Another Weight Loss thread
 

I have two weeks before school starts, and I need to go from sumo to pudgy. Any suggestions to drop a quick 10-15 lbs?

Low carb is so the way to go....
You've gotta be really anal about it, but if you do it right you'll drop 7 or 8 lbs in 2 days.
You stay under 15 gs the first 3 or 4 days and then gradually work up to under 100.
the only prob is that almost everything has carbs, you gotta stick to salads, cold cuts, hot dogs, eggs, sugar free jello, cheese, etc. Basically eating like a cave man. Even fruit has too many carbs.
It's hard but seriously if you research it a little and really try it, it is guaranteed to work!

I hate to sound like a shill for Weight Watchers, but it really does work. My first two weeks on the program, I lost 12 pounds. Granted, I was heavier than most people and it came off really fast, but men generally lose weight faster than women do.

But if WW isn't your thing, the best thing to do is cut back on portion sizes, exercise, drink LOTS of water (some people suggest 1/2 your body weight in ounces of water), and cut out alcohol for the two weeks you're trying to lose. If you do this, chances are you might be able to lose those 10 lbs, but you have to be really disciplined - no cheating!

Atkins! That is the best, albeit unhealthy way. to lose weight fast. Even the latest Maxim endorsed it. ;)

Low carb is the only way! I used a very strict diet this summer and lost 10 pounds in the first week.

I have had great success with the Atkins diet (when I stick to it ;) ). Try his induction plan - less than 20g of carbs per day. Lots of meat, fish, eggs, cheese, salad; no bread, rice, regular soda, or other carbs; no alcohol or caffeine; lots of water and exercise. You may well be able to lose 10 lbs or so that way.

But, it's not sustainable long-term. For one thing, it's not healthy to lose more than 1-2 lbs per week. I myself have added complex carbs back into my diet, though I stay away from simple sugars, and I keep well below the federal recommended guideline of 300g/day (no wonder Americans collectively are so overweight :rolleyes: ).

At a minimum, I suggest you eliminate simple sugars from your diet, and if you drink, either stop drinking or cut back.

Good luck :)

Does anyone know what Advocare is? I don't but this local girl wanted to drop about 40 lbs. quickly so she could have a good rush at Ole Miss and it sure worked for her.

If the weight is in your belly, why not tone up while you drop the extra fat...all these diet solutions only cater to dropping fat...it won't always make it look better though. Here is my work out schedule for my abs...it takes some dedication, but it only takes 10-15 a day...it might take a little longer than these quick fix diets, but you'll be more pleased with the results and you'll start to see them with in 2 weeks or so...you'll also notice how the work out gets easier:

No food after 10 PM.
Body Weight divided by 2 in ounces of water a day (ie. if you weigh 100 lbs, you need 50 ounces of water a day).

Workout for Monday, Wednesday, Friday right before you take a shower:
1.Get a 6 lbs. medicine ball hold it between your knees (feet slightly in the air) and do 60 crunches.
2. Lay flat on your back and hold the medicine ball above your head with straight arms, do "V-ups" by bending you body at your hips and sitting up bringing the ball to your toes. Do 20 of these.
3. Hold the medicine ball between your knees (feet slightly in the air) and get your shoulder blades off the ground. Arms behind your head, twist torso to the right and left 60 times.
4. 20 pushups.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays (right before you take a shower):
2 sets of the 4 point stance. You do this by sitting with your legs out straight and leaning back on your elbows. Push against the floor with your heels so your body is in a straight position with your butt off the floor. Hold for a minute and a half. Rotate to one side. With right elbow and feet the only thing on the ground. Body should be straight. Hold a minute and a half. Rotate so your toes and elbows are the only thing on the ground and you are facing down towards the ground. Hold a minute and a half. Rotate so left elbow and feet are the only thing on the ground. Straight body. Hold minute and a half. Do one more complete rotation.

If you do that every day you will have a great tummy - upper, lower, and obliques. It really doesn't take that much time either - about 10 minutes before a shower each day.

Low carb is a good way to lose weight. But some of you have lost too much weight too fast. 10 pounds in one week is too fast and any doctor and nutritionist will tell you that's not the way to lose weight. Start eating right, and a low card diet works, and start excersing regularly and you'll see reults. I've lost 15 punds since the summer just doing it slowly. You really shouldn't be losing more than 3 pounds a week depending on your weight. Work slowly because it will be better in the long run. You'll be able to keep the weight off.

I would disagree that ten pounds a week is too fast. Usually the first two weeks on any weight loss program, if done correctly, will cause the most extreme fat loss.

But after that weight loss will slow depending on how much extra fat you have.

