Contents
Introduction 3
Chapter 1: Before You Begin 5
Chapter 2: Fasting for Quick Weight Loss 7
Chapter 3: Eating for Sustained Weight Loss 10
Chapter 4: The Importance of Hydration 12
Chapter 5: Sleep More to Lose More 13
Chapter 6: Calorie-Burning Activities 15
Chapter 7: Building Muscle to Burn Fat 17
Chapter 8: Vitamins, Herbs & Supplements 19
Chapter 9: How to Beat Bloating Every Time 20
Chapter 10: Laxatives & Colon Cleansers 21
Chapter 11: Put a Stop to Emotional Eating 22
Chapter 12: Tips for Staying Motivated 24
Chapter 13: Addressing Medical Concerns 27
Chapter 14: Your 14-Day Weight-Loss Schedule 28
Introduction
When it comes to losing weight, one thing’s certain: It took time to gain the excess weight, and it will take time to lose it. But there are steps you can take to speed up the process. If you play it smart, you can even lose up to 14 pounds in 14 days!
Of course, not all of that will be fat loss. You will also lose weight by getting rid of the retained fluid, bloating and waste products that keep your weight high. By the time the two weeks are up, you’ll feel like a new person – a much lighter one, at that!
This e-book will be your guide through every step of the 2-week journey. You will begin by learning how to mentally and physically prepare yourself for rapid weight loss. In Chapter 2, we’ll discuss the benefits of fasting for quick weight loss and how to do it safely.
Chapter 3 will explore the best nutrition plans for sustained weight loss. You can avoid regaining the weight you initially lose by following these simple rules.
Chapter 4 describes the importance of hydration. Water plays a vital role in fitness and fat loss. You will learn how to determine how much water you need each day. (Hint: Not everyone needs 8 glasses a day!)
In Chapter 5, you will learn why sleep is so important for weight loss. If you’re not getting 8 hours a night, you’re not alone. But you’re not losing weight as quickly as possible if your body doesn’t get a chance to regularly recharge.
Chapter 6 will introduce you to the basics of calorie burning through exercise. Working out doesn’t have to be a chore; you will be presented with dozens of fun activities that will burn more calories than a trip to the gym.
Muscle-building is the subject of Chapter 7. Did you know that muscle tissue is a 24-hour fat burner? You will learn how to eat and exercise to build maximum muscle tissue and burn more calories than ever before.
Chapter 8 will examine various herbs, vitamins and foods that are rumored to jump-start your metabolism. Which ones work, and which ones don’t? You’ll soon be able to tell fact from fiction when it comes to dietary supplements.
Chapter 9 is the first part of a quick and dirty guide for beating the bloat monster. You’ll learn why bloating happens and how to get rid of it – and get back into your skinny jeans – in no time.
Chapter 10 is a follow-up that explores the embarrassing but very real problem of constipation and sluggish bowels. You’ll be shocked by how much weight you’re carrying around due to waste products.
In Chapter 11, we will look at the sometimes devastating condition of emotional eating and eating disorders. Sometimes you have to deal with underlying psychological triggers in order to stop overeating. If so, this chapter will get you started on the road to recovery.
Chapter 12 contains tips and ideas for staying motivated long past Day 14. You will learn how to motivate yourself, how to use outside influences for motivation, and how to keep your eyes on the prize.
Chapter 13 delves into medical conditions that can cause you to stop losing weight, or even cause you to gain weight. Many can be detected by simple blood tests, and most can be treated with prescription medicines. Diagnosis is the first step. You will learn some of the most common symptoms to help you decide if a trip to the doctor is in order.
Finally, in Chapter 14, we’ll teach you how to keep losing weight and keep it off for life.
You will learn valuable skills for healthy and permanent weight loss.
Without further delay, let’s set off on your two-week weight loss journey!
Before you read any further, make sure that you download the following free report which shows you what kind of food to avoid when trying to lose those excess pounds.
