There are some easy diets that work fast. But in order to find them, you will have to wade through an awful lot of misinformation and fad diets that have the potential to lead you straight off the deep end. The most common approach to weight loss tends to be to try and figure out whatever seems to be the quickest way to lose weight and run with it full-steam for just a few weeks. After those first few weeks, the average dieter will abandon all hope and go right back to their previous lifestyle, even if they were succeeding on their diet!
The reason for this is predictable: dieting sucks. And diets for quick weight loss tend to be even worse, because in order to lose weight quickly you are going to have to seriously deprive your body of calories. That usually means depriving yourself of nutrients, which usually results in very uncomfortable feelings. If you were to continue on the type of diet that relies on severe restriction of nutrients for very long, you would experience a lot of different health problems. But your body is smart enough to not let you do that to it very easily, and so you will experience poor mood, tiredness, and even pain. And cravings. Lots of cravings. No matter what weight loss tips you are following, you can't escape from the bare fact that the body needs nutrients and you will not be happy if you don't get them.
That's why low fat diets are so highly correlated with depression. You need those fats to maintain a healthy level of all the hormones that your body needs to continue functioning at an optimal level. Neurochemicals are no different. When you focus on healthy diets, quick weight loss becomes a more reasonable proposition. Because the body actually does adjust to change pretty quickly. That's why the healthiest diets are also the diets that work the best. You will feel good when you're on them.
Do quick weight loss centers work?
Just as there are many people who would like to shed those extra pounds extremely rapidly, there are innumerable dieting centers that will offer to help you with this. The problem of motivation is somewhat addressed in this scenario, because you are offered support from the personnel at the diet center, who will coach you through a variety of ways to cope with feeling awful. But the fact remains that if you are simply restricting your diet, you will feel bad. You need a healthy diet in order to feel energetic and happy, and you will feel the difference very quickly if you begin to reduce the nutrients that you are putting in your body.
Some people do experience success with weight loss centers offering this type of rapid diet service, but the majority of those people will end up putting all the weight back on as soon as they stop paying their monthly or weekly service fee. That is because these types of diets are not sustainable. Often you will have to buy and eat particular foods to get where you want in your program, and what do you suppose will happen when you go back to eating regular food? Will you know exactly what you can and cannot tolerate without accumulating fat? Of course you won't, how could you? All you have learned is how to eat pre-packaged meals. That's not permanent weight loss, it's just a quick fix and a waste of your money.
In my opinion, points systems are equally problematic. They make it very easy to cheat, and very hard to lose weight. Many of these plans promise lifetime results, and lifestyle changes, but the plain fact is that in my experience with people working these types of programs is that it simply doesn't work out that way. Often people counting their "points" don't end up with any real understanding of what foods do cause weight gain and which do not, and so typically end up fatter than they started. That has been my observation.
Does any quick weight loss diets actually work?
In my opinion, this will depend on how much weight you need to lose and it will depend on whether take the time to really try and learn how your body works, rather than following some guru. When you look at the way that the human body actually stores and uses fat, I think that things start to become a little simpler to understand. Because up until that point, you are simply blindly following advice, purchasing meals, and hoping for the best. You may as well be burning incense and chanting.
But when you start to understand the science behind weight loss diets then things become much more readily comprehensible. Because the body does not think in terms of points, but it does respond predictably to the intake of specific nutrients. So your job becomes to understand what it is that each chemical constituent of your food is going to convince your body to do.
Does that mean there is a magic bullet for quick weight loss? I don't know that there is. I do think that there are very specific ways that you can help the process along by manipulating the way that your food affects your hormonal balance. You see, the body's whole decision-making process with regard to gaining and losing fat is controlled by hormones, and the release of those hormones is controlled by the food you eat. So if you are fasting, your hormone balance will be much different than if you have been eating a lot of steak, and that will be much different than if you have been eating a lot of candy. Your body natural adjusts to the types of food that are available.
Also consider this: quick weight loss diets should lead to long-term lifestyle changes
You cannot simply make a quick change to your diet and suddenly reset your whole biological clock. It will not work out for you. What you need is a weight loss program that will give you a quick boost at the beginning that you can then proceed to take advantage of over the long hall. Think of it like rebooting your computer after it has been running for a long time.
You start to experience all kinds of bloating once you have been running machines for a while, because the memory gets all used up. After the reboot, everything feels much leaner and faster. But that is only the case until you have again loaded everything into memory and experienced the leaking of modern complexities. After that, you are stuck in the same position that you started. This is precisely the situation we are trying to avoid.
What you want is a very rapid start to your diet, followed by a transition into a sustainable and long-lasting weight loss diet plan. Don't just look at the quick weight loss methods at the beginning or the long-term weight loss or weight maintenance periods, because none of these individually will get you where you want to go. You have to follow an entire program that leads to lasting lifestyle changes. That's what you call healthy weight loss, not these fad diets like the cabbage soup diet.
You cannot live the way you have been living and be thin. That is a fact, otherwise, you would not be in the position to be dieting in the first place. It is because your overall style of living has led you to a sustained state of weight gain. As long as you continue to live the way you have been living, you will get fatter and fatter. A little break in the middle in which you lose weight quickly is not going to solve the problem.
Beware of fad diets -- use critical thinking
I definitely think it is worth saying a few words here about fad diets, because people tend to react too strongly in both directions to these fast weight loss programs. On the one hand, you have the people that would buy snake oil and who invest themselves into every fad diet that comes along only to wallow in failure a month or two down the road. Then on the other hand you have the people who pride themselves so much on being skeptics that they overlook flaws in the popular wisdom. Case in point is the standard cookie-cutter wisdom about losing weight: eat less and exercise more.
