Hi Zoyah and welcome:

Here are some tips that might help: http://thefastdiet.co.uk/forums/topic/the-basics-for-newbies-your-questions-answered/

Feel free to ask any questions you may have.

Good Luck!

Some great advice from Knittingmommie up there.

I’ll just add some more into the mix. I hope i don’t scare you off though. I give a lot of advice!

Maybe tell your mother you want to learn to cook and could you go shopping with her and buy some stuff for a chosen recipe. Choose fairly simple recipes to start with.

I’ve got a good one for you that’s healthy and easy and i like it. I find it an easy way to get my daily vegetable requirement in and i also use it for the fasting day.

Choose 4 or 5 vegetables: from this list – potato, pumpkin, zucchini, beetroot, cauliflower, broccoli, sweet potato, carrots, mushrooms, leafy greens such as spinach, kale, silver beet, rocket/argula,

Chop them into largish bite size pieces.

Steam (or boil) any of the vegetables but not the greens or mushrooms. And stop the cooking before they are completely cooked. Drain.

In a large frying pan, Saute/fry the mushrooms and 1-2 cloves of finely chopped garlic in a small quantity of olive oil (buy extra virgin cold pressed olive oil if you can. It is a good oil to cook with and put on salads because its not produced industrially.) cook the mushrooms on a low heat. Do not burn them and don’t over cook them. They will soak up most of the oil straight away but don’t be tempted to add more. Just 1tbsp is more than enough usually. Just stir them often.

Toss in the chopped greens. (about one cup is a good quantity for one person). Then toss in the steamed vegetables as well. You may want to add a little extra oil but don’t add too much. (for me i only use 3tsp of oil max but you can add more) In general, you want a fairly dry pan so that the vegies get a little bit crusty if possible and you don’t want them becoming soggy with oil.

Cook them like this for about 5 minutes, stirring them occasionally to stop them sticking to the bottom of the pan.

You can add a pinch of salt earlier in the cooking process if you like. Not too much.

At the end serve them and eat them just like this or make a simple sauce of unsweetened natural/greek yoghurt. You can add more garlic to the yoghurt if you like.

There are other sauces you make for the vegies but i just like them plain.

To make a salad:
for the dressing use 50% olive oil and 50% balsamic vinegar. This is a nice sweet vinegar and is not too sharp so look for it. If it comes from Modena in Italy, even better.

Choose about 3 salad vegetables including any lettuce or leafy greens like argula or watercress which are nice raw. Maybe a tomato and some peppers/capsicum or celery or cucumber.

Put the diced vegetables in the bowl. Toss them in some dressing you’ve made or just put the oil and vinegar straight from the bottle into it. I usually measure it out by the teaspoonful. 2tsp of oil and vinegar each should be plenty.

On top of the salad, sprinkle some pumpkin kernels (2 tsp) or broken walnuts (about 1tbsp) and get a smallish piece of good quality feta cheese and crumble it on the salad. The nuts and cheese make it particularly tasty. If you don’t have feta cheese, any other cheese will work fine.

You can also make a salad like this with a can of beans or lentils which can be very filling.

It’s great you want to address your weight but i have heard it said by a number of people who’ve lost a lot of weight and felt about their lives a bit like you, that when they lost their weight they still lacked confidence and had all their emotional problems they had before. Their life didn’t suddenly change. They weren’t inundated with propositions from guys and so on. They realised that they would have to address the deeper things as well.

So i figure you might as well start trying to address your fear of people now too. An easy way for you would be to start reading some self-help and personal growth books from the library. You can learn a lot from these books. Also read some biographies. Reading biographies of famous and important people can make you see that you are not the only person who has struggled and you can see how others have overcome their limitations. Maybe look for books by people who have had weight issues but also look for your heroes or important people you’ve learned about from school. One of my favourites to this day was the biography of Charles Darwin. One i’m reading right now by a famous rock musician is also really insightful as its an autobiography and he openly talks about his difficulties and personal flaws – that’s Eric clapton.

If this doesn’t set you on a better path, eventually, you may need talk to your doctor and try to find a therapist to help you deal with your fears but the sooner in life you address them easier it is to get over them.

But its probably good for you to know that your life will not suddenly be all A-ok once you lose weight. So by all means do lose the weight it will make life easier in many ways but more importantly work on that fear you’ve got. Fear of people and of life and of trying new things can become the thing that will really bring your life to a grinding halt at worst and just slow your growth and progress down otherwise. Some people go from where you are to becoming socially phobic and live lives of loneliness and depression. I have met many of these people in online forums.

You can stop that happening by starting now. Its hard in the beginning and it will take time but its so important that you really must tackle this as urgently as your weight.

There’s a wonderful little book called Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers. Her first chapter is totally brilliant. One thing to realise is that for most people the first time we do something we are scared. And for many people at your age, mixing with others is hard. Lots of people pretend they are finding it easy but in reality they are not. When i was your age i used to drink a lot to hide my social inadequacy. A lot of young people do that.

The thing we can’t know is what other people’s experience is until they tell us. Often times you hear older people say – i hated my teens. Life was so tough when i was young and what they re talking about is much the same thing as what you are talking about. A lot of people feel they are different or less attractive or less capable.

But its only the people who don’t keep fighting to move forward that become incapacitated by it and get stuck in a rut of never really solving those matters of career, family and new friends, skills and so on. Look this time of life is just hard for a lot of people. I certainly had my share of problems. And it was a long long time before i really began to tackle them in an effective way. In fact it wasn’t until i had therapy that i sort of woke up.

Pushing beyond your fears takes courage and dedication and often some input from a professional. But its so well worth doing it.

For the weightloss thing, if you have any pocket money at all, you can buy a dressmakers tape measure from the supermarket and/or ask your parents to buy a set of scales for you.

You could learn to cook at home. Get some recipe books from the library focused on vegetable cooking and i find european, particularly mediterranean cooking to be great. You can practice at lunch time. But on days you don’t want to cook, just make yourself a big salad sandwich, or an omelette with vegetables. The thing is to increase significantly the amount of vegetables you eat. And fruit. Fruit doesn’t even need to be cooked.

Have a go at learning how to make a chickpea soup. There are some great recipes on the net for this. chickpeas are a very healthy food. As are lentils and all the beans.

Vegetables fill you up, provide essential nutrition, make you feel more healthy. And there are many ways to make vegetables interesting and delicious.

You don’t need to exercise to lose weight. Exercise is good and in time you want to become more active but its not essential to worry about it now. Focus on eating right and losing weight. You can figure out your height by putting a ruler on the top of your head and its best if you get someone to help you. Draw a mark on the wall with a pencil. And measure to the floor later with the tape. If you get enough money you could buy yourself a pedometer. It seems to make people move more and motivates them.

When you are at the library, have a look at some nutrition and diet books. So you might be self-conscious taking these books to the counter. Don’t worry. Force yourself to do it. What does it matter what the person on the other side of the counter thinks of you. Try and chat to them about the books and ask if they’ve read or can recommend some books they like. Librarians generally like to be helpful. Try to train yourself out of guessing at what other people are thinking all the time. Instead, notice what they are doing and what you are thinking. Is your thinking negative? Make it positive.

And with the weightloss. Be patient. There’s a lot to learn and it takes time. There will be ups and downs and probably a few backward steps from time to time. Persistence will get you to your goal. Join a forum like 3FC for support. There will be many people like you in such a place all at different stages of their journey. You can find me again on myfitnesspal as well. I use the same name as here but have an extra t in my name over there.