How to Lose 10 pounds in a week – Step by Step – Day 1
Back on June 19, 2014 I wrote in my notes:
“As of this morning, close to 7 full days, I am down from from 208.5 to 199.0 lbs, just a half pound shy of 10 pounds.
I believe that by tomorrow morning which will be after a full seven days, I will have hit 198.5, at least, and met the 10 pound loss goal.
Yes, yes, yes, I am frustrated that I even got up to 208.5.
And if you are anything like me, you have experienced the same roller coaster for many years.
We cannot though spend time being frustrated and not taking action.
I know the exact actions that I took which brought me down from 275lbs to 175lbs over the course of 10 months between 2012 and 2013.
I am grateful that at 199lb, it is a much better starting point than 275lbs.
That is a significant head start compared to where I started in 2012.
What have I learned along the way?
Once a person reaches their goal weight, be very careful in maintenance.
Stick with the fundamentals that got us to the goal and keep setting better goals in fitness so as not to become complacent.
Frankly, I never thought of writing a post on how to lose 10 pounds in a week.
However, I have to tell you my own experience just so for those of you who are searching and struggling with weight loss, at least you can know that there is someone out there who understands and who has seen himself the results of eating real food and doing small amounts of weight training and the big results that yields.
First, what is the problem?
The problem is obesity. If you are happy with your body shape, how you fit in clothes, how fit you feel, then you do not need to even think about how to lose 10 pounds in a week.
If you have been struggling with how to lose a pound in 10 years, then this is the post for you.
I am sure that you know people who constantly speak about food and weight loss.
I know.
I grew up like that.
My first meal was a weight watcher pizza muffin.
The first food that I can recall from my childhood was a weight watcher pizza.
My parents were on weight watchers.
Their friends were on weight watchers.
The rest of my family, uncle, aunt, cousin, they too were on weight watchers.
It was an endless seesaw between eating food and losing weight, eat, feel guilty, gain weight, hear the remarks, “oh, you put on some weight”, feel guilty, eat out of guilt, try to lose weight on weight watcher or other diets, and basically fail.
Recently, I had a call from a childhood friend who told me that he is still in his food addiction.
He was usually hovering between 250 and 300lbs, was on weight watchers and every other diet regimen that you have heard of, to no avail.
And being a man, he is embarrassed to talk to doctors about it or even contemplate that he might have an eating disorder, something which usually brings to mind a woman with anorexia.
There are other eating disorders like bulimia, compulsive overeating, binge eating, non purging bulimic that might have fit the bill with him, but he is not going to get professional help because he is ashamed to even talk to a doctor about it.
Believe me, I am not judging him.
I feel powerless to help him because he is convinced that the only way to lose weight is to read a new book or try a new diet.
Forget learning how to lose 10 pounds in a week, how about being able to lose 10 pounds over 10 years? If you are reading this, you might be a person who has been trying to lose any pounds over years, even decades.
I myself am the one who has struggled with this nonsense for so long, way too long.
It has been an albatross on my neck, it has affected my life in so many negative ways that if I can help just one other person besides myself, to turn it around, I would be ecstatic.
Because I know how good I have felt when I had it under control as well.
Of course, first I have to help myself, and that is why I am going to write this post how to lose 10 pounds in a week step by step, day by day.
You know the difficulties.
Obesity, not fitting into your clothes, wearing baggy sweaters, wearing sizes that are too small for you, trying too many diets.
We become the laughing stock of our families of friends, I know I have, so I assume that there are some other people on the planet who are facing the same challenge.”
Shocking – Very Little Progress!
Five months ago I wrote those notes of how to lose 10 pounds in a week, and I am still only 5 pounds down from my starting point of 208.5lbs.
That stinks frankly.
I am fairly exasperated, but I am not going to give up.
I am going to be very transparent here because the whole point of this blog is to say it like it is and provide you with the information necessary to lose body fat, to build muscle, no matter where you are on your fitness journey.
I have really struggled the last year and a half to maintain my initial loss of 75 pounds down to 175 from 250 pounds.
I have struggled for decades but I will not use any excuses
As of today, I am going to start fresh and move forward.
My goal is 32 inch waist, so I have approximately 30 pounds to deal with.
If I let myself get totally frustrated, then I might end up having more junk food and gaining more weight.