The 17 “Cheat” Foods that Burn Fat
https://blogforhealthy.com/3weekdiet
Chapter 1: Before You Begin
Do your old skinny jeans still haunt you? Do you find it harder than ever to lose weight after years of yo-yo dieting? Well, you’re in luck: You’re about to embark on the last weight-loss journey you’ll ever need.
It starts with a 14-day regimen designed to melt away pounds and even heal your diet-damaged metabolism. Even if you’ve been subsisting on very few calories (and not losing any weight), you can change your habits and get back the fast metabolism you enjoyed before. If your metabolism has never been speedy, get ready to see it come alive like never before.
Before you start any diet or exercise plan, you need to make sure your doctor is okay with it. The tips outlined in this e-book might not be appropriate for someone with diabetes, malnourishment, or a compromised immune system, for example. Dieter discretion is advised.
Keeping that in mind, let’s walk through the steps you can take to prepare yourself for this two-week weight-loss plan.
Step 1: Forget the Past
Don’t let past diet failures discourage you. This is a new beginning, and you will have new results. Get ready to try as though you’ve never failed because you never have to fail again!
Step 2: Set Concrete Goals
Your big-picture goal might be to lose 14 pounds, but which activities will you do to burn calories? What types of food will you buy? When will you make time to work out and cook healthy meals? Goal-setting isn’t just about general ideas; it’s about fleshing out the logistical details, too.
Step 3: Purchase Supplies
You’re going to need plenty of fresh produce, lean protein and pure drinking water. If you don’t already have those things on hand, you’ll need to plan a shopping trip. Try to think of other items that could prove helpful. For example, weight loss requires adequate sleep. If you have trouble sleeping at night, invest in some earplugs or a sleep mask that blocks out ambient light.
Step 4: Plan Your Schedule
If you work during the week, you might want to start the initial fasting phase on a Friday evening. That’s because fatigue is common when you’re starting out, and you want to give your body enough time to grow accustomed to the new regimen. After two days, you will feel more energetic than ever.
Step 5: Make a List of Rewards
Think up some tangible rewards you can give yourself for losing weight. Since you want to lose a large amount of weight in a short amount of time, avoid using your favorite food as treats. Instead, buy yourself a book on your wishlist, or go out to a movie. Go for a walk through a new neighborhood, or splurge on a pedicure. There are plenty of ways to celebrate your success that won’t sabotage your efforts.
Chapter 2: Fasting for Quick Weight Loss
Some experts warn that fasting is no way to lose weight. But proponents of fasting claim that taking a break from food can have all sorts of health benefits. They credit fasting for giving them everything from increased energy to elevated mood and clearer skin.
Here’s the secret: Fasting is not the same thing as starving. There are different levels of fasting. Some fasts even allow you to eat solid foods. Of course, you can al
so restrict your intake to just liquids, or to just water, but such fasts shouldn’t be sustained for more than a few days.
Fasting is usually done for detoxification purposes. Think of how many processed foods you eat each day. All of them contain chemicals designed to extend shelf life or enhance flavor. Those chemicals can build up in your system, making it hard for your body to function normally. Fatigue, achiness and depression can result.
Now consider how many toxins you pick up from other sources. How many chemical cleaners, pest control sprays, cosmetics and other chemicals do you come into contact with? How is the air quality in your area? How is the tap water? You could be polluting your body simply by eating, drinking and breathing.
You can kick off your 14-day diet plan and give your body a break by fasting. To do this, you should first determine how extreme of a fast you’re willing to try. Here are some popular types to choose from.
Sugar Fast
A sugar fast is a relatively mild fasting technique. All it requires you to do is give up sugary foods and white flour products. Those foods will be replaced with healthier carbohydrates in the form of low-glycemic fruits, fibrous vegetables and whole-grain products.
Prepare for some adverse effects in the first few days of your sugar fast, especially if you’re something of a sugar addict. You might experience headaches, lethargy and even nausea while your body cleanses itself of sugar.
