how much weight can i realistically loose by christmas?

Question

11 weeks to go i think

Answer 1

That depends on how fit you are at present. If you are "skinny" then the answer may be almost none. If you are carrying a lot of extra weight then the answer would be about 25 lbs. Here are some aggressive but realistic ideas.


For all of the "quick and easy" weight loss diet pill suggestions, remember, if something sounds too good to be true... it probably is, particularly if you have to pay for it.


On Yahoo!Answers I find certain questions being asked repeatedly which is simply a reflection of new people participating. A couple of common question amounts to "How do I lose weight," or more specifically, "How do I lose abdominal fat?" I have gotten very positive responses from my answers when I paused to reply (and now beginning to get "It works!" emails that are very gratifying. I like helping people)... so have recently decided to put a good solid answer on my Yahoo!360 Blog (September 10) that I can point people to. These are my thoughts as a physician and athlete.

Don't target losing more than about 2 lbs per week. If you try to lose faster, your body will go into "starvation mode" and get very stingy about burning calories while at the same time very efficient about storing any calories that you do provide. And it will make you feel awful.

There is no site specific way of losing fat... the old myth about working your abs to burn belly fat isn't true. To get rid of love handles, you need to lose overall fat. That happens with exercise and watching your diet. More on that below.

The most effective way to lose fat is aerobic exercise in the "moderate" fat-burning range, ideally first thing in the morning before you eat. When you wake your body is ready to burn fat and your levels of growth hormone are highest at that time. Later in the day it can take up to 30 minutes just to put your body into a fat-burning mode.

Another overlooked way to burn fat is by lifting weights. Skeletal muscle has very high caloric needs... almost twice that of adipose (fat) tissue. Put on a little muscle and you will burn calories all day even at rest. Be aware that skeletal muscle weighs more, so with this approach you may see your weight increasing while your body fat is melting away. Not realizing this often stresses folks who think they should be losing weight as a measure of fitness. Forget the scale, look in the mirror and you will be happy.

To lose a pound of fat, you need to eliminate about 3500 calories. You can do this by burning more with exercise or by modifying your diet to reduce intake. If you do a Google search on say, "swimming calories" you will quickly find a website with tables of calories burned for a given exercise. You can use such lists to estimate how many calories you are burning up with your routine.

For diet, keep a diary for a couple of weeks counting calories, grams of protein, and grams of fat intake. It is easy with online sources of nutritional information (type the name of the food and calories into the Google search engine) and packaging labels. That will let you quickly figure out where the fat is coming from in your diet.

Fat gives you 9 calories per gram. So take the number of grams of fat, multiply by 9, then calculate what percentage the fat calories are of your total daily calories. Restricting the calories from fat to about 20% of your total intake is ideal for a maintenance diet... that isn't overly restrictive. Of note, you need some fat in your diet. For instance, the body uses fat to produce hormones. Once you have a picture of how to modify your diet, you can drop the diary and just go back to it occasionally if you are wanting to tweek things further.

There is a subset of questions that goes further and asks about "How to get a six-pack?" The answer is the same. Six-packs are 20% abdominal exercise and 80% diet. There is one caveat... abdominal muscles will form in the position that you work them, so be certain to pull them tightly toward your spine while doing crunches, etc. Also, during most lifting, the "core is active" which means that you should be stabilizing with contracted abs then too. Fail to do this and the abs will form, but bulging outward and the result is not attractive.

If you are trying to build muscle as a way to lose fat, then you may need to increase total calories and specifically your protein intake. I target about 0.8 g of protein per pound of body weight each day when actively building. That is far more protein than most people need in their diets.


Aloha

Answer 2

They say anything more than two pounds a week is dangerous, but when you're starting on a new diet and exercise regimen you can experience a significant loss very quickly. For example, I lost over 20 pounds in four weeks when I started The Abs Diet and I have kept it off (I only wanted to lose 20 pounds). So it's possible for you to lose 30-35 pounds by Christmas SAFELY through diet and exercise. I would advise you against using diet pills, fat burners, or appetite suppressants because they mess with your metabolism and you'll gain all the weight back -- with interest -- once you stop taking them. Personally, I would recommend The Abs Diet to anyone because it's 100% safe, it's a common sense approach, it doesn't require you to give up entire food groups, you get one meal a week where you can eat and drink whatever you want, and most of all IT WORKS!!! You can find the book at any major bookstore, and it's hard to miss -- the cover is bright orange. It's worth checking out...

Answer 3

You should aim to lose no more than 3lb per week (any more is detrimental to your health, plus you're statisically more likely to put at least some of the weight you've lost straight back on)

So, realistically, you could lose up to 33lbs by christmas

Take care,
Marty

Answer 4

I too need to lose about 30lbs by Xmas (I'm going on holiday) and I have said that if I have not lost the weight I will not go!
I've just started a Herbalife regime; I've met people who lost 12lbs in the first week, but on the whole I understand that losing 2-5lbs a week is about right.
Best of luck to both of us...

Answer 5

The healthiest and most likely to stay off weight is said to be 2# a week. First week about 5# as a good amount of the first weight lost is water weight.

Answer 6

To be on the safe side I would say 7-10kg, you can loose more but it's not recommended because you are going to gain quickly. It depends are you exercising, what are you eating. I would say join the gym and watch what are you eating. Everybody is different, so it's very hard to say how much weight you can loose.

Answer 7

hi im doing the same thing hav my christmas doo on the 8th dec, im doing weight watchers and lost 4 lb the first week and 2 lb every week so far if you want the weight watchers programme i will send it to you via e mail let me know tc and good luck if you choose another programme but this has always worked for myself and my friends. net xx

Answer 8

It depends on if you diet or what kind of work out's you do such as cardio. I would say between 5-20 lbs would be a good range.
Good Luck.

Answer 9

you extremely do not elect to do some thing. it would want to incredibly basically be water weight. Your weight fluctuates in the technique the day always. when you're going to weigh your self, do it contained in the morning till now you devour and once you bypass to the lavatory. that's the ultimate time. yet when you're searching average to lose some pounds, initiate ingesting better effective and workout.

Answer 10

realistically you can lose one or two pounds a week so it will be somewhere between 11 and 22

Answer 11

drink more water at the start of every meal