How To Lose Weight In A Week

‘How to lose weight quickly’ diets are all over the media, on television, websites, newsstands, radio, magazines and books.

Most overweight people want to know how to lose weight in a week.  They are, quite rightly, desperate to lose excess weight and will grasp at anything that promises how to lose weight fast.  But many of these “lose weight fast” diets are based on false promises and ill-founded opinions, and can actually be harmful and even counter-productive, leading to greater weight gain!

Here are just some of the myths and misinformation promoted by “quick weight loss” gurus:

Myth:  cut calories to lose weight.
Reality:  cutting calories makes the body think it must preserve fat, and so you put on weight instead of achieving weight reduction.

Myth:  following set menus and eating plans can help lose weight.
Reality:  most diet books and weight loss plans promote set menus of what to eat when.  This never works because food preferences and lifestyles vary so much.  Indeed, by following any kind of set food menus, day in day out, you are more likely to gain weight because you will either go hungry or get too bored with the monotony.  Then when you give up the set menus you will quickly re-gain your weight (and more) as you go back to your old eating habits.

Myth:  eating whole grain and fiber-rich foods is healthy and will help you lose weight.
Reality:  whole grains are no healthier than milled grains, and do nothing to promote good health or help you lose weight.  Furthermore, there is plenty of scientific evidence showing that a high-fiber diet is bad for health.  Fiber robs the body of vitamins and minerals.  This leads to poor nutrition, which in turn prevents safe and healthy weight loss.  We do not need much fiber in our daily diets and getting enough is very easy.  Exhortations to eat more fiber are counter-productive.

Myth:  fruit juice is non-fattening and healthy, as part of a well-balanced diet.
Reality:  drinking fruit juice is more fattening and unhealthier than just about any other kind of food.  Fruit juice gives the body a blast of fructose sugar without being bound up with fiber – this goes straight to body fat giving you quick weight gain, and is much worse for health than even table sugar!

Myth:  you should eat less and exercise to lose weight.
Reality:  The less you eat the more fat you put on because any kind of food restriction makes the body store more fat.  When you exercise more you make yourself feel more hungry and exhausted, and you end up stuffing yourself with junk food which just makes you fatter.  The secret is to exercise the smart way so that you don’t feel hungry and exhausted.

Myth:  drink less water so as to reduce water retention and feel less bloated.
Reality:  you must drink plenty of water to lose water retention (not less!).  When you drink plenty of water the body will “think” it no longer needs to retain water in body tissue, and you quickly lose excess water.

Myth:  a good way to lose weight is to increase your metabolic rate so as to burn fat fast.
Reality:  your heart should sink when you come across such ridiculous notions.  The metabolic rate is nothing more than a set of many different chemical reactions inside the body.  Some of these chemical reactions work faster than others at different times of the day or night depending on a multitude of factors.  In fact, fatter people tend to have higher metabolic rates (i.e. burn fat/energy faster) because of their higher body mass.  To use (or attempt to control) the metabolic rate as a way of losing weight is like using a table-tennis ball to play tennis (impossible!).

How to lose weight in a week is a question many people ask.  And yes, you can lose weight in a week, safely, quickly and easily if you know how.  But 99% percent of dietary advice about how to lose weight quickly is completely wrong.  Worse still, if you don’t do it right, any attempts to lose weight quickly will re-bound and you will end up putting on more weight than before.

You definitely don’t want to lose weight in a week and then put it all back the week after.  Yo-yo dieting ruins your health and prevents weight loss.  You want to lose weight quickly, but permanently.  All human beings are the same biologically.  Therefore there can only be one best way for a human being to lose weight quickly, safely, and permanently. 

In recent years medical research into weight loss has made exciting discoveries and now there is a kind of consensus on the best way for any human being to lose weight safely and quickly.  A key point that has come out of this research is that you gain weight when your hormones are out of balance (not functioning properly) and you lose excess weight when your hormones are in balance.

What makes your hormones go out of balance? Several factors, but by far the biggest factor is the diet. And dairy milk products are increasingly being seen as the biggest dietary cause of hormonal disharmony. It's not the fat in milk that causes weight gain, its the havoc caused by dairy milk to your hormones that causes weight gain.

Keep well,
Russell Eaton
How to lose weight in a week