Stay away from diets that promise fast results
Almost all of my clients here in Italy want to find a way to lose weight fast (or as they say dimagrire velocemente). On the one hand i understand that they want fast results and they are fed up with their current situation. On the other hand, though, i struggle to understand how they can assume to get rid of all that fat that took years to accumulate.
The vast majority of my clients has to lose between ten and twenty pounds. Sometimes i have an occasional one that has to lose more than thirty pounds. Our body needs month to accumulate ten pounds of fat. Probably a year or a year and a half. Therefore, the same principle is true for when you want to get rid of that fat.
Its impossible to lose it quicker than four pounds a month. I remember once a client telling me that a friend of her had lost something like twenty pounds in two weeks. She said that it was the proof that it was possible.
The only thing that my client didnt realize is that i really doubt that of those twenty pounds more than ten percent was fat. In fact, when you reduce calories drastically and you dont drink enough water, the first thing our body does is to lose liquids and muscles. This explains the twenty pounds lost.
The only problem is that after that period the metabolism is very low and this means that if the person starts eating as she used to, she is going to gain more weight than how much she lost. This is a good reason why diets with extreme calories reduction or fasting (or as they say in Italy digiuno per dimagrire) are not a good idea.
Instead, if you want to lose weigth permanently (dimagrire) you should increase the number of work outs and the intensity of those.