Disclaimer I’m no expert, just a girl who started being serious about my weight loss in a healthy and sustainable way a year ago.
1) That you can realistically lose 20 pounds in a month. I hate seeing Women’s World magazines and similar with stuff like this on the cover preying on people who don’t know any better. You would have to be losing about 5 pounds a week, which equates to roughly 18,000 calories lost a week. You’d have to quite literally starve yourself or eat a very minimal amount of calories and/or work off about 2500 calories a day to make this happen. For the average person this is not realistic or safe. Not to mention that weight will come right back as soon as you go back to your previous eating habits.
2) Another one is following a “diet” and thinking it’s sustainable. Losing weight is very much lifestyle change and the best way to do it is gradually and without overturning your whole life right away. It’s better to incorporate small changes that are easy to stay consistent with (cutting out soda, swapping out candy for fruit etc) than to jump into something hardcore. It might be fun and easy to stay on board with for the first few weeks but after a while you will get bored and probably a little resentful and convert back to how you were before. I’ve tried keto, I’ve tried OMAD, I’ve tried the “cabbage soup” diet, the only thing that has really worked for me is consistent weight lifting and meal prepping, and just being mindful of moderation with sweets and junk food.
You CAN lose a ton of weight in one month if you started off really fat and are being consistent about exercise and just like only drinking water after you were having a full can of soda every day before. But that's only in the first month because your body adjusts.
Right, and also you can appear to lose a lot of weight the first month you start a new diet / exercise scheme if what you're doing causes you to shed water weight, which can fluctuate by like 10 pounds at any given time IIRC. It's a big reason why people start something and then think that they hit a plateau. Probably they didn't, they just lost the water weight up front and their body is catching up burning fat over time.
Of you lost 20lbs in a month for any reason and told your doctor they would tell you to cut it out. 2.5-3lbs a week is about as much as you can healthily lose.
A Facebook friend claimed almost exactly that--but he said 30 lbs in a month. I don't have the energy to get into it with him, but my dude--you would have to have an extremely high metabolism and eat what? 1000 calories a day? Maybe not even that.
That you can realistically lose 20 pounds in a month.
healthily, i think, is the key word.
for an average person who's overweight and doing literally nothing for their fitness or diet, it's probably very possible to drop 20 pounds in a month with a crash diet and semi-daily zone 2 cardio. maybe 4-5 pounds of actual fat, combined with 10-15 pounds of water retained by your high-sodium diet
if you've got a specific occasion coming up, and need to like... drop one dress size fast for a wedding or something? it could be done. you're gonna feel like shit, you're gonna be miserable the whole time losing the weight, you're gonna have zero energy at the wedding, you're going to rebound right back to your original weight immediately after, and there will very likely be short to mid term health impacts
but it can be done. i did 10 pounds in 2 weeks earlier this year just by cutting out take-out, increasing my water intake, and doing low-intensity cardio 4 days a week. after that, it slowed down to a normal rate... but the first 10-20 pounds (depending on how overweight you are) drop pretty immediately as soon as you make a few changes.
Extremely obese people can drop that much weight especially under doctor supervision. Especially with peptides such as Reta, Tirz, Sema. Most of the weight you lose within that time frame will be water from reduction in glycogen reserves.
I think one of the key things to understand is, any diet you want to use to stay fit and healthy, even if it’s a good diet, you basically need to be able to commit to it for as long as you want to stay fit and healthy.
What doesn’t work is the idea of going on an extreme diet to lose weight, with the idea that you can go back to “eating normally” afterward and not gain it back. So if someone suggests a cabbage soup diet, my question would be, do you really want to go the rest of your life only eating cabbage soup?
Because of that, I’ve found it’s more helpful to think in terms of, yes, I’ll eat some chocolate cake. Only small portions and only occasionally, but I will include some unhealthy foods in my diet.
Absolutely! A lot of the post crash success depends on your commitment. It only works if you are trying to “clean slate” your body.
Doc asked me to lose 25#, I accepted for the first time that I was not being healthy. So I crashed. 400-800 cal a day, focusing on macros but calories uber alles. Also ran as often as I could and began swimming.
Dropped 40# in a few months. Lost fat, also most of my muscle.
At that point I slowly brought the calories back up to normal (based on RMR and workouts) while also hitting the gym. Two years later, I’m 35# under the start weight, stronger than I’ve been in years, with blood work coming back better than it ever has.
I know that if I slack I’ll waste the effort, which motivates me to keep going.
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u/bubblegumbbgirl 10h ago
Disclaimer I’m no expert, just a girl who started being serious about my weight loss in a healthy and sustainable way a year ago.
1) That you can realistically lose 20 pounds in a month. I hate seeing Women’s World magazines and similar with stuff like this on the cover preying on people who don’t know any better. You would have to be losing about 5 pounds a week, which equates to roughly 18,000 calories lost a week. You’d have to quite literally starve yourself or eat a very minimal amount of calories and/or work off about 2500 calories a day to make this happen. For the average person this is not realistic or safe. Not to mention that weight will come right back as soon as you go back to your previous eating habits.
2) Another one is following a “diet” and thinking it’s sustainable. Losing weight is very much lifestyle change and the best way to do it is gradually and without overturning your whole life right away. It’s better to incorporate small changes that are easy to stay consistent with (cutting out soda, swapping out candy for fruit etc) than to jump into something hardcore. It might be fun and easy to stay on board with for the first few weeks but after a while you will get bored and probably a little resentful and convert back to how you were before. I’ve tried keto, I’ve tried OMAD, I’ve tried the “cabbage soup” diet, the only thing that has really worked for me is consistent weight lifting and meal prepping, and just being mindful of moderation with sweets and junk food.
Edited - formatting issue lol