Just take it easy for a couple of days and drink plenty of clean water to flush the toxins from your system. You can do a sugar fast pretty much indefinitely as long as you continue to eat healthy carbs.
Raw Food Fast
Food loses a lot of its fiber and nutrition when you cook it, and proponents of raw food diets insist that their way of eating delivers the most nutrients and the highest fiber content.
Obviously, there are many foods which should be cooked before consumption. A raw food fast will limit you to foods like fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains. Some people eat raw for life, but if you’re a meat fan, you should make it a temporary weight-loss technique rather than a long-term lifestyle choice.
Juice Fast
Juice fasts gained notoriety among the Hollywood set. Now they’ve gone mainstream with hundreds of cookbooks, restaurants and websites churning out fresh fruit and vegetable juice recipes.
Juice fasts can be healthy when they’re done right. To get enough vitamins and fiber, you’ll definitely want to do your own juicing using fresh produce. Pre-packaged fruit juices are typically high in sugar and lack fiber content.
Some of the most popular homemade juices include green smoothies, which blend leafy greens like kale and spinach with fruits, vegetables and silken tofu. Fresh orange and carrot juice add a massive dose of vitamins C and A, and fruits with high water content like cucumber and melon will keep you hydrated and full at a very low calorie cost.
As long as you’re getting a variety of fruits, veggies and protein, a juice fast can last for several days or even a week. The nutrient-dense drinks are easily digestible. You will likely feel revitalized right away as your body absorbs the vitamins and micronutrients.
Water Fast
For some, only a total water fast will do. As the name suggests, a water fast means giving up food altogether and drinking pure water instead.
While this doesn’t provide nutrients like juicing does, fans of water fasting insist that the process gives them mental clarity, clearer skin and increased energy.
Due to lack of nutrition, water fasts should not be sustained for more than a couple days at a time. Ask your doctor for permission before you embark on a water fast.
The Master Cleanse
The Master Cleanse gained notoriety because several high-profile celebrities used it to shed extra pounds. Beyoncé Knowles lost a fast 25 pounds in preparation for her role in Dreamgirls, thanks to the Master Cleanse.
This plan is a liquid fast that requires you to drink several cups of juice throughout the day made from lemons, cayenne pepper and maple syrup. Salt-water drinks and laxative teas are sometimes incorporated for a full-body cleanse.
The Master Cleanse is effective for cutting weight, but not for long-term loss. This plan departs too radically from normal eating. It’s also possible to become dehydrated while following the plan, so dieters beware!
The Final Word on Fasts
A fast that cuts out junk food but leaves you with plenty of nutrition is the most sustainable type of fast. Kick off your 14-day plan with a sugar fast or raw food fast, and see how great you feel!
Chapter 3: Eating for Sustained Weight Loss
To start losing weight right away, you’ll need to know the scientific principles behind weight loss. Let’s start by learning how many calories you actually need each day.
Your basal metabolic rate, or BMR, dictates how many calories your body needs to perform its functions for the day. This number is the bare minimum; it tells you how many calories your body needs to simply survive and carry out natural processes. If you’re an active person, you will require more calories than your BMR suggests. The sum of your BMR plus the calories you burn during daily activities is your Total Energy Expenditure, or TEE.
There are various formulas you can use to help you figure out an appropriate number of calories for weight loss. The most widely used is the Harris-Benedict formula, which considers your age, gender, height and current weight to come up with a suitable number of calories. Here is an example of this formula in action:
Men: BMR = 66 + (13.7 x weight in kg) + (5 x height in cm) - (6.8 x age in years)
Women: BMR = 655 + (9.6 x weight in kg) + (1.8 x height in cm) - (4.7 x age in years)
(For conversions, 1 inch = 2.54 cm and 1 kilogram = 2.2 lbs.)
