Rapid Weight Loss

Can you really achieve rapid weight loss? The reply is yes, but towards be the greatest long term answer. You might have maybe seen examples of this on the Biggest Loser TV show.

What most people don't understand is what the contestants put their bodies through to have such dramatic results in a short time of time. The outcomes seen on the program are not an illusion, but not realistic for most of us in real life who have multiple daily responsibilities.

However, if you are seeking safe, realistic results, they may be obtained by incorporating the following suggestions.

Focus on Your Diet

To ensure that you to achieve rapid weight loss, your diet must be impeccable! Not only must you avoid the obvious bad foods such as: fried foods, cakes, cookies, ice cream, all desserts, chips, and most processed foods that come in a box or bag.

You must also avoid most beverages and fruits. You shouldn't drink any alcohol, coffee, soda, or fruit juices if you'd like rapid weight loss.

Your beverages should consist of plenty of water throughout out the day (6-8 glasses), and optional green/herbal teas, or low sodium vegetable juices and broths.

Your meals should include one source of protein; preferably lean cuts of chicken or fish in 3 ounce portion sizes, or if you're a vegetarian substitute tofu or natto for meat.

Eggs are another great source of protein you could include in your meals. You should limit your carbohydrate intake to just vegetables and these should be contributed to each meal.

Avoid starchy vegetables like peas, carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, or corn and rapid weight loss will be easier.

Instead, focus on green vegetables. Also, consider adding a small portion of raw veggies to each meal, but avoid commercial salad dressings.

For dressings use 1 tablespoon of olive oil and fresh lemon juice. Your meals really should not be spaced more than 4-5 hours apart and be sure to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

If you skip meals or wait longer than 5 hours to eat, your metabolism will slow which will make rapid weight loss hard.

You Must Exercise Daily

The other important consideration for rapid weight loss is exercise. When you have watched the Biggest Loser you might have perhaps seen the contestants engage in numerous physical challenges and exercise sessions.

What you don't know, is the contestants spend hours every day working out. You probably don't have more than an hour of free time to exercise everyday so you'll want to concentrate on high intense workouts if you need rapid weight loss.

Your workouts should include a mix of cardiovascular conditioning exercises along with resistance training exercises.

All very reputable weight lifting exercises to perform are those that use your body weight as resistance such as: push ups pull ups, squats, lunges, dips, planks, crunches and bridges.

The reason these exercises some others other movements is they require more balance and coordination, resulting in more calories burned. Also, these exercises usually tend to significantly raise your heart rate.

In between performing body weight exercises, add a short bout of cardiovascular exercise such as: jogging in place, jump rope, stepping along on a stair/bench, running on a treadmill, riding a stationary bike or using an elliptical trainer. The key to your exercise sessions is intensity.

Try to keep your heart rate up and avoid long breaks in between exercises looking for rapid weight loss.

Rapid weight loss is not hard nor is it suggestible. However, if you're diligent about your diet and you include high intensity workouts daily you can achieve your goal.

Remember, as well as advisable to check with a physician before beginning any weight loss routine, especially if you're focused on rapid weight loss.

Instant Weight Loss - Fact Or Fallacy?

Instant weight loss - now there's a phrase to strike joy in a girl's mind. Such a lovely word instant and when applied to losing weight it conjures up images of quick, effortless, easy weight loss. All those things that we dream that losing weight can be, but never is.

When I was in my teens and early twenties, my girlfriends and I had a diet we called "The Skinny By Saturday Night". Whatever calorific sins had been committed in the last weekend, come Monday morning all would be forgiven and we would be assured of fitting back into our favorite skintight (think lying on the bed with coat hangers wrenching the zip up) jeans by Saturday night, providing we adhered to the basic principles of the diet - nothing but black coffee and cigarettes.

Yes, I can hear the collective groans and gasps of shock, but remember this is extremely popular time when smoking was not considered the death sentence it is these days, and was certainly not something that banished a person to social obscurity and condemnation because it is now. We were also of that age where things like wrinkles, poor health and death were things that happened to our grandmothers, and not our ten-foot-tall and bullet-proof young selves.

So coffee and cigars for a week it was, and the weight literally fell off us. Somehow we never noticed, the tiredness, crankiness and crappy skin that went along with it, and if we had, we still wouldn't have cared.

Then as we got older, wiser and more educated on what was and wasn't good for our bodies, something awful happened (or maybe it was a very important thing), we realized that we couldn't lose weight instantly anymore, and that even if we replaced the coffee and smokes with lettuce and mineral water, the weight would cling stubbornly to our thighs and butts in ways it never had before.

So what happened? Well there are various reasons why the opportunity to maintain a steady weight, much less lose any excess, does decline with age, but usually the one that affects those like my friends and I who used extreme forms of dieting when we were younger, is the effect it has had on our metabolism.

Bodies are built for survival and when we starve ourselves; our body thinks there exists a famine coming and slow down the rate at which it burns food so that you can preserve energy. It learns to live on the lesser amount it is receiving. That really was a great mechanism for our ancestors; however, for us it's not at all so good. When we start to eat normally, our body is still wired to fear the next famine and so it doesn't speed the metabolism back up and instead stores it up as insurance money for hard times.

Neat little trick huh? You eat the same food that you did prior to your diet, but you put onto weight. Hardly seems fair does it?

So what's the answer? Have we permanently destroyed our metabolism and doomed ourselves to a lifetime wardrobe of elasticized pants? The good thing is that we can reboot our metabolism and turn it back to its normal settings.

Here are a few things start with:

1. Eat small snacks and meals and space them out through the day so that you will eat about every 4-5 hours. This will get your body back into the habit of knowing that it will get enough food and let your catch burn more efficiently.

2. Exercise - you don't need to run marathons but you will should get your heart rate up until you are huffing and puffing a bit. Aim for 30 minutes most days each week.

The most crucial thing is to stop any type of super restrictive diet and to eat sensibly. Your butt will appreciate it and so will your skin.