You will find that 9 times out of 10 no sooner with someone decry the horrors of so-called fad diets than they will recite this mantra to you: eat less, exercise more. This is what the news has been telling us for 30 years, what the government has been telling us for 30 years, and even what our doctors have come to tell us (if you remember, this wasn't always what doctors recommended.) And over that time we have heard more and more people decrying our "sedentary lifestyle" and telling us that Americans are fat because we are lazy. But if you actually look at the statistics, over that period of time the rates of exercise have gone up dramatically. People exercise more now than they ever did before, and they are also fatter than ever before. It doesn't add up.
Over the same period of time, the amount of fat that people are consuming has gone down. That's right, we Americans now eat less fat than ever before! And yet we are still more obese (often morbidly obese) than we ever were in the past. How can that be? It is because the conventional wisdom is wrong. You don't have to listen to me, you just have to look at the results. Did people change their behavior? Yes. Did they get fatter or skinnier? Fatter. Well, then, you do the math. The recommendations aren't working. SO what else has happened over that time period? A dramatic rise in the consumption of grain-based foods. Everyone will tell you now that you have to eat whole grains if you want to lose weight. Well, guess what? Same scenario. More whole grains are being eaten than ever before, and people are fatter than ever before.
The moral of the story is that you have to use your own brain to figure out what is the best plan for rapid weight loss -- and it sure isn't weight loss surgery. Evaluate each diet for what it is, rather than what people tell you it is. Some examples:
- Cabbage soup diet - Radical restriction of nutrients. Results: Short-term weight loss accompanied by muscle atrophy and possible blood disorders. Long-term weight gain.
- Cookie diet - You're eating grain pellets that are supposed to be cookies in an attempt to reduce your caloric intake. You might lose a little weight, but you'll also be too hungry for it to last.
- South Beach Diet - This one is actually pretty good, you reduce carb intake, reduce calories, get some good nutrients. This one allows for enough protein that you won't get muscle atrophy, but some of the low-fat stuff can result in excess hunger that leads to failure. Also, there are too many carbs in this diet for some people to be able to lose weight on it.
- Diet pills - There have been all manner of diet pills over the years, and countless dieting failures and even disasters as a result. Most diet pills are nothing but stimulants which artificially suppress your appetite while making your body more prone to stress. The truth is there are some weight loss supplements that can help you lose weight in a natural and healthy way. But there is no such thing as a diet pill that works all by itself. You have to be on a sensible regimen of diet and exercise, and then you have to find a diet pill whose method of action makes sense in the context of your diet program.
You see, this is the thought process you should go through when you evaluate each and every weight loss diet. Are people actually losing weight on it? If so, why? What is going into the body on this diet and what is coming out of the body on this diet. Just be sensible and you'll be losing weight. If you go off track too far, it doesn't matter which direction you go in, you're going to end up disappointed with your weight loss results.
Should you exercise? Absolutely. But when you do, you should focus on fitness above all else, rather than doing things you think are specifically going to make you lose lots of weight. Because studies have shown that people don't burn as many calories as they think they do when they exercise, and then they almost always recoup the lost calories by eating more anyway. But if you focus on getting fit and on becoming more healthy, then you will realize the results you're looking for, which is a healthier and better looking body, a healthier and more reliable heart, and a better overall ability to maintain your internal homeostasis. Don't worry about necessarily losing pounds. Think about more reliable measure of health, like waist to hip ratio, muscle tone, and energy level.
Drink plenty of water, yes, but don't believe it when people tell you you have to drink "lots" of water to lose weight. Think about it for yourself--how does that even make sense? It doesn't, there is simply no physiological reason why drinking more water will cause you to lose more weight. You should absolutely stay hydrated, but unless you have a rare disorder that prevents you from feeling thirst, then you won't need to drink any more water than you are thirsty for. And for crying out loud don't drink fruit juice as though it were a weight loss supplement. It's nothing but sugar water with a couple of vitamins in it.
Quick weight loss tips that work
In my experience the best way to get involved in this type of sustained weight loss program both physically and mentally is to change the way that you think about food. It is easy to go off track in this modern world where you are constantly marketed to, where there is always someone offering you a piece of birthday cake or a tempting dessert or a decadent breakfast. it is very difficult to make the decision that you will not eat these foods, and the only way that I know of to make that easier is to develop a comprehensive worldview that you know is informed by up-to-date and sound knowledge.
This means always staying informed. You have to always be seeking out and absorbing information about how to tweak your dietary intake in order to make it more optimal. In other words, your goal cannot be as simple as quick weight loss: it has to include being as healthy as you can. You must really invest yourself in the idea of being healthier, and happier, and more energetic.
As soon as you make that decision and start to involve yourself in really learning on your own, that is when the healthy choices to avoid fattening foods will become extremely natural for you. You will not have to resist, because you will have created a cognitive context in which you no longer want what that unhealthy food has to offer you. After all, what do these foods give you? They give you an immediate burst of flavor, and a few-second feeling of satisfaction.
Once you have understood and experienced the lasting satisfaction that comes with being a highly energetic and intrinsically fulfilled individual, then you will not have any cravings for those foods because you will prefer your present feeling to the feeling they have to offer you. That is ultimately my main quick weight loss tip: change your frame of mind, and your behavior will change naturally. The main characteristic of easy diets that work fast--and I'm talking about healthy diets for quick weight loss--is that they produce this kind of mental shift because you will feel the differences both physically and emotionally.
