I’m assuming you know that the faster you lose weight, the faster you are likely to put it back on. And that rapid weight loss is not good for your metabolism. And that it can make your skin look slack. And that real, lasting change means way more than going on a kick for a week — it means changing your habits and your lifestyle and quite possibly your life.
Here are four proven ways to lose more than five pounds in a week.
1) The lemonade diet, or master cleanse. Expected weight loss: 7 pounds for women, 10 pounds for men.
Here’s this diet in a nutshell: you drink spicy lemonade during the day and a cup of laxative tea at night and a quart of salty water every morning and nothing else. You may lose up to two pounds a day, and your skin is also likely to clear up, and you will be surprisingly not hungry (if you are, keep drinking more lemonade).
This is my all-time favorite way to lose weight fast. It also makes you less likely to participate in some of your old, bad eating habits. Every time I do a cleanse I eat a little better afterwards — it actually creates lasting change. You are supposed to do the master cleanse for ten days, but you can do it for up to a month or more if you really want to. Oh, and if you commute to work, you will need to give yourself an extra 90 minutes in the morning to make sure your morning flush is done before you attempt to be away from a bathroom for more than half an hour.
2) Raw foods only. 5 or more pounds.
The nice thing about a raw foods diet is that you can eat as much as you want. Its just raw. To lose weight you will need to be eating almost entirely raw fruits and vegetables. While you can technically eat nuts and avocados and raw peanut butter and other things like that, those will severely limit your weight loss.
Of all the radical, rapid wieght loss plans available, just going with raw vegetables is definitely the healthiest. If you want an extended version of a modified raw foods diet, check out Eat to Live: The Revolutionary Formula for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss. It may do a lot more for you than just trim the pounds — you might actually clear up some chronic and serious health conditions.
3) A spin class a day
I specify a spin class because it is intense, sustained exercise. Frankly, if you are out of shape it may take you two to three weeks or more of working out to get strong enough to do a spin class. But they work. Some known sexy people, like Brooke Shields, say they just don’t really lose weight no matter what unless they do their spin classes.
Your metabolism will get stoked like you won’t believe. Just don’t be surprised if you step out of the spin class and want to eat an entire grocery store. Actually, you can attempt to eat the grocery store. Just start out in the vegetable aisle and eat them raw.
4) Cut all the carbs
Everyone and their mother probably knows of Atkins and South Beach, but they do work. Of the two, you definitely want to go with South Beach, but even sticking to meats and cheeses (go light on the butter and the oils, OK) and fruits and veggies and nothing else will drop pounds fast. At least the first few times you do the diet… my body has figured out the con, and now I don’t lose weight on this diet as much as I did before.
Here are three more ways to lose 2-3 pounds a week
- Cut out soda and all forms of sugar
- Drink a gallon of water a day (at least try… half a gallon is a good start)
- Eat an apple before you eat anything
- Eat a salad (with no avocados, no bread, no eggs and salad dressing besides vinagrette) for lunch and dinner. Eat steak if you want after the salad, but eat a salad first. The salad should be big enough to cover your entire dinner plate and mound up about 3-4 inches. A big salad.
- Get your heart rate up to fat burning level for 90 minutes a day.
If you could do one the those five things a week and sustain it, over the course of five weeks you will be substantially thinner And healthier.