So, no thanks.
I have a plan and my committment is to write about it every single day until I reach my goal.
I am not sure how much my weight loss has to be in order to reach a 32 inch waist, and I am not sure what the percentage fat loss has to be, I am guessing about 20% body fat and a weight of about 180 pounds.
We will find out.
I am the ultimate weight loss yo yo , up and down for so many years, but this morning I had the thought of committing to writing the facts every day to keep me in line.
Eighteen months ago, when I was a 31 inch waist and about 175 pounds, I stopped writing frequently.
My excuse was that I was embarrassed when I was screwing up.
I started to socialize a bit more with my new found slimness and as a result, after a slice of bread here and a slice there, before I knew it, it turned into an oreo here and then a snicker bar there, and I did not closely monitor what was happening.
It was as if I was high on reesee’s peanut butter cups and did not want to see the truth that I was losing all of my gains.
So this is my idea to keep at this every morning until I get to where I want to be, to record everything and my hope is that once I reach my first goal of a 32 inch waist, then I am going to take on a new goal and maintain the first one.
I have to be able to learn to socialize and celebrate with friends and family and not let it turn into a gain of 20 or 30 pounds.
So let me thank you in advance for reading and I hope that you will leave some comments of support or your own ideas.
By the end of this first phase, we are going to know exactly how to lose 10 pounds in a week or 20 pounds in a month or 30 pounds in 3 to 6 months.
If it takes six months, then so be it. I cannot know the time frame for sure, but I can know what the goal is and the committment to reach it.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The Good – Starting weight of 203.9 pounds and not 275 pounds where I was just a few years ago.
The Bad – Starting weight of 203.9 pounds after having been at 175 pounds only 18 months ago.
The Ugly – 43.5 inch waist today after having been at 31 inch waist only 18 months ago.
Whew.
Alright, no time for self pity, time to get to work!
Here is where I am starting as of today on Tuesday, October 21, 2014:
43.5 inches with a measuring tape over the navel. Oh boy, that was a shock.
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Here is the plan, very succinctly:
How to Lose 10 Pounds in a Week Program
What to eat:
Fruit, Vegetables, some nuts, some protein, oatmeal, quinoa, brown rice, either whey, eggs, veggie burgers, tofu, meat, fish or chicken, sprouted whole grain bread.
What to drink:
Water, water and water. Some dry red or white wine if you like.
Exercise:
60 minutes of walking or elliptical a day at a moderate pace of 3 miles per hour.
or 30 minutes of walking or elliptical a day
or 20 minutes of elliptical interval training which means, go slow a couple of minutes and then pick up your pace for 4 minutes, and do that 4 or 5 times.
Shoot for at least 2 miles on the elliptical or treadmill. 3 miles preferably.
Weight Training:
Do pushups every day. Start with 1 and increase from there. Try to add one pushup every day or every week.
Do squats every other day. Same idea, start small and get stronger.
Do deadlifts twice a week.
Along with squats and deadlifts, you can add in other compound movements/fuller body movements like pullups, barbell rows, bench press and shoulder presses.
In all cases, try to keep your weight workout to 30 minutes, and you might have to only do one body part, that is okay.
The point is to be consistent, especially in what you eat.
What Not to Eat or Drink
Sugar, flour and/or processed white flour products.
That is all that you need to know. For Free. No books necessary.
This is what I need to know too!
Keep eating real food and drinking real beverages and taking your walks, lifting your body weight and weights, you will become a new you alot faster than you ever believed possible.
This is how to lose 10 pounds in a week and begin a new life.
How to Lose 10 Pounds in a Week – Day 1 in Practice
Being able to get into shape is not about magical tricks.
I believe that we really have to develop better habits.
For a fast overview, I believe that the best success will come by fostering healthier habits in general, like going to sleep earlier, waking up earlier, drinking more water, moving more, cutting out empty calorie junk foods.
These are all common sense but somehow elude us in our highly commercialized society which markets pure junk food that never existed in real nature in very attractive packaging.
So, to start off today, the first habit that I think is critical has nothing to do with food.
The first habit is to get to sleep earlier than usual.
Last night I shot for 11 and got to sleep at 1130 and was up this morning by 6 am.
My goal with this habit is to fall asleep by 10pm and get up at 6am.