It may very well be possible for an extremely obese person to drop 30 pounds in the first two weeks and then keep losing 10+ pounds a week for weeks on end.

Re: Another Weight Loss thread
 

To anwer the orginal question: The people advocating the low carb diet (Atkin's) are correct. ITas the no-brainer approach to fat loss and you should be able to lose your goal weight rather handily.

Make sure you excercise, but honestly, if you are a couch potato almost anything is going to work for you. Even on days you work out try and walk for a couple miles in the evening. ITs a nice low impact extra.

For your diet: Plan out the same meal at the same times for the next two weeks. Also your diet should be 3-1 fat calories to protein calories. The diet works much better if your fat intake is pretty high.

To give you an idea, a 4oz piece of chicken has 80 calories of protein (20 grams). You would want to eat 240 more calories of fat with it. Some diets recomend 4-1 fat to protein.

Try and keep your calories around 1800, divided into 3-5 meals. If you have more meals you can squeeze in some extra calories.

Did I mention working out? If you do some cardio and some weights you will have no problem at all.

Oh and a word to the wise. Loose ten to fifteen pounds more than you think you need to, because you will always rebound at least that much coming off any diet program. Especially a low carb diet where a lot of the weight loss is water.

If you have any more specific questions we could work on a diet and excercise program to fit your lifestyle.

I have coached litterally hundreds of people to significant fat loss or muscle gain.

I'd always heard that there are 3,500 calories in every pound of fat. Therefore, if you create a 1,000 calorie deficit every day between what you eat and burn (which will require exercise) you'll lose two pounds per week. Any faster than that and it's just water weight and maybe even some muscle.

Some doctors (including mine) suggest 1-2 lbs a week, or 1% of your body weight per week. If you're heavier than 200 lbs, chances are you'll lose much more than 2 lbs a week. Larger people simply lose weight faster in the beginning, but as you get closer to an average weight, the losses slow down to about 1-2 lbs a week.

There are 3500 calories in a pound of fat.

Whenever you lose fat you always loose water with it. And usually you loose water more than you lose fat.

So if you are losing 2 pounds a week a decent amount of that will be water and probably some of it will be muscle.

People that do cardio only, or diet only lose a great deal of fat. In fact after they loose the first goodly amount of fat, almost 50 percent of their weight loss will be muscle.

This is one of the reasons some many diets fail in the long run. By loosing muscle your metabolic rate lowers. so if you start losing pounds of muscle that is a lot less calories that your body can handle, so its easy to gain back even more fat after you start eating more food.

That is why weight training is essential for long term fat loss.

1-2 pounds a week is the medical benchmark. I speculate that some of that is based on observation:

It seems that many dieters start slowing down to one or two pounds week over time.

One of the major reasons this happens is that people start taking in almost a starvation level of calories. Especially women. This drastically slows down weight loss because the body is perceiving that you are starving it.

This is a curse also for women that are constantly watching what they eat. What they end up doing is lowerinf their metabolic rates because they consume so little food daily, and then adding fat every time they break down and eat more, like over a holiday.

It also makes it very hard to diet because they are already on a low calories diet daily. There is not much room for them to drop calories.

I usually tell people in that situation to add calories for a few weeks to their diets and work on the meal spacing. Especially if you can get them on a low carb diet.

For some reason you can take a lot more calories on a low carb diet and not put on weight. For example, when I am doing low carbs I have gotten to over 4 thousand calories a day and been sedentary without putting on fat. If I did that with carbs I would have blown up.

Just run.

Two miles a day at least 5 times a week will drop alot of weight. You can pretty much eat whatever you want too. Just drop the useless fatty stuff like butter, mayo, candy.

Not the greatest, but it works for me. I JUST started the Cabbage Soup diet. Two plans, but I'm on one week to get myself kick started. Then I'll go for a more reasonable plan like LA Weight Loss.
It works on the concept of "negative calories" meaning a food like an apple or a strawberry takes more calories to digest than they offer.

Re: Re: Another Weight Loss thread
 

Hey James - do you know why that ratio of fat to protein works? I've read that it's counterproductive to eat too much fat (if you're counting calories) because it can be stored more readily by your body (since it's already fat..), so I'm curious to hear the other side of that. :)

You should read Dr. Atkins' book or check out the website here .

Re: Re: Re: Another Weight Loss thread
 

I am not completely sure why they recomend it, I think it has something to do with making ketosis easier or better. Dan Duchaine writes about it in Dirty Dieting.

If you are counting calories it wouldn't really matter where you got them though would it ? I mean logically?

