HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT FAST

How do I lose weight fast?

That’s a good question. Many OMYs have asked me to address this and the two following issues:

Fasting to lose weight?

Losing weight without exercising?

Before I dive into these issues, here’s a reading assignment:

1. WEIGHT LOSS THE OMY WAY.
2. DIET OMYGOALS AND PURPOSEFUL EATING.
3. OMYFAST AND “FASTING”.

If you’ve already read these, it’s OK. If you haven’t, they’re worth your time. See, I’ve talked a lot about diets, but not specifically about weight loss. This post will be about losing weight.

First Things First:

Photo by AllGo – An App For Plus Size People on Unsplash.

OK, Let’s Talk About Fasting First:

How to Lose weight fast? The most effective and easiest way is to stop eating and only drink water. Cold turkey – nothing to do, no special foods, and no eating schedule. This food abstinence will work.

The problem is, this diet can only be short-term if even that. Two things will happen here that you don’t want. First, your body will quickly run short of water-soluble nutrients. Second, your metabolism will slow down, and when you start eating again, you’ll probably be over-eating and gain back the weight you lost.

There are many good things about fasting, but weight loss is not one of them. It’s not sustainable and potentially dangerous. I fast for three days on occasion, and I don’t lose weight when I do. I will not fast longer than three days, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone else do it either.

So, I’m ruling out anything more than a 24 hour fast as a reliable weight-loss method.

Weight Loss and Exercise:

Exercise is good for you, and there’s no doubt about this. Here are some examples using a 120-pound woman and a 180-pound man.

ACTIVITY	120 lb. Woman	180 lb. Man
Walking	120	180
Jogging	222	333
Swimming	144	216
Skipping Rope	342	513
Weight Training	150	225

Information source: https://www.infofit.ca/calorie-burn-chart/

It looks like skipping rope wins the calorie-burning prize. It seems as if doing 30 minutes of this every day would help you lose a little short of a pound a week. 3600 calories is a pound of fat. There’s no doubt that skipping rope thirty minutes a day is good for you, but it’s not an effective weight loss technique.

You could accomplish the same thing – or even better – by passing up a slice of extra cheesy pizza every day.

So, while exercise is good for you, it’s not an effective way to lose weight. Exercise and fasting are in the same weight-losing boat. Lots of effort, slight return.

OK, How About Dieting?

Well, let’s see, a pound of fat has 3600 calories, and two pounds is 7200 calories. So, it looks as if cutting your calories by 1000 per day will earn you a net loss of two pounds a week. Simple math, right?

So, herein comes the rub. Based on simple math, if you’re a 140-pound woman who wants to take off 20 pounds in a month and get in that summer beach outfit, you’re going to have to stop eating altogether:

Here’s the math:

20 pounds of fat is roughly 72,000 calories. A 140-pound woman who is moderately active burns about 2000 to 2500 calories per day. We’ll take the mean here and settle on 2250 calories burned per day.

But 72,000 divided by 2250 is 32 (slightly more than a month), which means that our “average” woman, even if she eats nothing, can’t lose 20 pounds in a month. It works the same with men; the numbers are bigger, but after adjustments, the percentages work out the same.

So, What To Do?

First, the overall answer is that rapid fat loss is mainly wishful thinking for most people. It is reasonable to set a goal to lose two pounds a week from your baseline weight. This amount is healthy and doable.

Typically, you should take weight loss in the first week lightly. Much of this loss will be from water. The more overweight you are, the more water you will lose. So please don’t count the first week as a standard; it will leave you disappointed in the second week.

Let’s say you want to lose fifty pounds, and more importantly, you want to keep it off. OK, we will accept that two pounds a week of fat loss is our goal. We are not, however, going to count calories.

Successfully losing weight involves a lot of strategies. Let’s talk about them in succession.

Mindfulness Focus and Determination – Mental Conditioning Before Starting Your Diet:

The first step in losing weight and keeping it off is freezing a picture in your mind. You won’t make it to fifty pounds without a deep commitment shored up by mental support pictures and “stop” commands.

The first step in your diet is to take a full-body selfie of yourself in your birthday suit, front, sides, and back. This photo set is your “I don’t wanna look like this anymore” mental image that you review daily. Look at it every day when you get up, and before you eat anything – burn it into your brain.

Create a losing weight vow. As you look at your selfies, say your vow over and over. Say it before you eat anything. Drown yourself in your vow, and punish yourself if you break it by cheating on your diet. Deny yourself something you enjoy. At the same time, reward yourself when you make your weekly goal.

