I have a friend who wants to lose a few pounds to fit into an outfit for an event coming up in a couple weeks.
She is aware that many, perhaps most fad diets result mainly in short term water loss and she is okay with that.
What are some reasonably safe effective ways to accomplish this?
My thought was that she should just cut down on the amount of sodium she eats as well as the amount of carbohydrates. She does seem to eat a lot of bread products and salty foods.
Cut out carbs and she’ll burn off her stored glycogen. Water comes off at 4 grams water/1 gram glycogen.
However, walking around in a depleted state is not fun.
Keto! Keto! Keto!
I have never found that water loss changed my figure all that much–just the numbers on the scale.
If she’s close enough that a fad diet will do it, she’s close enough that serious underwear will work.
An update:
My friend made a few small changes to her diet and lost about 5 pounds in a week.
She substituted unsalted nuts for salted nuts as snack food but otherwise ate like normal.
Instead of having regular fruit after lunch like apples or oranges, she ate grapefruit.
At dinner, she ate about 2/3 of her usual helping of potatoes, rice, etc but otherwise ate normally.
For lunch, she had an open sandwich instead of a closed sandwich, i.e. she ate half the amount of bread and made up the extra calories with a fatty spread.
With her breakfast cereal, she ate about 50 calories worth of fruit instead of her usual 200.
So the total change in calories was about 200 less per day. And she was still eating a lot of carbs and salt – but less than before. And yet she lost far more weight than 1400 calories worth of fat. Just from (1) reducing carbohydrate intake a bit; (2) reducing salt intake a bit; and (3) eating one grapefruit per day.
I now see why fad diets are so seductive. So many people desperately want to believe that they can lose a lot of weight very quickly by making only small changes to their diet. And diets which cause you to lose a lot of water give you that illusion.