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Looking for advice on how to lose ten pounds fast? If so, you’re not alone. The latest statistics reveal more than 90 million American adults suffer from obesity. Obesity is more than a cosmetic issue. Excess body fat often leads to heart disease, type-2 diabetes, and cancer.
On top of the health issues, for many people, excess body fat is uncomfortable and causes low self-esteem. The modern American diet doesn’t help. It’s full of processed and fake foods making food choices difficult.
If you are confused about nutrition, diet, or the best way to get healthy and feel confident, you’re not alone.
Read on for science-backed weight-loss ideas and learn how to lose ten pounds.
How to Lose 10 Pounds
Your first goal should always be getting and staying healthy. Good nutrition, plenty of sleep, regular exercise and management of stress and anxiety all play a central part in good health. Of course, if you have an eating disorder, always consult a doctor before starting on any weight-loss program.
If you’ve had an unhealthy diet for many years, a doctor visit is also advisable. Remember that small habitual changes are the best way of taking off weight and keeping it off.
Below are six tips for losing a quick ten pounds that you can incorporate into a healthy lifestyle for long-term health and weight-loss maintenance.
1. Lose the Sugar
Cutting sugar from your diet is one of the most important changes you’ll ever make for your health and looks. Need some extra motivation?
Sugar causes glycation which in turn accelerates aging in your body.
Sagging skin, wrinkles, and loss of skin elasticity are all made worse by sugar. The worst offender? Processed sugars.
Don’t worry about the sugar found in fruit. It’s processed sugar that’s harming your health and good looks. What foods should you lose?
Examples of processed sugar include:
- Sugar-laden beverages such as soda or juice
- Baked goods
- White bread
- Desserts such as cakes, pies, doughnuts, etc.
- Many sauces, such as ketchup and barbecue sauce
- Alcohol
You’ll see a quick and noticeable improvement in your weight and health from cutting these foods out of your diet. Expect cravings for a week or two but after that, you’ll lose those extreme food cravings. To make the transition easier, the Flexible Dieting Lifestyle provides low-sugar recipes and practical tips that can help you stay on track without feeling deprived.
Also, if you’re drinking a cocktail or glass of wine or two in the evenings, you’re ingesting a lot of extra calories throughout the week. Try limiting yourself to one glass of wine or a cocktail on the weekends only.
For the initial ten-pound weight loss, cut alcohol out of your diet for a few weeks.
2. Choose High-Fiber Plant-Based Foods (Veggies)
Shop from the fresh produce section of the store. Plant-based foods contain high amounts of fiber. Fiber fills your stomach and keeps you full for longer. Plus vegetables and fruits fuel your body with crucial vitamins and nutrients.
If you’re looking for those six-pack abs, they start in the kitchen with good nutrition.
Eat lots of vegetables and eat them with every single meal, including breakfast.
Vegetables should compose at least half of your plate at every meal. In contrast, when it comes to fruit, eat them in limited quantities and around your workouts only.
This is because fruit is relatively high in carbs in the form of the natural sugar, fructose. If you do want to eat fruit, berries such as blackberries and strawberries are an excellent choice, because they are relatively low in carbs and high in fiber to help you feel full.
In contrast, fruit like bananas and grapes are high in carbs on a per serving basis. When seeking to lose weight, cut out these high carbs fruits.
One of the worst mistakes mistakes that I see people make is grabbing a banana for breakfast and thinking they are making a healthy decision. Unfortunately, they aren’t. They’re just getting a big dose of sugar first thing in the morning, which for people who aren’t doing an early morning workout, will likely get stored by the body as fat.
3. Track Your Intake
Keeping a food journal for tracking your food intake helps with weight reduction. Write down your current weight and your goal weight. Keep a record of everything you eat throughout the day.
If you have a hard time keeping a food journal, then use your smart phone to take a photo of every thingthat you eat.
Tracking your food visually will make you much, much more aware of your food choices.
You can also add an “accountability partner” or “food buddy” to whom you send these photos. In exchange, have them send you theirs.
Tracking your food intake keeps you away from mindless grazing. It helps you see how much food you’re eating. It keeps your attention on making good food choices.
Why does this tip work? Because where energy flows, results go. With each meal, you are putting attention onto your food choices. Losing weight is about consistency, so you need to be tracking your food intake until you set a new normal.
