Fast Healthy Weight Loss: Three Simple Rules that Help You Shed Pounds Fast.

Sometimes you want to get in shape in a hurry.

There are many reasons why this should be so: the holidays have sneaked up on you and you want to get bikini fit; there’s a wedding coming up, and you mean to dress to impress; there’s a date in the offing, and a dress you’ve sworn to get into. Whatever the reason, it’s possible to shed a few pounds in a hurry, and do it safely.

The first rule of fast healthy weight loss is this: do not starve yourself.

It really works against you. Cutting down on eating is not a good way to go; it just slows your metabolism down, makes you feel and look bad, and leaves you wrung out and weak. Not a good look at any time, and particularly not when you’re trying to impress. So what can you do? Take a long cold look at your diet and make some changes.

Sugar has to go, in all its forms: the spoonful in your coffee, the chocolate snack, the odd sweet, the jelly doughnut. Cut them out.

Alcohol has to go, too. Cutting out all alcoholic drinks for one week will save you a shed load of calories and leave you clear headed and sparkly eyed.

High fat food has to go. Fried food, hard cheeses, full fat dairy, chocolate. If it comes in a packet and contains 30% fat, lose it. If it started life swimming in hot grease and comes to your table shiny with fat, don’t eat it.

Sounds a little dull, doesn’t it? How long do you have to eat this way? Try it for a week. Eat normally, but just make these changes. Don’t skip meals or go for the ‘healthy’ option, just dodge fat and sugar and alcohol for as long as it takes. You should see and feel changes in a few days. This leads us to…

The second rule of fast healthy weight loss, which is this: have some means of testing your progress in place.

It could be that you weigh yourself every couple of days, to see if you’ve shed a couple of pounds. Or you might try the waistband test: find a garment that fastens a little snugly around your waist, and see if it gets any looser as time passes. As long as you have some way to check that what you’re doing is working, you’re more likely to keep doing it.

One way to do it is to invest in a set of body fat calipers and learn how to use them. AccuMeasure make a set that enables you to self-test.

The third and last rule of fast healthy weight loss is simply this: be realistic.

Want to lose thirty pounds in a week to fit into a new dress? Well, you can’t. Not safely, anyway. Want to lose seven pounds of fat in two weeks so your swimsuit looks good? Great, no problem. Drastic changes are doomed to fail, but sensible measures can succeed with consistent, planned action. It all sounds very dull and sensible. And it is. But that’s the way things work. There are hundreds of snake oil salesmen out there who are happy to take your money in exchange for their dubious cures. You don’t need them. Just eat a healthy diet, cut out sugar and excess fat and alcohol, and watch the pounds fall off until you’re back at a healthy weight.