Most people gain weight gradually over time and don’t even notice because it happens so slowly. But almost anyone I’ve ever seen who has lost weight does it rapidly over the course of weeks and months. It almost never takes as long to lose weight as it does to gain it.
This goes against conventional ‘fitness’ industry talk. But have a look around at fitness competitors, bodybuilders, and any average person who has lost weight doing a transformation challenge or any other weight loss program…
The one thing you’ll notice is they lose weight quickly. By quick I mean they will lose some serious weight over the course of a few months and even over a few weeks. In reality the time it takes them to lose weight is a sprint compared to the time it took to put the weight on.
Even if the weight that took them years to put on the way to take it off is fast.
When it comes to things like losing weight you don’t want to be told that it’s going to take you years to do it. That is simply not good enough and not acceptable and it isn’t even realistic.
The reward is too far away if you expect to lose the weight over the course of 12 months. But if you shorten the time frame to 12 weeks, or even 12 days, now you’re talking. Why not just try to lose as much as you can in 12 days. Then take a break and do it again in a few weeks. This seems much more doable psychologically and in fact it is really how people lose weight.
It’s almost like interval training for weight loss dieting.
Hack off a bunch of weight in a couple weeks or a month. Then take a break for a month, then hack some more off.
This seems to be the way most people really do lose weight.
Kinda ironic that people spend years trying to lose weight, and when they finally do it, it all happens in a few months.
Brad Howard and I just had a discussion about this very topic during a recent phone call. You can listen in on it here.
In this audio I talk about one of the landmark research trials that studied human starvation.
Whenever you hear a fitness or nutrition ‘expert’ talk about “starvation mode” the following picture is an example of what true starvation mode is.
I think you would agree that you and I will never experience starvation mode if this is the state we need to be in.
When you hear any fitness or nutrition person nowadays refer to ‘starvation mode’ you know right away they don’t know what they’re talking about and misinterpreting the scientific research to mean something that it does not. (unless of course they actually believe you are in danger of looking like the guys in the above picture)
If you want to lose weight fast, then you gotta drop your calories ALOT. Do this in intervals and get it over with. I’ll bet you get more results this way than trying to add in a series of rules to follow for the rest of your life for “sustained’ slow weight loss.
John
