No More Diets

How Do I Lose Weight Quickly for the Summer?

The quickest way to lose weight is to eat a very low calorie diet - that’s the principle behind the kind of diets where you eat very little real food and have some kind of special drink, soup or bar instead of a real meal.

I don’t recommend this though.

Why not?

1. Although some people find that having a rigid regime makes things easier (there’s no doubt about what you can and can’t eat), most people find sticking to this kind of plan exceedingly difficult especially with a normal work, family and/or social life. Plus you have to contend with the hunger caused by eating such a small volume of food.

2. This kind of plan is definitely a short term thing - it’s not something you can do for life (or would want to). It’s just not healthy. So what happens after you lose the weight? You go right back to eating how you were before and put the weight straight back on (nothing more heart-breaking than that, is there?)

3. A very low-calorie diet tends to affect your metabolism. Your body goes into fat conservation mode for self-protection. Plus you tend to lose muscle as well as fat on a very low calorie diet - the muscle which burns calories even when you are resting. The result is that when you go back to eating normally you gain weight faster than you ever thought possible.

4. In using a very low calorie plan you are not learning how to stay slim. You are not learning how to eat moderate quantities of delicious healthy food and enjoy it. You are not learning new eating habits. You will be going on and off diets for the rest of your life.

You might decide (as 95% of the population do) that you still want to diet (and diet to lose weight as fast as possible) and that you’ll deal with the maintenance issue once you’ve got rid of the weight.

Believe me, it just doesn’t happen like that. Unless you learn new habits - new habits you are willing to stick with for the rest of your life, you will not maintain any weight you manage to lose.

Changing your habits doesn’t happen over night in the same way as you can eat cabbage soup for a week and lose a few pounds. It takes about 21 days to make a habit stick.

But the effects are cumulative as you change each habit and they last and last….

….long after the point where you would be starting to turn green and feel sick at the thought of another bowl of cabbage soup or a strawberry meal replacement milk shake (probably within a week or two if you’re like most people)…..

….long after the point where you would feel the misery of your clothes getting tighter yet again (within a month of stopping your diet) ….

long after the point where you are searching around for yet another solution.

By changing your habits consistently one by one at a pace you can live with you will still be enjoying delicious food, great health and a slim body long after all those people on a diet are pinching their extra inches. You will be just like your slim friends - after all you have the same habits as they do.

And that’s not just for this summer but next summer and every summer afterwards.