@SJ2004 wrote:
I am currently 14, and I have always had a larger lower half. However, I have been gaining weight this year, and as I don't love or even really like much exercise I am struggling. My diet is fine (I'm starting to eat less, and all healthy food) and I try to walk home from school every day (~2 Miles) I just would love some insight on how to earn to enjoy, however mildly, exercise. Also, any other pear shapes who could give insight on this topic would be appreciated.
Hi there,
There's a lot of emphasis being placed that exercising is an end all be all method of reducing weight. But while that is true, it is only as true to a certain point. Otherwise, you'll see everyone who is currently running a marathon, biking long miles and swimming for long periods of time would be as thin as you see those athletes being paraded in the Olympics and other professional venues. The truth of the matter is that, it is diet and a certain lifestyle that promotes weight loss more so than using exercise as the means to losing weight.
What exercising does is create a healthy regimen to promote good cardiovascular health, good pulmonary circulation as well as good muscle growth and bone growth. You, being 14, are still at the puberty age of growth, which means you should eating "MORE" rather less. Your body seeks nutrients, minerals and vitamins and all the macros especially dietary fats and protein to promote the necessary growth. Otherwise, you risk curtailing growth or in the medical field, stunted growth. Meaning that eating less actually promotes more of a pear shape because you are less likely to grow horizontally, but more vertically so to speak.
Diet is especially important during the puberty age of growth, so you should be concentrating on eating food high in nutritional value and low in sugar content in grams. Health food is an oxymoron and unfortunately is a marketing term for the health industry to tell you that you will get healthy when you eat them. It is a multi-billion dollar industry. My sister who works for an agency who caters towards exhibitions for the health food industry just recently went to one of our nations biggest health food exhibitions and thankfully I educated her about proper food nutrition and she had maintained a nice figure from the obese pear shaped that she once been. It was interesting that when she was there asking questions; one of the few questions she asked them was the sugar content. The sugar content on the majority of the health foods are actually QUITE HIGH!! I mean surely, 40g of sugar on a health coconut drink can't be claimed as healthy food right? But they did, but they claimed that 40g of sugar is naturally occuring so it's healthier than refined sugar. Whatever they like to say, sugar is sugar no matter in what disguises they tried to label it. W.H.O (World Health Organization) recommends a daily intake of 24gram of sugar; some doctors had gone as far as recommending as low as 12 grams of sugar. Unfortunately, the so called health food failed on the very simple fact as well as the sodium content (again very high). Any packaged health food are going to be laced with sugar, sodium and unhealthy fats. So diet is actually the number #1 cause of obesity and excess sugar consumption is one of the causes of obesity. The second cause of obesity is personal lifestyle, which is stress. Stress causes many unhealthy benefits including weight gain by being constantly in episodes of low blood sugar, because as our body feels threatened, it goes into survival mode. So even if you exercise a lot, you will not burn your body fat, but rather carbs because the body is preserving that fat for the eventual starvation that may not ever come. And the fastest way to cure low blood sugar is, well guess what, sugar. Even eating less can also trigger survival mode in your body to preserve body fat, so even doing the exercise you don't like won't help you lose fat. Without joy, your create even more stress exercising. This is the fallacy in the fitness industry. See most of the runners who run marathons and you'll quickly see that most participants are not as thin as sticks like the pro Olympic runners.
Lastly, it can also be attributed to your family body genes and your structural body makeup and most likely there is nothing you can do to try and change that. If your body is shaped naturally like that, the only way to be happy is to accept who you really are rather than trying to keep up an appearance of a body image that you are not as long as you are eating healthy and walking frequently. I know that at age 14, there is great peer pressure among classmates of being accepted into the group or clan and judgement and bullying happens to force people who do not conform to the group's body image. The key to this is to love yourself first and accept who you really are. Body image is a temporary illusion of joy and happiness as most people chasing the ideal body image will always continue to chase that image. They are not necessarily happy on the inside with themselves as they continue judging themselves too harshly as to what others may think of them even if others think they are too thin or are perfectly fine health wise.
Focus on eating a healthy diet low in sugar and transfat, but high in minerals, vitamins, nutrients, macros and dietary fats that promote growth. Think of it as life is an ongoing journey and eventually you will reach an ideal body image that is natural to you if you live a life that is full of joy and has the least stress and embrace friends who are not toxic, but rather supportive of who you are as a person rather than just a body of you.
Hope this helps.
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