Just want to make sure I'm doing this right...

Hey, I've been on CC for a while and have lost 11 lbs successfully. My GW is 120. I just wanted to know if I was doing this correctly and that I wasn't doing any harm to myself or anything like that. I know it might be a little late to ask, but better late than never, right? Also, I prefer losing weight slowly, if that makes sense... ^^;

Female    15    5'3"  125 lbs

Calorie Range: 1500-1600 

Lightly active

Thanks in advance. :D

You're 15 so you already know what I'm going to say. At 5'3" and 125 you are at a perfect healthy weight. And sadly, you were at a perfect healthy weight before you began dieting as well.

Only teenagers who are overweight with imminent health issues should ever risk going on a diet.

The reason for this is that 30-40% of all girls who go on a diet develop obsessive issues with food from that point on. Of those, another 30-40% go on to develop full-blown eating disorders.

The act of dieting triggers changes in the brain for some people that are irreversible. We don't know ahead of time which teenagers will be affected.

Rather than restricting your calories at all, focus your attention on being active and making healthy food choices until the age of 25. For the next decade your body has to lay down a lot of neurological, skeletal and hormonal maturing that can be irreversibly harmed by calorie restriction however modest.

Now, your approach has been far more modest and sane than most girls your age, but it is time to up your calories to 2100 and focus on being healthy.

Original Post by hedgren:

You're 15 so you already know what I'm going to say. At 5'3" and 125 you are at a perfect healthy weight. And sadly, you were at a perfect healthy weight before you began dieting as well.

Only teenagers who are overweight with imminent health issues should ever risk going on a diet.

The reason for this is that 30-40% of all girls who go on a diet develop obsessive issues with food from that point on. Of those, another 30-40% go on to develop full-blown eating disorders.

The act of dieting triggers changes in the brain for some people that are irreversible. We don't know ahead of time which teenagers will be affected.

Rather than restricting your calories at all, focus your attention on being active and making healthy food choices until the age of 25. For the next decade your body has to lay down a lot of neurological, skeletal and hormonal maturing that can be irreversibly harmed by calorie restriction however modest.

Now, your approach has been far more modest and sane than most girls your age, but it is time to up your calories to 2100 and focus on being healthy.

I am just curious about the bolded portion that I've quoted.  Is there a source for this information?

No I made it up. Here are just a few research publications on the topic, there are hundreds more. I have an abstract quote below highlighted from the last one with a translation.

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/ 348/12/109

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13261

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S 0006322398001954

http://eatingdisorders.ucsd.edu/research/imag ing/PDFs/2003/kaye2003anxiolytic.pdf

"New imaging technology, that marries Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging with selective neurotransmitter radioligands, confirms that altered serotonin neuronal pathway activity persists after recovery from an eating disorder and supports the possibility that these psychobiological alterations might contribute to traits, such as increased anxiety or extremes of impulse control, that, in turn, may contribute to a vulnerability to the development of an eating disorder."

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ben/cdt cnsnd/2003/00000002/00000001/art00010io

Bolded area translated: altered neurotransmitters persist even after recovery from an eating disorder.