The reasons for getting to sleep early is that we all know that the later that we stay up , we start to get hungry and eating at night is not going to help you lose any weight let alone 10 pounds in a week or even in 10 months.
Today I was up at 6 and was so excited to get writing that I delayed going to the gym to do the elliptical for an hour.
My second habit is to drink water with some lemon squeezed in it after waking up to kickstart metabolism and start off the day with the substance that makes up most of our body which is 70 percent water.
The third habit is to get in exercise early in the morning before going to work so that you have already done the workout.
In order to lose 10 pounds in a week or in a month, we need to change our habits.
So far we have said:
New Habits for Losing Weight, Getting into Shape and Achieving the first Goal of a 32 inch waist
1. Sleep early and wake up early – Early to Bed, Early to Rise, makes a Man Healthy, Wealthy and Wise as it has reportedly been said by Benjamin Franklin.
The benefits of sleep to help you lose body fat and gain muscle. At first glance, we might not consider sleep an important weapon in the arsenal of fast fat loss. But check this out, when your body is under stress, and who’s is not, your body increases it’s production of adrenaline to release fatty acids into your bloodstream to be used for energy. If we do not use up all of the energy that was delivered for our perceived emergency, we have another hormone which is released by the adrenal glands called cortisol. The purpose of cortisol is to manage those fatty acids. Cortisol takes the unused fatty acids and deposits them in your fat cells, and according to some studies, directly in your belly as reported in the following Yale Study:
Stress May Cause Excess Abdominal Fat In Otherwise Slender Women, Study Conducted At Yale Shows
Cortisol affects fat distribution by causing fat to be stored centrally—around the organs. Cortisol exposure can increase visceral fat—the fat surrounding the organs—in animals. People with diseases associated with extreme exposure to cortisol, such as severe recurrent depression and Cushing’s disease also have excessive amounts of visceral fat.
note how severe recurrent depression is associated with extreme exposure to cortisol and the resulting excessive amounts of visceral fat, usually on the hips for a woman and slathered over the belly for a man.
“Everyone is exposed to stress, but some people may secrete more cortisol than others, and may secrete cortisol each time they face the same stressor,” Epel adds. “We predicted that reacting to the same stressors consistently by secreting cortisol would be related to greater visceral fat.”
After the first exposure to stress, women with greater abdominal fat felt more threatened by the study’s stressful tasks, performed more poorly on them, and secreted more cortisol. They also reported more life stress. By the third exposure to stress, the lean women with abdominal fat still consistently secreted more cortisol in response to stressful lab tasks, compared to women with peripheral fat.
“It is possible that greater exposure to stressful conditions or psychological vulnerability to stress has led them to overreact to stressors in their daily lives, so they have had greater lifetime exposure to cortisol,” Epel said. “Cortisol, in turn may have caused them to accumulate abdominal fat. Genetics, however, also play a role in shaping reactivity to stress, as well as body shape.”
note that cortisol appears to have a preference to deposit excess fatty acids into abdominal fat, which suggests that to achieve a flat stomach and a 32 inch waist, it is critical to reduce cortisol also known as reducing stress, and that is why a great first step is to get good sleep, which is a very easy way to minimize cortisol levels.
Lifestyle and age may also influence levels of abdominal fat. Smoking, alcohol and lack of exercise all contribute to greater abdominal fat. Postmenopausal women tend to carry fat at their abdomen, due to changes in sex hormones. Epel said a healthy lifestyle, including getting enough sleep, exercise and relaxation, may reduce cortisol levels.
“These relationships likely apply to men as well,” Epel said. “However, excess weight on men is almost always stored at the abdomen. On the contrary, in pre-menopausal women, excess weight is more often stored at the hips. Therefore, for women, it is possible that stress may influence body shape more than for men, leading to abdominal fat instead of lower body fat accumulation.”
Elissa Epel’s research team at Yale included Kelly D. Brownell, Ph.D., Jeannette R. Ickovics, Ph.D., Jennifer Bell, and Grace Castellazzo. Other researchers included Bruce McEwen, Ph.D. of the Rockefeller University; Teresa Seeman, Ph.D., of the University of California, Los Angeles; and Karen Mathews, Ph.D. of the University of Pittsburgh.
