How to lose 8 - 10 pounds in 3 weeks?

Summer starts in 3 weeks?

OP, what are your stats? Height, weight, etc.?

And listen to the above ^^ advice because it's all good. Especially "slow the bus down" - love that! Fast weight loss is tempting in a way, but time proves that it's ultimately pretty fruitless. You punish yourself for several weeks and then say "the heck with this" and throw it all out the window.

Cut out added sugar; you'll be shocked. Not ALL sugar, but anywhere you can. My daily coffee was adding over 300 calories alone, and the resulting insulin turbulence caused me to be starving throughout the day, so I'd be grabbing snacks just to keep my energy up. I cut out 90% of my refined and added sugar, which, after 2 weeks, got my system normalized. One thing you learn is the difference between hunger and craving. Cut sugar for 3 weeks, and by then, you find how much better you feel, much more energy, and generally happier. Down 17#, in 52 days. But I also walk an average of 18000 steps for work, and go to the gym a couple times a week, so diet is a very big part of it.

The only true answer is increase your activity/calories burned. I don't know your stats or what is a realistic deficit for you. But to lose 10 pounds in 3 weeks you need a caloric deficit of 1,667 per day. So you need to be burning 3000++ daily. As for food in, aim for lean protein, high fiber to help you stay full, satiated, and energetic.

Just because I like to give positive feedback, I lost ~15lbs in the past 33 days just by increasing my exercise (HIIT, running, cycling) and cleaning up my food intake.

Yes I had a calorie deficit (~600/700 daily), but more importantly I cut out most processed foods and tracked my macros (5 out of 7 days low carb, high protein - 2 days of 'high' carb to boost my energy).

Now this is sort of a crash diet and the idea is - once I've reached my ideal weight - to slowly increase daily carb intake to maintenance levels (30-40% daily, different for everyone). But I don't think it necessarily means it's 'unhealthy'. In fact, because I slowly increased my daily exercise and cleaned up my food intake drastically, I think it's very healthy (just not cheap ).

So, yes it's possible (10 lbs in 3-4 weeks), but you'll have to put in the effort (in more than 1 way).

Btw, I'm 5'6" and had ~30lbs to lose when I started this ^^

PAV8888 wrote: »

If you only had a 700 Cal a day deficit on average over the past 33 days, the maximum amount of fat you could have lost is 6.6lbs, not 15.

You either have a much larger deficit, or,
you're also counting in some of the water weight changes that accompany you low carb/high carb eating, or,
you have a measurement problem, or,
a combination of the above

Losing a lb of fat requires at least 3500Cal of deficit and that already takes into account that it would contain a bit less than 453.6g of 9Cal per g fat... But 33*700=23100 🤷‍♂️

Where did I say it was all fat loss??

Maybe you're right though, my deficit may have been larger, I may have forgotten an exercise here and there and I honestly haven't studied my calorie intake that thoroughly. I'll review my weekly reports. I've been focussing on macros, not calories though. All I know I was running at a deficit.

It may have been a lot of water weight, I was on a 1200 cal diet in the 2 months prior to starting this journey while exercising (cardio) almost daily. I fully believe my body was in starvation mode, which caused me to only gain weight instead of lose. When I started focussing on my macros rather than calories, I recalculated my TDEE and increased my cal goal accordingly. Never hit the cal goal though. Couldn't eat more than I did.

Just wanted to let the topic starter know you can actually lose 8 pounds in 3 weeks.

GarysGirl78 wrote: »

PAV8888 wrote: »

If you only had a 700 Cal a day deficit on average over the past 33 days, the maximum amount of fat you could have lost is 6.6lbs, not 15.

You either have a much larger deficit, or,
you're also counting in some of the water weight changes that accompany you low carb/high carb eating, or,
you have a measurement problem, or,
a combination of the above

Losing a lb of fat requires at least 3500Cal of deficit and that already takes into account that it would contain a bit less than 453.6g of 9Cal per g fat... But 33*700=23100 🤷‍♂️

Where did I say it was all fat loss??

Maybe you're right though, my deficit may have been larger, I may have forgotten an exercise here and there and I honestly haven't studied my calorie intake that thoroughly. I'll review my weekly reports. I've been focussing on macros, not calories though. All I know I was running at a deficit.

It may have been a lot of water weight, I was on a 1200 cal diet in the 2 months prior to starting this journey while exercising (cardio) almost daily. I fully believe my body was in starvation mode, which caused me to only gain weight instead of lose. When I started focussing on my macros rather than calories, I recalculated my TDEE and increased my cal goal accordingly. Never hit the cal goal though. Couldn't eat more than I did.

Just wanted to let the topic starter know you can actually lose 8 pounds in 3 weeks.

Turns out I was on a 700±100 cal deficit, on top of the already calculated deficit MFP shows you when you put in your weekly weight loss goal. So in my case that was somewhere between 1200-1400 cal below my (manually calculated TDEE). Mea culpa, I didn't realise it at the time of posting the above.
I will do better and be more accurate from now on.

Some people could use some better bedside manners though, just saying...

I spend a lot of time reviewing all my data from MFP, compared it to my Garmin data (seem to have issues getting the 2 communicating properly) and manually re-calculating everything in a spreadsheet. So I now have 3 'databases' to keep up with

Will leave it at that and not further comment on the 'starvation mode' thing, used the wrong term on this forum obviously. Did a lot of research on it myself, and last night searched this community on the topic, it seems to annoy many here. I'd rather spend my energy on working out tbf. Props to the author of the big article summary on the topic though, very well done!

@paperpudding *hugs*

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