It would be very possible for him to lose 20lbs in a week, including water weight. Boxers, wrestlers, and MMA fighters do it all the time, to gain an advantage (fight in a lower weight class). What generally happens is they diet down and then attempt to cut 5-10% water weight. It is a science and normally they will have coaches and medical personnel helping. It can also be very unpleasant, the last bit of water weight is a bear to lose.
I lost 35 pounds of water weight in three and a half days.
I was in ICU and on intravenous diuretics, however-
If he consumes large amounts of sodium, and then stops doing that, he could lose 5-7 pounds of water alone in a week. Happens to me every single time I come back from Japan, where they drink soy sauce with a straw.
Fat loss isn’t going to come anywhere close, but you can futz quite a bit between two factors – water weight, and food bulk in the digestive system.
Water weight will drop with sudden diet, but people who I know who have been ultra serious (trying to win competitions) will also eliminate all possible sodium for the last few days as well. This makes eating a huge pain, as you do have to eliminate basically all processed foods – think vegetables plus chicken breast you’ve verified was never used with brine, that sort of thing.
There are lots of tricks to use, but all in all it is not recommended to do this, it can have very negative effects on your health.
If you don’t eat hardly anything, how much will the difference in weight of gut contents make once your belly is full of small meals instead of large?
The dehydration part would be needed at the end of the week, not the beginning. In the first part of the week it would seem more critical to burn off reserves of glycogen and start on fat and in this case muscle loss.
If he was a she instead childbirth could accomplish this goal.
I lost 11 lbs and my husband lost over 20 lbs in less than a week that we had swine flu. I thought it would be just water weight but it stayed off. We seriously considered marketing the ‘Swine Flu Diet’ after that.
I also lost 15 lbs in a 24 hr period when I gave birth, but that’s probably not an option for your friend.
That’s what I was going to say. I go to a Chinese restaurant and wake up the next morning five pounds heavier, which I lost over the next 2-3 days. Has nothing to do with fat, just water balance. So fill up on salt and water over a week, gain 20 lbs, then go on a salt-free diet for a week, lose 20 lbs. But who are you kidding. I normally keep to a low salt diet and so I could not lose 20 lbs that way.
This too… not swine flu for me, but some unnamed bug that caused a lot of diarrhea. I dropped 4 poundsin 3 days and was sure it was due to dehydration, but it stayed gone. :eek: I’m sure that inadequate/absent nourishment was part of it.
Assuming an average weight of 150 lb, 20 lb is 13% body weight loss. Okay maybe 5 lb of actual fat, glycogen, and muscle mass, but you are still talking about 10% of body weight in water. That would be serious dehydration.
Despite claims made here, I do not believe that fighters lose more than 5 to 7% of body weight via acute dehydration.
Can 10% plus be done without death? Yes. Can it be done without becoming seriously clinically dehydrated and risking death? No.
This is an older post, but i don’t mind :). If someone wanted to lose 20 pounds in a week on a bet, they could load up on water by drinking about 2.2 gallons which weighs about 20 pounds. I do understand that drinking too much water too fast could be dangerous, but also that 2.2 gallons is humanly possible even if there are risks. If necessary, the individual could load up on salt to make the body more conducive to holding onto this water. Granted this loading up in advance was not what the op was talking about, but it would certainly make it vastly more easy to lose 20 pounds in a week or maybe even in a day.
Even apart from the intentional pre-loading strategy, the biggest part of this formula as others have noted is going to be water loss. A lot of excess sodium in the body can have a person carrying a lot of excess water weight. In cases where this is extreme, one could lose quite a bit of water without becoming dehydrated, not unlike in the pre-loading example given above. This too could make it possible even without intentionally pre-loading water into the body.
As well, i have heard many anecdotal stories of people losing about 20 pounds during a 7 day water only fast, likely due to this very issue of excess sodium being released with the excess water following it out and this would likely be even greater in a 7 day dry fast (no food, no drink at all including no water), which contrary to what convention might say is possible and has been done. Likely about 2-5 pounds of fat would be burned in 7 days of fasting as well depending upon an individual’s daily caloric expenditure. Such factors as glycogen burn off and the accompanying water would contribute as well.
Getting to healthy ideas, it would be good to lose excess sodium and the excess water weight that would be accompanying this and it would be good to lose body fat while preserving as much muscle as possible. Otherwise unless one was needing to make weight for an athletic competition, making a goal of losing 20 pounds regardless of what constitutes this would be a poor life choice and changes in scale weight (as opposed to changes in body fat percentage) can be extremely over-rated as well as misleading as to what is actually going on. Much of the water loss would be temporary and regained anyway, so what would be the point? This is not to mention that such an endeavor could potentially be very harmful to one’s health depending upon how extreme the dehydration becomes.
He could take an illegal, deadly drug called dinitrophenol. This disrupts the electron transport in mitochondria, making the metabolism enormously less efficient.
The trouble is that all that waste heat that is produced has to go somewhere, and if you exceed a relatively low temperature, the brain is permanently damaged and you die. (about 111 Fahrenheit)
In theory, if he were in an ice bath, with implanted temperature monitors, and the drug were carefully administered with an infusion pump in controlled amounts, and he was ok with the risk of cataracts and death, he might be able to do it. He’d have to burn 7200 calories a day.
I lost a little over 11 pounds in one week with a high-fat, low-sugar diet. I’m assuming most of it was water. I have a body fat scale thing but I doubt it’s very accurate. I haven’t really lost any weight since then but I look much better and leaner.