the above regularly, don't worry about vitamins.
PROTEIN is in meat and fish and in cereals and beans, mostly. The body uses it to build and repair itself. You don't need a big load of that. A good handful of meat per day is enough, rice and kidney-beans for dinner will do fine instead. An overdose of protein gets turned into ureum (pee).
FAT gets burned to provide energy. It also contains some vitamins that you can't get from other stuff, so don't stop eating fat completely. It's in greasy things like meat, dairy, fish and vegetable oils. Meat and dairy are less ‘healthy' than fish and vegetable oil.
SUGAR is in sugar and sweet things AND in cereals, beans and mealy vegetables like potatoes. It gets burned for energy.
Overweight:
All the energy you eat (fat, sugar/starch) gets turned into fat, as a reserve for lean times. If you eat more sugar-fat than you burn, you get fatter. If you eat less than you burn, you burn off the reserve and slim down.
Losing weight:
Either you burn more, or you eat less or you do both. Exercise and diet.
Exercise:
An hour a day sounds good if it is the kind that makes you sweat. It keeps the muscles and bones supple and strong, the body active and rosy and the sweat-glands working. Oh, sure, it burns some fat, too. But if the other 23 hours are spent sitting down, you fight a losing battle. Get off that chair, now. You SIT, reading this, don't you? Why not kneel and put your elbows on the desk? Okay, BE uncomfortable then.
Anyway, keep active, take the stairs, not the elevator. STAND waiting for, riding in the bus. In school, sit straight up, don't hang in that chair. Walk around or pace instead of leaning against a wall. Don't be driven places, get a bike, take a hike. Do chores, help your mom with the dishes. Don't worry about looking a nice girl, just tell her you do it to burn fat, NOT because she asks. Lose TV. Get a camera and make your own movies. You need a book? Don't flop down across your desk to reach for it, get up and get it. Don't have things brought to you, get them yourself. No deliveries, go shopping. If you need three things from upstairs, now, soon and later, don't wait till later to get all three at once. Run up and down now, run again soon and run once more later. The big advantage is that you drive your family completely crazy.
Drinking coffee or tea helps to keep you awake and moving. Which is Ye Olde Miracell Cure: keep awake and keep moving. Burn fat all day. The faster you move, the more you burn AND the more time you have left to burn some more doing something else. And, running around, you drive EVERYBODY crazy. Cool.
Get an active hobby? Swimming, ballet, soccer, something you like and can go on doing forever? Join a club or team up with friends to get regularity and fun into the exercise? Just a thought.
Diet:
Eat less fat, sugar and starches, eat more fiber and all the protein you like. Think about what things are made of.
Pancake: white flour (pure starch), milk and egg (protein and fat) butter (pure fat) and syrup (pure sugar). Bummer. Steak: lean meat (protein and fiber). Yum.
More fiber means more raw vegetable, unpeeled apple, an orange eaten instead of squeezed and drunk. On the whole: the more you need to chew, the better you eat.
Avoid sweet things like candy and soda, snack on carrot and fruit. Avoid overdoses of white bread, pasta, potato. Less of those, more rye, lean meat and vegetables. Try to eat different, not necessarily less. Just less ‘energy'. But enough of it. So:
Eat regularly. A fair breakfast, a good lunch and a light dinner. Eat enough to last you till the next meal, don't undereat. Be prepared to start feeling hungry a few hours before the next meal and, if absolutely necessary, fill the gap with fiber. Apple, nuts, carrot, celery, raisins or something horrible and whole-wheat from a health-food store. So please DO starve yourself just a bit every now and then, just don't overdo it. Usually the in-betweens do most damage, they tend to be sweet, fat or starchy. And mind the light dinner. You don't burn much after it, a lot of dinner gets turned into a lot of fat while you sleep. Eat just enough to keep you from getting hungry before bedtime.
You already know all this and do all that? Then see a doctor and ask if your hormone-levels may be out of balance. It happens. Some people somehow turn everything they eat, however little, into amazing amounts of body-mass. It can be treated.
Now I get on firmer ground: the confidence.
Usually I write this about too big breasts or too small a penis, but the principle applies to you just as well.
Looks are a great topic for conversation, but they are not important in how people deal with each other. Kids may tease and bully, but by the time they reach sixteen, they start looking through the outside appearance, and acting upon that. Looks still make a difference, but only at first glance. Sure, a slender beauty catches the eye, but that's where it stops. One step closer and people will shift their attention to the eyes, and the look in them, the sound of the voice and what it says. Because that is where you are. You are your intelligence, your humor, your character and that is the ‘you' that people want to connect with. This simply is how humans work, we all care about the person inside. People need PEOPLE around, not just skins. Everybody values others on the basis of their whole being, never on looks alone. People who don't look for the real you, don't want to deal with you at all, they pass you by and you pass them by.
So what about all those people who know you but still shut you out and call you names? Some of them may be not-your-kind-of-people. They don't like you, you don't like them. That's normal, fat or no. Nobody likes everybody. The rest, even at 16, will like you and respect you, but don't want to be seen to be too chummy with someone unfashionable. Carrot hair or bad teeth do the trick just as nicely. They're a small loss. Spineless bunch. Of them, the ones that will spare you a smile (or more) are the ones that show you how valuable you are. They like you. You're likeable.
Finally, on the off-chance of offending you hideously by thinking a nice innocent girl like you would even THINK such vile things: sex does exist. So sue me. I saved this for last to make sure you'd get all the rest before you stopped reading in disgust.
Purely generally speaking, AFTER 18, girls can give themselves a nice treat by masturbating, which also uses a big amount of energy. Duo-sex burns double. It beats the comfort a burger or Hershey gives by miles, both ways. No, minors can't do any of that, of course.
Ask again for more. Then, be very precise or you get another four pages of it.
Yours,
martin
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