Posted by Christine G. Shannon

Maybe it’s a class reunion, or a loved one’s wedding, or even your own - you know that you want to lose six pounds in a week, and when you are thinking about how to do it intelligently and safely, you will find that far from starving yourself, you need to think about what you are eating!

Cut out all fatty foods, fried foods, sugars, high carbohydrates and fat-filled items. These include juices and sodas, and alcoholic beverages, which are high in calories and sugar and substituting water, unsweetened tea, or black coffee. If you are trying to figure out how to lose weight, then get yourself mentally prepared, visualizing yourself thinner helps to lose weight, but it won’t just fall off.

By eating lean meats, vegetables and fruit and watching your portions, pounds may start to drop off and you may be able to drop six pounds in a week. But some people also just lose what is often called “water weight” the first week. Since your body is 90% water, by not eating as much, you may not be taking in as much water through your food, so it is not a permanent weight loss, and will return when you start eating normal or take in more water.

If you want to make sure that the weight that you lose is permanent, you will find that you need to eat fewer calories than what you burn if you want to lose six pounds a week. Try walking a little further every day. It will clear your mind, and you will find that it can also do wonders to speed up your metabolism.

When you have cut the sugar, carbohydrates and fat out of your diet and started a fitness program, you might think you have the key to weight loss but as your metabolism adjusts, you might find that your weight plateaus. What to do here is to fool your brain signals of fat storing or fat burning hormones into controlling your metabolism.

Your diet plan may eventually stop working when you are having a very restrictive diet. This is because your body metabolism has changed to adapt with fewer calorie, less sugar and fewer carbohydrates and hold on to fat stores in your cells. At this point you may feel that you are on the starvation mode. Therefore, running into this obstacle is what makes many people give up and gain back the weight that they started. Some even gaining more weight than they were when they started their weight loss endeavor.

If you want to know how to lose weight, you need to balance food types, learn about portion sizes, nutritional requirements and fat burning techniques. By eating different foods and different times throughout the day, you can speed your metabolism up without strenuous exercise and burn more calories.

When you are thinking about how burn fat through good nutrition, you will find that it is possible to lose eleven pounds every eleven days as long as you pay attention to the portions that are being used and the foods that you are consuming.