But in truth given the same amount of calories of protein and carbs or protein and fat you are more likely to lose body fat on the protein and fat diet.

Most women fail on the ketogenic diets because they don't eat enough fat. So shooting for a 3-1 or 4-1 could be useful.

If you are morbidly obese or just want to lose fat quickly they will put you on a "fat fast" where you do 1000-1200 calories a day in just fat. But if you add some protein into that mix you will lose less muscle.

Sorry I don't have a better answer. I'll look around a little on the net.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Another Weight Loss thread
 

There are different versions of the keto diets. I don't know if you read testosterone.net but they have an interesting one called the fat fast. I can't ever get myself to do it completely because...well let's just say it messes up your digestive system too much to be enjoyable.

-Rudey

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Another Weight Loss thread
 

yeah, that one is a modification of the medical "fat fast". A lot more protein.

You are better off, for compliance sake, in varying the calories daily. pyramid up and then drop down . . .

I'll admit I don't know much about ketogenic diets or ketosis, but I have a problem with it. According to an article I read about the safety of Ketosis, ketosis and diabetic ketoacidosis are 2 seperate things. ketosis is safe, while diabebtic ketoacidosis is fatal. Ok, so here's my problem. In this article the author says that,

"Dietary ketosis is among the most maligned and misunderstood concepts in nutrition because it is often confused with ketoacidosis, which is a life-threatening condition most often associated with uncontrolled insulin-deficient Type 1 diabetes. In the Type 1 diabetic, the absence of insulin leads to a toxic build-up of blood glucose and an extreme break-down of fat and muscle tissue. This condition doesn't occur in individuals who have even a small amount of insulin, whether from natural production or artificially administered"

I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that the last sentence in this article is WRONG! Ketones are dangerous in the body. As a diabetic I have had ketones in the body while taking my "artificially administered" insulin. I can tell you it's just as dangerous. Ketones are poison, PERIOD! Even while taking increased amounts of insulin I have still had ketones build up in my body causing me to collapse, be rushed to the ER, have heart problems, and basically could have killed me. I lost 11 pounds in 3 days due to ketones.

If this is the information being supplied about Ketosis, ketongenic diets, and ketones, I strongly urge you to stay away from it or at least speak to your doctor about. Ketones, no matter what are extremely extremely dangerous. It is a toxin in the body and can be fatal.

But if anyone else has any other information about Ketogenic diets or ketosis that they'd like to share, being I'm not an expert, but I don't think it's a good idea, feel free to share.

Oh, here's the link to that article.
http://www.ketosis-ketoacidosis-difference.com/

Re: Re: Re: Re: Another Weight Loss thread
 

No, I don't think it matters when you're counting calories assuming you're taking in less than you're burning. The study I read - which was a long time ago, so I don't remember as much as I probably should - said in general, extra fat in your diet can be stored more readily since it's already fat, basically. I'm assuming that would only matter if you were eating enough calories to gain weight, however. If your metabolism's burning 2000 calories a day and you're only eating 1500, you'll lose weight whether that's 1500 calories of carbs of protein or pure fat.

That's also ignoring the aspects of the Atkins diet that make it work despite the lack of reduction in calories. I'd guess that's not applicable in ketosis, but it might be the case if you're just on a low calorie diet (or lack thereof).

I think the results that people get from the Atkins diet are amazing, but it's just not for me. I could never stay away from carbs long enough for it to really work. I'll stick to my 1200-ish calories a day and exercise. It's taking longer, but I was fat for almost 20 years, so two months to take off the little tummy I still have isn't going to kill me.

Thanks for all the help though!! :)

http://www.diet-i.com/weight_loss/raised-metabolism.htm

This is pretty inclusive and explains why different foods in a diet plan are better than others. Go to the bottom of the page and check out the links. I explored many of the areas, but not all.
It lists the pros and cons of popular/fad/radical and healthy diets.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Another Weight Loss thread
 

I don't think that's quite true... Most diet experts agree that simple sugars are bad - if you're sticking to a 1500-calorie diet and 1400 of those calories come from Snickers bars, you're not doing yourself any favors. The reasons differ - some people talk about insulin spikes, others say that it is very easily broken down by the body, others say all carbs are bad, etc. Same thing for alcohol - most experts agree alcohol should be limited if not done away with entirely, but for different reasons. So it does matter where your calories come from.

Dr. Atkins' argument as for why fat is not "bad" is that your body processes any carbs that you eat, and then goes to fat stored in your body. According to him (for reasons I don't understand) dietary fat is not processed before bodily fat.

The important thing is to decide what you're going to do - low-carb, low-fat, low-calorie, Weight Watchers, whatever - and then stick to it.