The thing is, it’s about looking good in a leotard and tights, not strictly about weight.
Dance classes start in a little over a week, and I’ve still got a bit of the Michelin Man to me. 
Sure. Is that an offer?
I once lost over 10 lbs in less than a week, sick with strep, and I wasn’t obese or exercising (I was already slim and fit, cycling 50 miles a week and eating a vegan diet at the time). It just fucking HURT to swallow, so I lay in bed and sipped water and juice and choked down maybe a half a bowl of soup a day for 4 days.
I didn’t get me no million dollars, though. Dammit. :mad:
I could do it today easily…a simple switch to all raw fruit and salads, plenty of water and maybe some light exercise (swimming, walking) and I’d likely drop 10 lbs in a week no problem. Now where’s my money? :dubious:
I agree. And if you DO eat carbs, eat WHOLE carbs/grains, not refined AND don’t mix them with concentrated proteins when/if you do. Eat either proteins OR carbs along with lots of high water content veggies (salads) and eat raw fresh fruit on its own, preferably in the mornings until lunch.
Yep, the “natural hygiene” approach…don’t knock it…I once lost 30 lbs in 2 mths simply by following those rules (no added exercise, no reduction in calories). Works even better if you exercise.
I’ve been a vegetarian for 15 yrs, having added some fish now and then the last few yrs, and overloading on carbs (esp. refined ones) is a great way to GAIN, not lose. We are not cows, we are humans, and most closely related to the fruit eaters, not the herbivores. Ease up on the grains/carbs and focus on the fruits, succulent veggies and low doses of concentrated protein (a bit of fish with the salad or raw nuts, legumes) and the fat will come off.
So who has this million dollars? Where do I sign?
I can only speak for myself but after weigh-in there’s usually ample time to eat. What counts is that you make the weight at weigh-in, you can gain all you want between weigh-in and the match.
Also if your are a growing teenage boy who has been exercising strenuously for 4 hours a day - 5 times a week for the last 10 weeks, you burn calories like a blast furnace. Remember the scene in Breakfast Club where everyone got out their lunch and the wrestler had a brown grocery bag of food? Not as much of an exaggeration as you might think.
So you can eat a surprisingly large amount of food after weigh-in and be ready to go within an hour or so.
And honestly if you haven’t eaten in 2 days, you’re in a pretty damn bad mood and someone is gonna get their ass kicked. Teenage boys tend to be full of piss and vinegar.
I know right? this is like the easiest SDMB million dollar challenge ever.
Is that an offer? Because with three days notice, I could do it in 24 hours.
In fact, I have, and I’m 5’ 4"…
Every-one over 50 knows how.
Cool, thanks, zoid. Saw a bit of Breakfast Club on TV last weekend and I remember thinking that the lunch was over the top at the time but then I’ve never been a teen boy, or a wrestler at that. Interesting that it’s true.
If you are a long-distance runner, you can lose that much in water weight in a single 60-minute run. I’ve lost 11 pounds during one marathon. Wasn’t pleasant, but it can be done.
You need to set the bar a little higher. 5 pounds in a week would be cake for most people, some could do it in a day under the right conditions. Most Americans are heavier than they should be, and know it. You’d have literally millions of people clamoring to enter such a contest.
20 pounds in a week would be a better challenge, but no more than a challenge, definitely not an impossibility.
Pretty much what bordelond said. I was 16 when I dropped 70 pounds. I pretty much fasted for 2 weeks, but I had to cut it out because of the dizzy spells. My weight has always yoyoed.
This is supposed to be a forum for sceptics, but some of the claims in this thread seem to flout physiological possibility.
I could just about believe that if you time things just right and exploit natural variation in body weight, you could vary your weight by maybe 5lb over a few days. You would only actually “lose” 5lb if you took the first reading at the top of the cycle and the second reading at the bottom. But the claims that you can really lose more than two pounds in a week are questionable to me. Dead people barely lose weight that fast! (Of course, if they did more exercise I guess they would lose weight faster. But they tend to laze around in their coffins.)
Most people are talking about hydration swings, which can easily be 5 lbs: I do that almost every night (I drink a lot of fluid).
That said, losing over two lbs of fat is far from impossible if you are overweight to start with. IME, 1% of body weight/week is pretty standard–the 1-2 lbs a week number is just assuming a person between 100-200 lbs. An extreme diet will take off more than that, especially at first (later, your body starts doing other things to conserve energy, but the first week it seems to just burn fat).
No matter what diet you are talking about, if you go right back to your old eating habits afterward, you will gain it right back.
We’re talking about losing weight for lots of money as a one-off, not as part of a healthy weight-loss programme. If you had to, you could just fast for a few days and exercise like mad then drink nothing for the last day - there’s no way you could fail to lose at least 5lbs that way.
Anyway, without it being that extreme, it’s not uncommon to lose more than 2lbs in a week via ordinary dieting. Natural daily weight varies by that much anyway.
I acknowledged that body weight varies. I’m addressing the people who are talking about that rate of weight loss over a longer period.
I disagree that it is common to lose more than 2lb a week (long term) through normal dieting. That implies a calorie deficit of 1000 calories a day, which is borderline starvation, not ordinary dieting.
Try this…
[ul]
[li]weigh youself right now[/li][li]go about your daily routine - go to work, pick up the kids, make them dinner, etc…[/li][li]Do not eat anything - I mean NOTHING not even a potato chip for 48 hours[/li][li]suck ice chips to keep you mouth/throat from drying out - do NOT drink[/li][li]weigh youself after 48 hours[/li][/ul]
edited to add - obvoiusly, don’t do this, it’s dangerous, but you can make dramatic swings in your weight this way
If you are not at LEAST 5 lbs lighter I’d be shocked.
Depends on where you start. If you are morbidly obese, a thousand calorie/day deficit isn’t brutal, especially with exercise. I’ve lost 45% of my body weight in the last 14 months, and while I am pretty much always hungry, I’m never starving. My average weight loss over that time is just above 2 lbs a week, though it was faster at first and slower now. It has actually tracked 1% of body weight pretty closely.
Oh. The only people I noticed talking about losing lots of weight over a longer period were those who were talking about being ill.
2lb per week is the usual ‘healthy goal’ for dieting. I don’t know why you think that’d require 1000 calories per day less than usual.
Yeah, I meant more as the body’s reaction to getting more food after not getting much at all - storing more of it as fat. (That happens, right?) My old eating habits would still be fewer calories than I need to maintain my weight.
Because 1 pound is about 3500 calories, so 500 calories less per day x 7 days is 1 pound and 1000 calories less per day would be 2 pounds.