Thirty pounds is 480 ounces, if you want to lose that much in four months, that would be around 4 ounces a day. That is the size of a quarter pound hamburger patty. That much in one day, everyday for 120 days? That is around 113 grams loss per day.
First of all, this is pushing the limits. It is going to be a little rough making sure that you are on a safe diet. Talk to your doctor and find a good nutritionist. Try to remember that you do not want to lose just weight, you want to lose fat. Also, should you mind if you replaced 5 pounds of fat with 5 pounds of muscle? Muscle helps to burn fat.
A friend of mine is obsessed with losing ounces. She wants that weight off any way possible. To her it does not matter if that weight loss is water, or muscle, or fat, or whatever, she just wants it off. This is such a wrong way of looking at things. Generally, water in your body is a good thing (unless you overdo it). Losing weight by sweating it off or dehydrating yourself is meaningless and dangerous.
Here are some odd tips:
I have heard, or maybe I just made it up, that the best diet food is a walk. Keep that in mind. Everytime you want a little snack, just get up immediately and take a little walk. If you are the type that likes to munch on things all the time, munch on celery, carrots, popcorn, even ice, or other kind of vegetable. Stay away from anything with oils, things like salad dressings, fried stuff (including most chips), margarine, etc. If you want oils, take fish oil pills.
Nutrition is primary, you still need protein, vitamins, minerals, and all that miscellaneous stuff. You even need some fat, but it needs to be the right kind of fat, and you need to take into account your condition. If you are pregnant or breatfeeding for instance, you need to be especially careful going on a diet.
Look up the amount of calories that you need for one day for a person of your age, size, sex, and condition (disabled, pregnant, ill, athlete, high stress, diabetic -- anything out of the ordinary). Try to figure out how many calories you are taking in on any given day and try to adjust that to match.
Go through the nutrition of everything you would normally eat for a whole week (keeping in mind the adjustments that you just made), and figure out, probably by dividing it by 7 to make it a daily average, what you are lacking in and either adjust your diet, or take suppliments to make up for it. In other words, if you calculate that your diet will be low on iron, figure out how much iron you will be lacking, and match that in the suppliments.
If you understand this, and do it, then you will not lose weight, you will however be healthy. If you do it this way, then you get to eat pretty much what you want, but less of it. If you want more, substitute foods, like carrots or celery instead of chips.
I like to snack on dehydrated fruits, (or even vegetables -- which are hard to find, and usually make me a little sick) because it feels like you are eating more. You get to munch of them longer, and they have a lot of flavor. Unfortunately, they tend to have added ingredients that you usually do not want, but I had a dehydrator so it was not a problem.
Meat, cheese, diary products, oily products, and sugary things are your greatest enemies. One of the reason for this is because you need the nutrition found in those foods and they taste good. Diary, oil, and sugar are found in nearly everything. You do not have to stay away from them as much as watch out for them being added to things that you do not expect.
So, along those lines, stay away from most TV dinners and nearly all restaurants. You need to be in control, and when you go to a restaurant, you just lost that control. You can eat the same thing at home, just prepare it differently. It is a very different thing from eating a McChicken sandwich and making a chicken sandwhich at home, the difference in calories can be huge! So huge, that sometimes you can eat another sandwich and still eat less calories. Of course you can't make it the same way, but it can have the same main ingredients (chicken, lettuce, tomatos, etc...at home you can add spinach leaves, pickles, green peppers, onions, etc...cool!)
Now, once you have this stablised, you have to do something to start taking that weight off. The best way I mentioned earlier, turn fat into fat burning muscle. To many people this means working out at a gym, but you are on a diet and hard working out and diets to lose weight do not mix. You might want to increase your protein intake so that your body can make the muscle. At any rate, exercise ought to be moderate.
This is where the doctor comes in. I cannot possibly know what is safe for you to handle. But you need to do something more than you do now.
Here are some odd tips on exercizing to get you started:
Fiddle. Fiddling does two things. It burns a few calories, over time, and secondly, it helps you keep your metabolism up.
Sitting around is a big problem, it should be avoided. If you are walking around while watching TV, you are going to help yourself out. You do not have to overexert yourself at all, just move a little.
Move your body. Just stand or sit and go through each muscle group and move them. No real exercising involved here, just move them. Take them to the limit without going over the limit -- you know where your limits are, just go there. Everyone will think you are weird, but just tell them these are your karate exercises or something. Pretend like you are an octopus or some such thing. Rotating, twisting the muscles are your best bet -- go and find them all. Again, you know what you can do, don't go past your limit.
Along these same lines, tense your muscles. Just sit there if you want and find a major muscle group to tense up. Tense them for a few seconds and slowly untense them. Go to the next major muscle group. Pretend like you are stretching, like when you just wake up. Yawn if it helps you get into the mood. Again, no reason to exert yourself, this is very low impact.
The key is to not stop, just do the little things and keep on doing them. If you stop to rest and you find yourself panting, you are probably over doing it. If you can handle it, fine.
Some breathing exercises might help, but I do not know much about them. All these things work together to do one thing, increase your metabolism.
From there, again, talk to your doctor, don't push yourself past your limit, you should be able to eventually take yourself to the next step. Walking is good, power walking (between walking and jogging) is best. Power walking helps you to lose the weight the fastest, or so I have been told -- it is even better than jogging, and it is easy to do.
Around here, the seniors all go to the enclosed malls early in the morning, sometimes before they open and just walk the entire mall, around and around. I have never seen one huffing and puffing, even the 90 year old ones with several heart operations in their past. They drink coffee and orange juice. If they can do it, then probably so can you, you might want to think about joining them. They are fun to talk to, and you can talk to them while walking (but I notice that they do not talk while walking). After they are done, they like to sit down, talk, and eat a light snack instead of a big breakfast.
Well, that is the best that I can do for you. In my opinion, if you do this, you will slowly lose weight. As you exercise a little more, you should lose a little more weight. Don't be surprised if your body tries to compensate. Sometimes you will lose an ounce of fat and gain two ounces of muscle, and you will think "oh my goodness! I'm gaining weight!" but if you know what you have done, you do not have to worry. That 2 ounces of muscle is going to help you burn the fat better and you don't have to worry about getting rid of that muscle weight!
If you lose 30 pounds of fat and gain 30 pounds of muscle, you might think you have accomplished nothing, but believe me, there is a big difference in your look and health! 30 pounds of muscle increase...maybe that is too much to expect for a while. We must be realistic.
Good luck.
2007-02-28 03:35:03
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answer #9
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answered by Shawn D 3
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