Science tells us that establishing a new habit takes approximately 66 days.
4. Choose Low-Glycemic Carbohydrates
High-carb foods cause a spike in insulin, so when seeking to lose weight, you will want to limit your intake of them.
Aim for foods that score 55 or less on the glycemic index (GI) chart. These foods keep your blood sugar at a lower level than high-carb foods.
As a point of reference, glucose is a simple sugar that has a GI score of 100. This means it is quickly broken down after being eaten, making it readily available for use as energy, or when consumed in excess, to be stored as fat.
Don’t have the chart handy? Avoid foods with processed sugar or flour. Bread, baked goods, crackers, chips, and pretzels are all on the no-eat list, because their GI scores are 55+.
Instead, focus on foods like leafy green vegetables, which have very low GI scores. For example, spinach, lettuce, and kale have GI scores of 10 or less. Most other veggies also have low GI scores, like cauliflower, broccoli, asparagus, mushrooms, tomatoes, and green, red and yellow peppers. These foods have GI scores of 15 or less.
You’ll notice a quick reduction in weight as you cut high glycemic index (GI) foods out of your diet.
You may also lose up to five pounds in a few days as your body releases stored water out of its cells.
5. Exercise (Ideally, Strength Training or HIIT)
Exercise is important for more than your physical health. It’s also great for your mental health, because exercise releases endorphins into your body. These endorphins offer a natural “high.”
Exercise also increases physical endurance and burns more calories than when you’re sedentary.
It’s almost impossible to exercise yourself thin, but your body needs exercise as much as a healthy, nutritious diet.
Put simply, “You can’t out train a bad diet.”
In my estimation, your diet is about 5X more important to weight loss than your exercise choices, but your exercise choices do matter.
Exercise has many benefits including:
- Reducing stress and anxiety
- Reducing depression
- Strengthening the heart and cardiovascular system
- Increasing energy
- Improved looks and body image
Lifting weights builds muscle, and muscle burns more calories than fat. Replacing fat with muscle helps build and maintain good fitness while also aiding in weight loss.
The mistake some people make is overestimating the number of calories burned during exercise. Be realistic about the number of calories you’re burning. Exercise does help with weight loss but it can’t save you from overeating lots of empty calories.
When it comes to exercise, you’ll get more “bang for your buck” from strength training and high-intensity interval training (HIIT) than you will from steady-state cardio, because your body will continue to burn calories at an accelerated rate after these types of workouts.
Personally, I follow a 4-day per week strength training program to accelerate fat burning.
6. Have a Plan for Bedtime
This is perhaps the most important tip. It is to have plan for bedtime.
While some people recommend not eating food in the evening after dinner, I’ve observed that most people have a hard time complying with this because of the phenomenon of decision fatigue.
Decision fatigue is a scientifically-documented phenomenon that describes your limited capacity for decision-making per day. Each time you make a decision, you fatigue slightly and this compounds over your waking hours.
Practically speaking, this means the quality of your decisions tend to deteriorate as you become fatigued.
Decision fatigue is the reason that nearly all of us who have binge eaten a tub of ice cream or gorged on a pizza have done it at night and not in the morning. By later in the day, most notably between 7pm and bedtime, you’re the most likely to eat off diet. This is a fact of life. Period.
The importance of recognizing this is that many people ruin an entire day’s worth of good decisions in the final hours of the day.
For this reason, I always suggest that people have a “bedtime plan” for what to eat that will prevent you from having cravings and give you something healthy and limited in calories to consume instead.
Personally, I have a 40g chocolate casein protein shake before bed, which I shake up in a blender bottle with water and heat up like a “hot cocoa” drink.
It’s sweet, it’s filling, it’s chocolatey and it’s satisfying. I also have it with 1-2 tablespoons of nut butter, such as peanut or almond butter, because this healthy fat fills me up and keeps me from making other bad decisions.
How to Lose Ten Pounds Quickly
Now you know the key factors that will help you to lose ten pounds fast. Cut the sugar, processed food, and high carb foods out of your diet. Avoid baked goods, crackers, bread, chips, and other junk foods.
Get regular exercise for your mental and physical health.
Track your intake and pay attention. Eat vegetables with every meal and have a plan for bedtime.
You’ll soon be on your way to a new, healthier you. Remember though, your health is the most important thing and patience with yourself is important.
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