The study was funded by the MaCarthur Foundation Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health.
Clearly, managing cortisol is key to stripping the layers of body fat from our bodies.
Who does not want to be healthy, wealthy and wise and I would add slim to Ben Franklin’s famous quote!
Sleeping deep and the full amount of time that we need which is typically 8 hours will dramatically reduce cortisol levels and increase human growth hormone which we need to build muscle. The much maligned and neglected sleep is how to lose body fat and gain muscle. What could be simpler than sleeping?
After reading and writing all of these amazing facts about cortisol, stress, human growth hormone and how sleep will improve everything, I am going to really double down on getting to sleep tonight at 10pm, wish me luck because that is so much earlier than anything I have ever been used to.
But that can be a reason that I find it so difficult to get rid of my belly fat.
Even when I was down to 175 pounds, I still could not see my abs, I know they are there, but perhaps I need to reduce cortisol in order to strip the fat dramatically.
2. Drink a tall glass of water after waking up to kick start your digestive system.
3. Get in exercise in the morning, a long walk, treadmill, a swim, elliptical, something where you get moving.
4. Take your weight and waist measurement EVERY day. I know that there are people who say to only do so once a week. I have gone that route. I think that is a big mistake, especially for people who are compulsive overeaters or binge eaters. Perhaps not looking at the scale is great advice for someone who is anorexic, but for someone who wants to see their weight go down to a specific goal and is not anorexic, I believe that keeping daily track is more beneficial than ignoring what is happening. I have made that mistake!
I already took my baseline measurements today:
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5. Have a good breakfast. Here is what I had today:
| Breakfast | Calories | Carbs | Fat | Protein | Chol | Fiber | |
| Alvarado St. Bakery – Sprouted Multi-grain Bread, 2 slice (34g) | 180 | 30 | 1 | 10 | 0 | 4 | |
| Tomato – Tomato, 1 whole, medium | 15 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | |
| Spinach – Raw, 1 cup | 7 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | |
| Onion – Red, 1 Slice Med 1/8″ Thick | 6 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
| Garlic – Raw, 1 clove | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
| Kirkland – Extra Virgin Olive Oil, 1 Tablespoon | 125 | 0 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
| Pete & Gerry’s – Organic Eggs, 50 g (1 large egg) | 70 | 0 | 5 | 6 | 185 | 0 | |
| Organic – Egg Whites, 3 large egg white (33g) | 51 | 1 | 0 | 11 | 0 | 0 | |
| Tirat Zvi – Thinnies Oven Roasted Turkey Breast, 5 slices (2 oz) | 50 | 2 | 1 | 9 | 20 | 0 | |
| 508 | 39 | 21 | 38 | 205 | 6 |
| Snack | |||||||
| Quaker Oats – Old Fashioned Whole Grain Rolled Oats, 1/2 cup dry (40 g) | 150 | 27 | 3 | 5 | 0 | 4 | |
| Organic Valley – 1% Organic Milk, 1 cup | 110 | 12 | 3 | 8 | 15 | 0 | |
| Crazy Richards – 100% Creamy Peanut Butter, 1 tbsp | 95 | 4 | 8 | 5 | 0 | 2 | |
| Fresh, Raw – Individual Strawberry, 5 strawberry | 20 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | |
| 375 | 48 | 14 | 19 | 15 | 7 |
| Lunch | |||||||
| Organic Valley – 1% Organic Milk, 1 cup | 110 | 12 | 3 | 8 | 15 | 0 | |
| Chobani – Greek Yogurt Simply 100 Black Cherry, 150 g (5.3oz) | 100 | 15 | 0 | 12 | 5 | 5 | |
| Fresh, Raw – Individual Strawberry, 6 strawberry | 24 | 6 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | |
| Crazy Richards – 100% Creamy Peanut Butter, 1 tbsp | 95 | 4 | 8 | 5 | 0 | 2 | |
| STI – G6 Prolific Isolate Chocolate All-Natural Whey Protein, 1 scoop | 100 | 1 | 1 | 24 | 1 | 0 | |
| Add Food | 429 | 38 | 12 | 50 | 21 | 8 |
How to Lose 10 Pounds in a Week Snack 1 Day 1
How to Lose 10 Pounds in a Week Final Table for Day 1
