Trying to lose the last 10 Pounds? Join my 10 in 10 Challeng

Hello there!

I have been using MFP for a while but have not utilized the community message board until now. So just to introduce myself, I am trying to lose those last stubborn ten pounds in time for my wedding in three months. I have been plateauing for a while so I thought I'd get a new kickstart by starting a challenge with others in my place. My goal is to lose ten pounds in ten weeks (essentially one pound per week) and hit my overall goal on 9/19. I would like to have everyone check each Monday starting this Monday, 7/11.

*This is not meant to be a competition, but instead a supportive and motivational group*

Please respond if you would like to join in on my challenge by this Monday 7/11

I think you can lose it in less than 10 weeks if you cut out all junk food and limit calorie intake to 1,200 at the most. Drinking a lot of water has helped and exercising in the morning to jump start metabolism. Good luck.

It depends on the person, really.
I'm quite small (5', 118 lbs), so losing the last 10 is going to take much longer. Even with 1200 calories a day and working out at least 6 days off, MFP doesnt think I should/would lose more than 0.6lbs a week.
Being short kinda sucks.

Yes, but when you have so little to lose you should set your goal at 0.5 lbs/week and eat back your exercise calories, this helps ensure that what you lose is fat and not muscle. I stole this quote before and am doing it again it is from Banks:

the reason why you need to reduce your deficit as you move closer to a healthy weight is many fold. One of the main reasons is the one you stated (I.E. to prepare you for maintenance), and while that may not seem like a big deal, adherence is listed as the number one reason why people yo yo diet. In other words, BECAUSE people treat it like a diet instead of a permanent lifestyle change, is one of the main reasons why it doesn't work. Creating healthy eating habits that you can live with is a main way to lose the weight and keep it off.
Another main reason, (and these are in no particular order of importance), is because the size of the deficit is a direct correlation to the amount of energy in the body available to use to make up the difference.
Without getting to complicated, the goal of a deficit is to force the body to burn adipose fat to make up the difference. But there's a line there, when fat stores shrink, available surface area of fat shrinks, which means less fat for the body to draw on at any one time to use to make up the energy difference. If your deficit is to large, the body will do 2 things, 1 it will try to utilize the third source of energy (protein) which it generally will get from muscle mass (taking the least used muscle first, which is why anaerobic exercise during weight loss is important), and the second thing it will do is (like a dimmer on a light switch) turn down the metabolic activity in the body, reducing certain organ and system functions to reduce energy needs.

It's important to note that there's no "line in the sand" where this all starts happening, it's a constant evaluation based on homeostasis throughout the body and hormone production, and as such you are almost always burning at least a little muscle mass, even if you're perfect, but the percentages go way up if you create too large of a deficit, (either by incorrectly choosing your goals, or by exercising to grow your deficit, or a combination of both), so the idea is to minimize protein burn, while maximizing fat burn by keeping the deficit in the sweet spot, as you lose body fat, that sweet spot deficit becomes smaller.