Lose 30 pounds in 30 days!
Believe it or not, it can be done. There are three different ways I can think of to accomplish this:
1. Dangerously dehydrate yourself
2. Chop off a limb
3. Start off by weighing as much as a Smart Car.
When you dehydrate you end up gaining all the water weight back quickly, of course. That second one involves losing bones and blood and muscles and tendons and doesn't sound pleasant at all. The third is the only one where all the weight that is lost is from fat; and there is an example of this actually happening.
I saw a video on CNN that showed how a guy lost 237 pounds in seven months. That's over a pound a day. This actually happened, but the guy started out at 640 pounds. He still weighs around 400 and needs to lose another 200 to get to a healthy weight level. I can guarantee that those next 200 pounds will come off a lot slower than the first 200 did.
Extremely obese people can handle rapid weight loss because they were taking in such massive amounts of extra calories in the first place that putting them on a regular caloric intake makes it possible to lose a pound a day. This is coupled with the fact that a 640 pound guy has an incredibly high resting metabolic rate.
For people who need to lose 40 pounds instead of 400, there is no way we can lose weight that fast. Besides, people who attempt rapid weight loss usually fail. The secret to success is slow and steady.
There are innumerable weight loss books and products available that claim you can lose large amounts of fat in a short period of time. I'll withhold names and titles to protect the guilty and just report on a very popular diet book that claimed one of their subjects went from 220 pounds to 190 pounds in six weeks. Let's run the numbers on that:
* 30 pounds of fat = 105,000 calories
* 105,000 calories in 42 days = a 2,500 calorie deficit per day
If we assume an average sedentary 220 pound guy has a Total Daily Energy Expenditure of about 2,800 calories a day (the quick method of calculating TDEE for a sedentary person is body weight in pounds X 13), we could restrict him back to 2,000 calories a day by instantly giving him a very healthy and fat-reduced diet. He'd still be hungry, but let's take that out of the equation, and we can't go any lower than that or he may go into starvation mode where the metabolism slows down significantly. This still leaves another 1,700 calories a day that would need to be burned via added activity. This would be the equivalent of him running about eight miles followed by an hour of intense weight training, every day. All told he would run 56 miles a week, plus do seven hours of weight training a week.
Riiiiggghhttt...
This doesn't even take into account that his metabolism is going to start slowing down both due to the weight loss and due to an increase in efficiency. By the way, the book doesn't recommend an exercise regimen nearly as rigorous as what I outlined above. Therefore, the author sucks at math.
The same book also stated you can burn off 12 pounds of fat (from your belly first – they claim) in two weeks or less. Even if we give them the full two weeks it means a 3,000 calorie per day deficit. You already know that's impossible, but what is also impossible is to control where you lose the weight from. Your body decides where the weight will come off, and you have no say in the matter. For men, the gut is going to be the last place you lose weight. That's why you have to get to a very low level of body fat in order to see your abdominal muscles. Have you ever seen a guy with a fat ass and washboard abs?
So what is possible? For a person who is not seriously obese, losing even two pounds of fat a week is ambitious; one pound a week is more reasonable. Remember, when it comes to getting in shape, there is no quick, and there is no easy. There is only long, and hard.
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