Can You Really Lose 15 Pounds in a Week?

A reader has written, “I see the tabloids in the supermarket that talk about ways I can lose 15 pounds in a week. Is this really possible? Isn’t it better if I try to lose just 5 pounds a week?”

(The author is a psychotherapist who lost 140 lbs. when he discovered Therapeutic Psychogenics,  and he’s kept it off for over 25 years. Read about his method of fast permanent weight loss and the clients who have used them by clicking on the menu above.)

Whoa! Let’s leave the supermarket tabloids to reporting about celebrities giving birth to aliens and come back to planet Earth and reality.

While my program is known for fast permanent weight loss, losing 15 pounds in a week is not possible for most people. I have seen it only with very obese people, and only in the first week of a weight loss regimen. After that, things slows down. Even 5 pounds a week, after the first week, is unrealistic. In the long term, with a healthy weight loss regimen, it’s more realistic to expect 1 to 3 pounds a week. However, speed of loss is not the most important thing. Making the loss permanent is.

If you are like most of us, you’ve been struggling with a weight problem for a long time. You’ve found that diets and exercise binges don’t solve the problem, even when they are sensible, never mind the crazy stuff.  If you’ve lost weight with those approaches, you’ve put it all back on and more.

If you really want to solve your weight problem for good, if you want to lose your excess weight and keep it off, it can be done, but you need to stop looking for unrealistically fast weight loss.

I lost 140 pounds in 18 months in 1983-1984 after 25 years of getting worse every year with diets and exercise schemes. In real medicine, that’s considered fast weight loss, but not dangerously so. I’ve maintained an ideal weight since then, over 25 years.  I was very lucky to have discovered the real solution to chronic weight problems in Behavioral Medicine, and now I teach it to others.

It’s an oversimplification, but succeeding with permanent weight loss is a matter of reprogramming habits, not diets, and not using “will power”. It’s a matter of using technique to reprogram the habits, not a matter of “just making up your mind”. It involves enjoying food even more than ever and winning every day, not waiting months or even a week to feel victorious.

Please read my articles here on my website, especially the letters from clients when you click on “testimonials” and you’ll learn how I and my clients have lost enormous amounts of weight  sometimes rather quickly, but always with the goal of forming a way we can live with forever, not fast weight loss at all costs.

Just so you know, a realistic pace for healthy weight loss is 50-75 pounds a year for women, with sometimes 5-10 pounds the first week. When you think about it, wouldn’t having that happen be a lot better than chasing crazy weight loss that will only disappoint and leave you worse?