Losing excess weight in your teens helps you incorporate healthy eating and exercise habits into your lifestyle. To lose weight, you have to eat fewer calories than you burn, add exercise to your weekly routine and drink more water. While "lose weight fast" diets sound good, any weight loss you achieve using fad diets is usually only temporary.
Balanced Diet
As you explore healthy ways to lose weight, learn what foods are healthy and why. Your body sheds excess pounds more easily when you eat foods that are "nutrient-dense"--that is, foods full of vitamins, minerals and fiber and low in unneeded extras like saturated fat and sugar.
Base your diet on the USDA food pyramid, which makes complex carbohydrates (grains, vegetables, fruit) at the most important part of your diet, and calorie-dense protiens the least important.
Portion Control
Packaged food all comes with a nutrition label printed on the bag or side of the box. The serving size is printed at the top, with the servings per container printed immediately below this.
Measure how much cereal goes into the bowl you usually use. If this is larger than the recommended serving size, choose a smaller bowl. Do the same with your plates and glasses, recommends My Pyramid.
More Water
Start drinking more water and less soda or juice, according to the American Dietetic Association. Start increasing your daily intake of water until you are drinking eight-8 ounce glasses of water every day.
You can still drink juice and soda; just drink less of them and more water. Don't forget to include three glasses of low-fat milk as well.
Exercise
Eating fewer calories helps you lose weight, while adding exercise to your eating regimen helps you double your rate of weight loss, writes the Mayo Clinic.
Using the Mayo Clinic example, relying only on a reduced-calorie diet and eating 500 fewer calories a day, you can lose one pound a week. Start walking for 45 minutes to one hour for four days a week and you can increase your weight loss to two pounds a week. Start your exercise program slowly--walk four days a week and concentrate on aerobic exercise, which increases your heartbeat and breath rate.
Goals and Progress
A healthy weight-loss goal is one to two pounds per week, writes the Mayo Clinic. To reach this goal, plan to burn 500 to 1,000 calories more than you eat.
Set goals that are specific; instead of saying, "I want to lose weight," write down, "I want to lose 20 pounds." Make sure your goals are measurable; exercising for 30 to 45 minutes a day, five days per week. Write your results down in a personal log at the end of the day, suggests the Mayo Clinic.
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