How Long Does It Take To Lose Weight?
“If you ask me “how long does it take to lose weight?” I would have to answer you with, “Well, how long is a piece of string?”
Now, I’m not being a smart Alec. Your question is so vague it is not possible to give an exact answer. For a start it helps to know how much weight you want to lose, and what your body weight is right now. And a nutritionist or medical doctor would probably want to know your age, your height, your body-shape, your B.M.I.*, your eating and grazing habits and your lifestyle before even attempting some kind of assessment.
So I will be bold and tell you outright. If you were to go into hospital today and be placed in a bed with a “nil by mouth” instruction for the nursing staff, then you would begin losing weight at about two pounds per day. But ‘nil by mouth’ means nothing to eat or drink. In hospital, they put you on a drip. Fluids are fed in through a cannula in your arm or in the back of your hand (that’s usually saline solution) and a catheter to drain your urine out so they can measure the quantity. That’s so the doctors know you are not dehydrating.
If you go on a very strict low-calorie, low-carb weight loss diet, you can still have three moderate meals a day – with no snacks in between meals – and just water or herbal tea to drink. Do that, and you will start to lose weight at a similar rate … that is up to 2 pounds (1 Kilogram) of weight loss per day.
Weight loss diets that will do this for you – as long as you can stick to the plan and not “bust’, include the food plans from F.A., from F.A.A. or from CEA-HOW. All of them are 12 Steps groups for people who have trouble controlling their food and their eating habits. All of these eating plans tell you to cut out alcoholic drinks and caffeine. (Booze contains calories and caffeine increases your appetite.) Then you also have to cut out foods which contain added sugar or flour, because these common food additives also make us want to eat more. Why else would food manufacturers delight in adding all kinds of sugars and flours to their packaged foods? Because it increases their profits.
But what’s good for the food corporations’ wealth is bad for our health. If they can keep us addicted to their foods, we just keep getting fatter and sicker. We need to break out of that vicious cycle if we’re going to get better and have decent health once again.
If a super-strict weight-loss diet is not for you, it is well worth joining up with Weightwatchers or a similar weight-loss program. They have a whole line of aids and products to help you, and they have their own line of food on sale in the supermarkets which makes it easy to keep track of your food consumption and calories in a diary.
Everything is horses for courses, so what suits you will not necessarily be what works for the next person. But that’s okay.
So before you can figure out how long it takes to lose weight, you need to see a doctor and work out what your ideal weight should be. Then you know how many pounds or kilos you need to lose. Then you need to find a group who will support you and help you stick with the weight loss food plan that will bring your weight down to a number that’s healthy and right for you.
How long does it take to lose weight? I will tell you straight. It takes as long as necessary; but the whole trick is to stay on your food plan. Don’t stop when you reach your ideal weight. Make some sensible adjustments, and don’t binge, and you can stay slim and trim.`
*BMI is a measure of the ratio of fat in your body. It’s your body mass index.
Types of Weight-Loss Diet
There are so many types of weight loss diets on offer, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with the choices available to you.
I feel that most loss diets for losing weight are mere fads. They are rolled out by some high-profile author or other personality, they achieve publicity and gain a following for a while. And eventually they become just another diet plan.
The problem with any diet plan is our own mentality – our expectations. When we go on a diet., we all do the diet plan, fully expecting that we’ll be allowed to go off that diet after a fixed number days or weeks.
A diet isn’t a prison sentence, folks. If you go off the diet, the chances are that you’re going to want to reward yourself for all the hard work and deprivation you feel you’ve undergone to be good… to lose a few inches and shed a few pounds or kilos.
The moment you reward yourself with those snacks or naughty foods that you crave, your body is going to put back all the weight you just lost. And what’s more, it usually adds a few more inches and pounds than when you started.
Why does your body do this? It’s a survival mechanism built in by Mother Nature, whether we like it or not.
While we were being oh so good and losing weight on the crash diet, our body was going into a starvation/survival mode because it thinks there’s no food available. It acts like you are experiencing a famine, just like those starving kids in Africa or other 3rd World countries that we see on the news.
So our bodies burn up some fat as fuel to provide us with the energy to get through our days of low-calorie or low-carb eating. Then, the minute we jump back on the food wagon and eat the goodies we crave, our bodies say “Whoopee!” and store away as much fat as they can — as insurance — to try and keep us alive through the next “famine” that comes along.
You and I gained those extra pounds slowly, over a matter of months or years. If we can lose them slowly as well, then we will have the best chance of not just losing weight but keeping it off as well.
Next, we can take a look at some lo-carb diets.