Lose weight and eating good

Question
Age: 16
Female
I'm an athlete(x country,track & field;long distant runner).
I'm 5'2 and weight around 139. My bone type is medium and I'm guessing heavy, I have to be honest, I don't even know if their is such a thing as a heavy bone.
I've been trying to lose weight for a while but can't seem to lose weight instead gain. I stopped eating meat this year and I stopped consuming cup of noodles, and drinking soda for a few years now.
How much should I be weighting?

Answer
I would not normally answer questions for your age group because I don't specialize in this group. However, your question is such a wonderful questions that, even when answered generally, will help many people understand a very important concept. So for that, thank you.

First of all, continue being active throughout your life. The rewards are plentiful. Life may seem to get in the way at times. However, if you fit your life around your health priorities, and not vice versa, you will find that it all works well.

Second, bone size refers to frame. The weight of the bone with regard to the weight of the body, in terms of frame size, is nominal. More important than weight in relation to bone size is how you look and feel. Do your bones and muscles look good on that frame? The mirror is a better "reflection" of how to determine how much weight is good for your bone structure. In addition, bone weight is a constant not a variable.

Third, and this is the most important, weight is simply a number on a scale that represents a guideline to indicate the need to review other more important components of body composition.  Those components are fat percentage, lean muscle mass, and water weight. Weight is a difficult thing to control. While fat, muscle, and water are easily controlled. Look at two examples:

139 pounds with 31% fat: Here you are clinically obese and leading toward an unhealthy state of imbalance. You have 43 pounds of fat. It is difficult to do anything to determine water, bone, and muscle weight. In fact, if you review the relative percentages given by experts, the numbers won't add up. However, you know that if you do cardio and strength training, it will be easy to tell if you are reducing fat and muscle because your fat percentage will decrease from the efforts of muscle increase and fat loss work outs. Let's say you lose 2 pounds and your fat percentage goes down to 29%. Simple math says that you lost 3.27 pounds of fat but since you only lost 2 pounds of weight, you likely gained 1.27 pounds of muscle. What if the weight didn't change but the fat % did? If you didn't know the fat % did, you might be upset because you worked hard but the weight didn't change, when in reality the fat loss was relative enough to the muscle that there was no WEIGHT change. In addition, I cannot stress how important portion sizes and eating habits are for health.

139 pounds with 14% fat: Here you are in a great spot for fat percentage if you were an adult athlete (the true definition of an athlete, which you have to decide for yourself). Keep in mind healthy ranges are different for adolescents and a physician should be involved in determining that.  Yet, knowing this, you can tell when your fat percentage goes up if you are gaining fat and, if you stop weight training, that you might be losing muscle mass.

The difference in the way these two examples look also make a big difference. You can easily tell a person with 14% fat versus a person with 31% regardless of their size. There is minimal to no muscle definition.

The short answer is to keep being active, focus on a healthy fat percentage based on your age, endeavor to maintain a strong muscle mass, and continue to learn the tenets of healthy eating. Healthy eating is truly more about what you keep out of your mouth than what you put in.  As far as your current weight, you are in the 70th percentile for girls your age. But, based on what you are telling me, I am guessing that you have a significant amount of muscle. Please take the time to have you body composition checked with your parents or buy a Tanita. Then discuss it with your physician. Mostly, please don't focus on that number on the scale. Weight is not an action goal because you CANNOT control it because there are too many factors involved. With healthy eating and proper cardio and strength training, however, you CAN control fat percentage and muscle mass easily and healthfully. Weight loss diets do not work; health gains diets do. Good luck with everything and keep it up! Everything changes all through life when it comes to the body.

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