How To Lose Weight in a Week

Your high school reunion is only a week away but you are still five pounds short of being able to zip your dress. Can anyone really tell you how to lose weight in a week? Doesn’t weight loss have to be gradual to be ‘real’?

The truth is, you can lose quite a bit of weight in a week if you set your mind to it. Sure, a good portion of that weight will be ‘water’ or bloat, but water weighs something. Water is genuine weight, and five to eight pounds gone is five to eight pounds gone no matter what those pounds are made from.

Here are some effective ideas for how to lose weight in a week. Before embarking on any of them, it’s a good idea to run your plans past your doctor, just to be safe. Also, don’t stick with any of these ideas for more than two weeks at the most. Weight loss is good, but too much rapid weight loss can lead to health problems and can even make your body hoard calories.

• The protein diet. Restrict yourself to high quality protein like broiled fish, chicken, beef, or lean pork and green leafy vegetables. You can use a bit of olive oil or butter if you need it, and a little vinegar and oil dressing for the greens. No starch, no dairy, no sugar, no fruit. You’ll lose between 5 and 10 pounds easily the first week. Drink lots of water while you are doing this to flush out toxins and keep the weight coming off.
• The liquid diet. Have a canned diet shake for breakfast and another for lunch, and then eat a serving of lean meat and lots of green salad or vegetables for dinner, plus lots of water. This will also take off five to ten pounds the very first week. If you continue this plan past a week, your weight loss will slow.
• Fast, eat, fast. Most people who live in Europe and the Americas think of fasting as something religious or negative, but many Eastern countries have fasting traditions that are based on health and wellness. Most people can safely fast for a day at a time. Drink fruit or vegetable juice and lots of water on your fast days. On the next day, restrict yourself to fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, and lean meats and fish.
• The Cabbage Soup Diet. This diet is actually a variation on the first three suggestions. You cook up a big pot of cabbage soup that is mostly comprised of low calorie vegetables in tomato juice, and you get to add specific foods on specific days. The soup you can eat whenever you want. You can only safely be on this diet for seven days, but in seven days you will lose a lot of weight.
None of these diet plans are a good idea for any length of time, but any one of them will help you to lose five to ten pounds in just one week. Once you know how to lose weight in a week, you can keep that as a tool to use in emergency situations. (Like high school reunions!) So long as you don’t become obsessed with crash dieting and find yourself on a constant stream of weird diets, there’s no real harm in losing weight in a week.