Are You Desperate to Lose Weight Quickly?
If you’re desperate to lose weight quickly, first you need to assess yourself. The first two questions being:
- How soon is "quickly"?
- How many pounds do you need to lose?
In other words, if you need to lose 40 pounds by this time next month…that’s not likely to happen. If you need to lose 6 pounds by next week…possibly.
If you need to lose a small amount of weight quickly, you may be in luck, with some "ifs". One is if you are carrying around a lot of water weight (most people do) and two is how up-to-speed is your metabolism?
Just by cutting back on salt (and salted foods) and drinking ten glasses of water a day, you could dump several pounds of water weight in just a few days. No, it’s not fat, and yes it will stay off if you lay off the salty foods and continue to drink at least eight glasses of water a day. But it’s weight off your body that you didn’t need anyway.
A realistic diet might have you lose 1% to 2% of your body weight a week. So if you’re 200 pounds, you could reasonably lose between 2 and 4 pounds of fat in a week with diet and exercise.
I just saw something advertised — lose 18 pounds in 4 days. Really, does anyone believe that? I will say I do know one lady who lost 15 pounds in a week BUT she had been on a medication that made her retain water big-time. When she stopped — whoosh a lot of water came off. The vast majority of people aren’t carrying around that kind of water weight.
We all want to be thin tomorrow. We all have times where being overweight will come back to bite us, so to speak. When you have an outfit you need to get into, can’t and don’t have time to get it altered. When you have to take a trip and you realize too late that you can’t fit into an airplane seat.
But in all honesty, there is no magic bullet. There is nothing you can do (aside from liposuction) that will honestly remove fat from your body overnight. Ain’t gonna happen.
So if you need to desperately lose just a few pounds in a very short period of time, low salt and lots of water will help drop water weight. A reasonable diet and at least a little exercise can drop you 2% of your body weight in fat a week.
Even if you need to drop more than 15 pounds in a very short period of time, you shouldn’t lose fat faster than 2% of your body weight per week unless you are on a doctor-supervised plan.
Even if you are desperate to lose weight quickly, you shouldn’t sacrifice your health (and future weight loss) by losing it too quickly with an unhealthy diet.