Can You Really Lose 10 Pounds On The Three-day Diet?

Can You Really Lose 10 Pounds on the Three-Day Diet?

Jun 13, 2011 | By Jake Wayne

The Three-Day Diet is a fad diet plan that claims you can lose 10 pounds in three days. Although the science behind the diet is factual, there are several features of the diet that make the claims less than reasonable for the average person. The diet also violates some of the basic principals of safe and sustainable weight loss.

Weight-Loss Basics

If you eat fewer calories than you burn, your body makes up the difference by burning energy stored as fat. One pound of fat is equal to about 3,500 calories. In addition, the right combinations of foods can stimulate your metabolism to burn more calories during all activities and can cause your body to burn more fat than carbohydrates.

The Three Day Diet

On the three-day diet, you eat a strict menu for three days in a week, then follow a more flexible, low-calorie and low-fat diet for the remaining four days. The diet also encourages you to drink a lot of coffee or tea. Proponents of the diet claim that the special menu stimulates your body to burn fat at an increased rate and the restricted diet on the remaining days helps keep the pounds off.

Can You Lose 10 Pounds?

Theoretically, there's no reason an average-size person couldn't lose 10 pounds on the three-day diet. The extremely light calorie intake combined with the chemical combination of foods could produce weight loss on that level -- especially when combined with the water weight loss that comes from drinking high amounts of caffeinated beverages like coffee and tea.

Should You?

According to health counselor Maya Paul, 2 pounds per week is the maximum rate of safe and sustainable weight loss. Losing weight at five times that rate can cause health problems and is difficult to maintain over the long term necessary to make positive habit changes to keep the weight off. Further, since water weight loss is a major factor in the three-day diet, that weight loss is temporary; the pounds come right back as soon as you reestablish a healthy level of hydration.