Throughout a person’s physical growth process, puberty is deemed the golden period to increase height. All of your efforts to grow taller will pay off if they are smartly invested in this period. For girls, the age of 13 is in the middle of their puberty, and most girls will have reached their final adult height by the time they are 15. As a result, it is crucial to take advantage of this growing period to maximize your height potential before you stop growing, i.e. when puberty is over and your growth plates have fused completely.
13 is the age when girls show profound growth in both muscles, bone frames as well as sexual functions. The bones’ size, mass, and mineral density increase at a rate of 4% per year. In addition, growth hormone is secreted at high levels during this period, which stimulates cartilage formation and bone development.
All of these will facilitate fast and effective height gain for girls. Therefore, the question of “how tall should a 13 years old girl be?” depends greatly on the way you take care of various factors influencing height in this period, namely nutrition, exercise, sleep, and living environment.
The contribution of nutrition to height growth can be as powerful as that of genetics. For this reason, taking proper care of what you eat on a daily basis is the best tip on how to grow taller at 13 for girls.
For girls aged 13, adding essential vitamins and minerals, especially calcium, to their diets is extremely vital for their height growth. They need a healthy and balanced supplementation of nutrients from different food groups, including proteins, starches, fats, vitamins, and minerals.
Particularly, foods that are rich in calcium such as dairy products, eggs, fish, crab, and shrimp should never be absent from their daily meals to support the skeletal system and promote optimal height growth.
Below is the list of food recommendations as part of the tips on how to grow taller for girl at 13:
Satisfying your body’s nutritional needs not only maximizes your height growth potential but also improves your overall health. Unfortunately, with our modern busy lifestyles, many parents do not have time to cook for their children or ensure sufficient nutrition for them.
This also results in poor absorption for children as they consume more and more processed or fast food. For this reason, height growth supplements can be considered a great solution to overcome nutritional deficiencies and facilitate outstanding growth for children and teenagers.
The importance of exercise to a child or teenager’s height development is undeniable. Indeed, a sedentary lifestyle will hinder the growth of bones and muscles, thereby preventing you from reaching your genetically predetermined height.
Exercising or playing sports regularly will foster the formation of cartilage and boost bone growth. More importantly, it triggers the production of growth hormone within your body, which is crucial for your height gain. With this in mind, parents should encourage their children to participate in more physical activities.
Regarding the tip on how to grow taller at 13, girls should choose exercises or sports that involve a lot of jumping, spreading arms, standing up, and sitting down. Some recommended exercises and sports to try are swimming, hanging, jumping rope, cycling, basketball, running, and yoga.
A trick to help you maximize the benefits of exercise is to practice in the period before 8:00 a.m. or after 4:00 p.m. This is the time when your body can absorb vitamin D from the sunlight effectively. Thanks to this, your calcium absorption is optimized, your bones are increased in length and thickness, rickets is limited, and slow growth is avoided significantly.
Another tip on how to grow taller at 13-years-old girls is to sleep for 9-11 hours every day. We all know that sleep is the time when the body rests after a day of tiring activities, but sleep also contributes exponentially to height growth.
In fact, growth hormone is released at peak levels at night, especially from 11:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. during your deep sleep. This hormone plays an instrumental role in the development of your height, and thus, you should go to bed early, preferably before 10 p.m. to ensure adequate sleep to grow taller.
What is more, if you do not want to deprive your body of a golden chance to reach your desired height, you should not use electronic devices before your bedtime while trying to create a clean, quiet, and well-ventilated bedroom to better your sleep quality.
Since water accounts for 70% of the body’s weight, drinking enough of it is required for the normal functioning of different organs within your body, including gaining height. Water helps people release toxins from the body, improve our digestive system, increase metabolism in the body, and eventually boost growth in height.
Apart from drinking water when you are thirsty, try to make sure you drink enough water (roughly 1.5-2 liters) on a daily basis. If you are fed up with bland water, you can spice it up by combining drinking water with juices such as watermelon, cucumber, grapefruit, or orange. This is also a good way to provide your body with more vitamins and fiber from fruits, which is beneficial for height increase.
On the other hand, please stay away from carbonated drinks as they would prevent essential ingredients from being absorbed into the body. They can even wear off your bones, leading to osteoporosis or bone fractures that hinder growth.
In addition to carbonated soft drinks, other growth inhibitors include alcohol, smoking, fast foods, and sweets. Heavy consumption of these can cause stunted growth for children and teenagers.
Specifically, they will interfere with the absorption of minerals and stop the bones from growing. Besides, alcohol can adversely affect your skeletal system, thus hindering the process of bone growth and bone formation. Furthermore, food colorings, sweeteners, added sugars, and additives in processed foods, instead of bringing nutritional value, damage the functions of your kidneys and negatively affect the growth of height.
Along this line, smoking destroys bone cells and makes your bones weak or brittle. Last but not least, the use of antibiotics in high dosage can be responsible for stunted growth. By avoiding these height-stunting factors, you can facilitate optimal height growth with ease
Let’s look at this example! If you put one book on a pillow, do you see the pillow sink a bit? But if you place a stack of books on the pillow, there will be more weight that makes the pillow sink more. And this is similar to being overweight to your knees. Hence, if you lose a remarkable amount of weight, you will stand taller or even gain a little bit of height because of less compression in your body overall.
If you want your children to have reasonable rates of height growth, the vitamin D produced by sunlight will play a vital role in producing stronger and larger bones. Spend 10 to 15 minutes or so of unprotected sunlight exposure to your arms, legs, and face. Then follow up with good sun protection like a 30-SPF or higher suncream. Additionally, you should choose the suitable time of day for significant sun exposure, between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. So, instead of eating good sources of vitamin D (scientists point out no matter how much you eat, you cannot consume enough vitamin D), simply expose yourself to sunlight for a short period of time and then you get enough vitamin D every day.
Aside from maintaining healthy nutrition and good habits to boost height, taking the best height growth supplements is recommended. The idea of using these pills is to supplement necessary nutrients for bone and body, which plays an important role in height growth. These growth dietary supplements often contain calcium, zinc, magnesium, vitamins, and proteins, all needed for height increase. While these can get you away from danger in terms of your height growth, it is wise that you should combine all the advice above. Last but not least, always consult your doctor before and when taking these supplements.
So, if you are a 13-year-old girl who is worried about your height, please be patient and carry out our recommendations. Have a balanced and nutritional diet, along with proper physical activities and a good nights’ sleep. And by carrying out all these things, you will keep your body both healthy and reach your height potential effectively.