A 35-year-old female who stands 5’4” (163 cm) tall and weighs 130 pounds (59 kilos) would use the following equation:
655 + 566 + 293 – 165 = 1,349
The woman in the example would need 1,349 calories a day just to lie around in bed and keep her organs functioning. If that number seems small, it’s because we haven’t yet taken this woman’s activity level into consideration.
That’s where these activity multipliers come into play:
Sedentary people (office jobs, no exercise) multiply BMR by 1.2.
Lightly active people (active job, or exercise 1–3 times per week) multiply BMR by 1.35.
Moderately active people (active job plus weekly exercise, or exercise 4–5 times per week) multiply BMR by 1.55.
Highly active people (sports or hard exercise most days) multiply BMR by 1.725.
Extremely active people (hard exercise every day) multiply BMR by 1.9.
Let’s revisit the woman in our example. We’ll assume she works a desk job and is sedentary most days of the week. Even at such a low activity level, she would expend extra calories walking around the grocery store, driving to and from work, typing and even fidgeting at her desk.
Her BMR (1,349) multiplied by her sedentary activity level (1.2) reveals that she needs about 1,619 calories each day to maintain her current weight. If she started exercising just 2 or 3 days each week, her daily calorie requirement would increase to 1,821.
So how do these numbers help you lose weight?
Easy: To lose a pound of fat each week, you must burn 3,500 more calories than you consume. In order to lose a pound of fat, the woman in our example would need to eat 1,119 calories a day if sedentary, or 1,321 a day if lightly active. That creates a deficit of 500 calories per day.
As you can see, it’s much easier to lose weight through diet and physical activity than through diet alone.
Chapter 4: The Importance of Hydration
We’re often told about the importance of adequate water intake, but do you know why it’s so important? Water can contribute to weight loss – especially fast weight loss – in several ways.
First, since our bodies need water to survive, they have a self-defense reaction when we don’t consume enough. In response to dehydr
ation, they start to hold on to every bit of fluid they get. This is called fluid retention, or bloating, and it can cause the scale to leap up by several pounds.
The cure for bloating is to drink more water. If you drink at least 8 glasses a day, your body will start to let go of the fluid it has been retaining. Your waist will shrink, and you will lose some superfluous pounds.
To tell if you’re bloated, clench your hands into fists. Do they feel tight and puffy? Are your rings leaving indentations on your fingers? If so, you might be bloated, and water can help.
Secondly, water acts as a vitamin delivery system. The vitamins you consume through food and supplements will be distributed throughout your body if you’re properly hydrated. If you haven’t had enough fluids, the vitamins will have trouble getting where they need to go.
Finally, water keeps our organs functioning at their highest level. This directly affects your body’s ability to burn fat.
Our bodies have a natural filtration system that gets rid of toxins and built-up fluid: the kidneys. But the kidneys need plenty of water to be able to do their job properly. If you don’t drink enough water, the kidneys have to call on the liver for back-up filtration. While the liver is busy helping out the kidneys, it’s not metabolizing fat as efficiently as it should, and more of the food you eat will be stored as fat.
You can avoid this situation by drinking at least 64 ounces of pure drinking water each day. A more customized approach is to drink 1 ounce of water for every 2 pounds of body weight. Thus, a 150-pound man would need 75 ounces of water each day. If you do a lot of sweating, or if you have a medical condition that leaves you chronically dehydrated (like diabetes) you will need extra hydration.
Chapter 5: Sleep More to Lose More
When you think of weight-loss measures, sleep isn’t usually the first activity that comes to mind. But sleep is one of the most important things you can do when you’re trying to lose extra pounds.
Like hydration, adequate sleep benefits the dieter in many ways. First and foremost, sleep relieves stress. Stress is actually counterproductive to weight loss. That’s because stress triggers a chemical reaction in our bodies that promotes weight gain.
This makes sense when thinking about our ancestors: They had to store body fat to help them survive through times of famine. Therefore, whenever their bodies were stressed (as in times of starvation), a hormone called cortisol was released as a signal to save up fat stores in preparation for hard times ahead.