Quick Ways To Lose Weight In Three Months

Losing weight quickly is no easy task, but it's helpful if you allow yourself a reasonable amount of time to do it. It's not realistic to think you'll be able to drop 10 lb. in a week and keep that weight off, but if you use safe and healthy methods and stick to them, it's certainly possible to lose twice that much weight or even more within three months.

Methods

There are just about as many weight-loss methods as there are people who want to lose weight. It's a dizzying array, but you can bypass many of them and improve your odds of success if you stick to burning more calories than you consume through a combination of low-calorie eating and regular exercise, which the National Institutes of Health notes is the only proven way to slim down.

High Intensity

Regarding exercise, you'll be able to lose weight faster if you dial up the intensity level of your routine and choose activities that burn more calories. A few of the highest calorie burners are running, inline skating and cardio kickboxing such as tae kwon do, which respectively burn about 1,000, 900 and 730 calories per hour for a 160-lb. person, according to MayoClinic.com. In contrast, brisk walking and low-impact aerobics burn only about 275 and 365 calories per hour.

Cutting Calories

Donald Hensrud, M.D., preventive medicine specialist for MayoClinic.com, notes that reducing daily calories seems to be a more effective method for weight loss than exercise, although both play an important role and work best in combination. By cutting 500 calories from your daily diet, you'll lose 1 lb. a week; double that amount of calorie reduction, and the weekly weight loss becomes 2 lb. It's tricky to reliably reduce calories unless you have an accurate handle on what you're eating, however. Use an online calorie counter to track your food intake for several days, take the average of those amounts and design yourself a meal plan that contains at least several hundred calories fewer than the total.

Pacing

If you can manage to cut at least 500 calories from your daily diet and get in a 30-minute or longer vigorous workout on most days of the week, you're likely to build up a notable calorie deficit. That will help you lose 1 to 2 lb. per week during the entire three-month period, for a total of 12 to 25 lb. That's right on par with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's recommended pacing; the CDC notes that people who lose more than 2 lb. per week are less likely to keep the weight off.

Considerations

Weight loss and healthy weight maintenance are truly lifelong processes. Although you can make some changes in your routine to drop weight in a few months, it's necessary to keep those changes up beyond the temporary period to maintain your weight loss and stay fit. A doctor can help you work out how to do that, and it's helpful to talk with yours before you begin any weight loss or diet program.