im trying to lose weight, sorta lika a lb. a day. any suggestions?

Question

my goal is to lose a pound a day or close but im really not sure how. help please

Answer 1

Unless you are very heavy to begin with, that rate of loss will be very hard on your body and frustrating. Here are some aggressive but realistic ideas.


First, 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 questions amount 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

1 lb a day is a pretty radical approach. If you are in good health, do not have complicating factors like Diabetes, etc., the time-honored way to lose weight is diet and exercise. And you will get sick of hearing this again and again. Consider a safer and more realistic goal such as 1-2 lbs per week.

The simplest route?

1) Move more. Walk more. Find a sport or activity that you like to do, and do it regularly. It doesn't really matter what it is: volleyball, martial arts, aerobics, etc. Don't go to extremes and injure yourself. Just stay active. Mix up your activity. Try to exercise at least a little each day (20 mins or more).

2) Eat a variety of healthy foods, and learn to prepare a few dishes that you enjoy. http://allrecipes.com/recipes/healthy-living/main.aspx Eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. Avoid fast food. Get a good, accessible book on nutrition and read it.

3) Don't weight yourself obsessively. Try once per week.

Answer 3

Watch calorie intake very closely. a lb a day is unrealistic, but if you stay under 1200 calories a day then after 2 weeks, you will probably have lost 10 lbs, Id try and work some excersize in too, at least 30 mins 4-5 days a week, or else all the weight you lose will come right back when you start to eat normally... At night is the worst time to eat, so if you get hungry at night, try drinking fat free, low cal hot coco, it will fill you up and keep you warm. Dont worry when your body starts to get really cold, its just adjusting to not having enough food.

Answer 4

in order to lose one pound of fat you have to burn 3500 calories. it is not healthy to lose one pound a day you should only lose about 3 pounds or so a week i know it doesn't sound like a lot but it's better safe than sorry. If you lose too much weight a one time you can end up in the hospital, cause yourself to have an eating disorder, also your body might be a bugger and after you've lost all that weight cause you to not only gain the weight you lost but a few more pounds to pretty much say "i'll show you i'll make you fatter than you were before to teach you a lesson in being nice to me. " Everyone has heard this saying....exercise and proper diet. You need to figure out how many calories you are consuming every day and then reduce 500 calories of that diet and exercise and you will be on your way to a slimmer trimmer you. Good luck!

Answer 5

One pound is equal to 3500 calories. Running for an hour only burns around 250 calories.... and the average person only eats around 2000-2500 calories a day anyway. My point? It's not possible to lose 1-2 pounds PER DAY. In fact, it's downright unhealthy to even try.

1-2 pounds per week is totally reasonable, and is the healthy way to go. There have been many questions on this site about weightloss. I HIGHLY recommend not only considering the answers you receive HERE but also searching for old questions that related to weight loss to find out what others have stated. I also recommend this because I have answered several questions regarding safe weigthloss in the past few months. Either look at my stats page or look for those old questions to find my answers there... no sense in my repeating myself. Two of the links are below....


Good luck to you.

Answer 6

I found the book to be very informative and easy to read.

I've lost 17 pounds in 12 days, I'm just concerned that I'm losing too much weight, too quickly. I will admit I haven't followed the guide exactly. I'm not sticking perfectly to the listed foods and meal plans (but mostly) and doing very little exercise, but the weight keeps flying off.

It clearly works and if I'd followed it exactly I think it would scare the living daylights out of me because of the amount that I'd lose. So thanks again for the information. I've never purchased anything like this before because they are usually full of trash, but 3WD has been a pleasant surprise.

Get started today!

Answer 7

Be careful. Losing that much is bad in one day. If you starve yourself your body will hold onto the fat longer. Eat 6 small meals throughout the day to get your metabolism going and at least walk a half hour 3 times a week. You can lose a couple pounds a week. Also losing too fast can make you gain more in the end..

Answer 8

1 lb a day is crazy and unhealthy.
You should start by doing 3 things:
1) controlling your portions. Eat lean meats & greens, try to minimize on carbs, snack on nuts, couple of slices of lunch meat (turkey/ham) or glass of lowfat milk between meals.
2) don't eat after dinner 6pm-ish, however if you are starved, drink a glass of lowfat milk.
3) go for a brisk walk, treadmill or elliptical 40 minutes, 4 times a week. You are working your heart and burning fat.
good-luck!

Answer 9

You can do it healthy that fast 1-2 lbs a week

Answer 10

You could try cutting down your portion sizes, snacking less, and not eating the unhealthy things. Exercising also helps, but I'm not sure if that how much loss in a day that will be!

Answer 11

Anything more than a 1-2 pounds per WEEK is unhealthy. If you try to do it faster, your body will sense it is being "starved" and prevent itself from losing any more. Changing your lifestyle to loose 1-2 pounds per week will help you loose the weight and keep it off longer.