This visualizing is mental conditioning. In essence, you’re making yourself feel guilty or even stupid for breaking your vow – I know this works; it’s how I quit smoking. Read about it here: SETTING UP YOUR PERSONAL OMYZONE. Under Be Honest With Yourself.

Mental conditioning before starting a weight-loss diet is the most important step – work hard at getting mentally prepared for the challenge you’re about to face.

Weight Loss Week One – Weigh in Sunday Morning

Start your losing weight diet after your weigh-in Sunday morning. Get up, no clothes, urinate, drink a glass of water, and weigh yourself. These steps will be your weigh-in routine from now on. Do not weigh in during the week; your weight will fluctuate day by day, which will be discouraging.

Your first diet-week weigh-in will reflect both fat and water loss. Keep this in mind because your following week’s weigh-ins will be primarily fat loss. So if you lose six pounds the first week and two pounds the second week, don’t be discouraged.

Checklist:

Week One:

1. Stop eating junk food – period! This will be hard at first, but once you stop, you won’t miss it at all. This is the first test of your losing weight will and committment. Repeat your vow every time you yearn for your favorite junk food.
2. Eat whatever you want, but do not eat after six o’clock in the evening, and don’t eat anything before six the following morning. This gives you a twelve hour fast that’s easy to do.
3. Stop snacking – period! Snacking is the worst thing you can do. Eating a bowl of ice cream before bed is a guaranteed way to get fat. If you’re a before-bed snacker, this one will be tough. Try going to bed earlier and sleeping off the urges. Repeat your vows over and over – fall asleep repeating your vows.

Week Two:

After week one, you’ve grappled with your most formidable demons: Good for you, but don’t forget your vows and know that the monsters are still there, and like all habits, they still have a room in your subconscious mind.

1. Stop eating sugar – period! This means raw table sugar, and foods high in sugar, usually this means sweets like donuts, cookies, pies and cake. Just say no. (Doing this and stopping junk food will, by themselves, promote losing weight.)
2. Add one hour to your overnight fast, don’t eat anything before seven in the morning. You are now fasting thirteen hours a day, and are starting to burn fat. This is important because training your body to burn fat is the key to fat loss with minimal hunger.
3. To counteract hunger, add a tablespoon of oive oil to your meals. This will not make you fatter, because you’ve cut out sweets, and your body can’t convert fat to sugar.

Week Three:

This week will present a challenge to losing weight because we will cut out one meal a day. For most of us, this means breakfast, which we will compensate for with an early lunch.

1. This week, we’re not going to eat until eight in the morning. This will give you a fourteen hour fast that will take you solidly into the fat burning zone. Skpping breakfast might be difficult for some of you, but in order to burn fat, you have to burn up other sources of fuel first. Eating less in the first place and fasting are the only two ways to do this.
2. Start eating a small meal at dinnertime. Cut your normal portions by a third. Lunch should become your meal of the day. At dinner focus on more protein, and lots of vegetables to fill you up. Stay away from bread of any type – bread is sugar in another form.

Week Four and Onward:

Well, we’re pretty much where we want to be from now until the fifty pounds are gone. We will continue to shorten our eating window until we only eat six hours a day. This level of restriction gives eighteen hours of fasting every day and a whole lot of fat burning. The eighteen hours must be consecutive. Eating anything between these hours will kick you back out of fat burning.

You can eat as much as you want on this diet (especially fats and protein), as long as you observe the restrictions I set up – especially sweets and junk food. Once you adapt, you should not be hungry losing weight on this eating regimen. Yes, it takes discipline to get to this point, but it is possible.

Don’t forget your vow. Repeat it over and over to drive temptation out of your mind. Remind yourself that if you break your vow, you will only be satisfied temporarily, and in the long run, you’ll feel bad and be angry with yourself.

Keeping It Off:

For many people, this is the hardest part. I suggest you make a new vow and internalize it like you made your losing weight vow. Also, put your “before” picture in a place where you can see it every day – maybe the screen saver on your personal computer. This picture might be embarrassing to you, but you need to see it over and over and say to yourself, “never again, never.”

OMY1

Final TIP: Continue weighing in every Sunday morning. If you gain more than five pounds, immediately switch back to your eating restrictions and take the weight back off. Remember, when losing weight, It’s easier to take off five pounds than to let things go and face an even bigger project. Keep your vows in mind.

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