Teens, If You Want to Lose Weight - You Have to Change Your Lifestyle

As an overweight teen at one point in time, at my highest I weighed in at 170 lbs for a 5' 4" female! I wore over-sized clothing to cover up the fact that I was heavy. At 16 I got tired of seeing all these skinny girls at school, so I wanted to lose weight, at first it was really hard for me, but before I knew it the work was finally paying off and I ended up finishing high school weighing in at 125 lbs.

The first thing that I had to do in order to lose the weight was to stop drinking soda! This was a big thing for me as I was very addicted to the caffeine in it!

My next thing was to start drinking more water, if you don't keep adding water to your body, it will hold on to the water that is already in your body, causing water weight!

After I started all that, I had to start eating better, I cut out sweets except for on Friday's (those were my free days to eat what I wanted within moderation).

Once I had gotten my eating habits under control, I had lost some weight, by just cutting out all the junk and adding in the water to my daily routine.

Just cutting out the soda and drinking only water gave me a loss of 6 lbs the first week and 2 lbs the following 3 weeks, for a total of 12 lbs in one month! Most of that was water weight.

After I saw the weight coming off I started to get really excited, I started walking to every where I wanted to go. I walked to work, to school, to friends houses, just because, it didn't matter. I walked everywhere!

The walking started to give me some results but I didn't think it was enough so I started jogging every other day, to school and home from school. Then on days that I worked, I'd jog to work.

Once I was jogging without getting winded I started to run to school and work. I would run for 3 minutes, then jog for 3 minutes, until I reached my destination. This was a good way to keep myself from getting used to my daily routine.

Once I had gotten used to the interval running and jogging, I stared running to work, as if I was late, and in a huge hurry. Once I could do that without getting winded, I was down to 150 lbs! I had lost 20 lbs before I knew it. All my clothes were falling off. I had to go out and buy new pants in less than 2 1/2 months after starting my routine.

After the first 2 1/2 months I fell into a rut, where I couldn't do anything that got me to lose weight, I was eating 3 moderate sized meals a day, and snacking at work (salads mostly). So I started taking Martial Arts, which helped me jump start my metabolism into losing weight again. If you can't afford to spend the money on martial arts classes, then the best thing to do is start doing some cardio. Tae bo is a great cardiovascular workout that is fast paced. If you feel stupid doing this then the next step would to be do sit-ups/crunches, push-ups, and continue to jog/run every other day. It's best to do all these things in the morning before you have eaten a meal. Because your body will burn the calories that much faster if you've been active before you eat anything!

It took me almost 6 months to lose 45 lbs without diet pills, and without starving myself.

If you have a treadmill in your home you could use that to run instead of being outside if you are that insecure with your body. But being active is the main start to losing the weight!

Losing weight can be done without diet pills and its best to do so without diet pills! So lets get up off the couch and get moving, you'll feel so much better once you've started to lose the weight!