As knowing that many of your guilty secrets is that your tummy is rathr big and has a lot of flab, and what do you do? You hide it with large baggy sweaters that are no other colour than red or black. Well now, you'll be wearing three-quarter tops showing off your perfect and flat tummy! Now, when you look at the picture above don't you just wish you were her? I know I do. The tummy is so flat and perfect! Well, I have got the SECRETS TO GET THAT PERFECT TUMMY! Oh, and by the way, you can get 6 abs extra too!
First, ditch the crunches and situps. Get real! We're talking ball exercise. So get that 9-years-old-stuck-in-the-attic ball out right away! (If you don't have a ball, you can buy one from sport shops for reasonable prices)
The two biggest variables that will affect your shape are diet and exercise.
Carbohydrates (sugar, starch) are digested by your body and some is used for your immediate needs and the excess is stored to be used as energy later. That energy is stored in the form of body fat. Protein is used by your body to build muscle. Muscle mass is more dense... it takes up less space than fat. This is why weight is a poor measure of health or of your success of a "diet", and it's probably more productive to focus on nutrition rather than resisting the natural need to eat.
With a reasonable quantity of protein and slightly lower percentage of carbohydrates, and some reasonable amount in increased physical activity, you can weigh the same and still be much leaner.
I took a weekend job as a ski team coach, skied about 100 days in the past 18 months, and lost about 10% of my body weight. However, I probably lost 15% in fat, swapping about a 5% increase in muscle mass back in.
I intentionally ate more healthy foods (apples instead of deserts with procesed sugar, nuts as a snack instead of cookies or potato chips) and eliminated some unhealthy ones (sodas, all fast food), but exercise also curbs your appetite, so I never felt like I had to "diet" (struggle with the food consumption side of the equation). I intentionally didn't give up anything... pasta, bread, pizza, and so forth, I just had it in moderation while getting enough exercise to be able to burn through it and still get the results I wanted.
The other thing I did was take up nature photography, and I now regularly go on hikes of up to 6 to 9 miles (round trip) to get to nice views, waterfalls, or fields of flowers. Perhaps your school has clubs that can help you connect with other people with interests that might keep you active (hiking, cycling, roller skating, team sports, and so on), you you can recruit your friends to join you. Even walking around the neighborhood can help a lot (especially if you skip TV and video games, when you might have been tempted to snack).
My hiking did start the process for me quickly in the first month or two before I even started to ski, so you should have time to see some great results by Summer if you start now and stick with it.
Bear in mind of course that due to the way women are built it's not necessarily normal to have a flat tummy. Being in great shape certainly will help, but the whole concept of a "flat tummy" may be overused as a marketing tool to sell diets, expensive (and ineffective) diet food, and impractical fashion that a skeleton could barely fit into. Fortunately real people think real women are just fine.
Trying to follow healthy nutritional good sense and make sure you have a reasonable amount of exercise in your daily and weekly routines, and you'll not only have some results by Summer you'll also have some great habits for a healthy life.
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