Just for reference. I am a heavy beer drinker. But can do 5 miles a day if i push myself.

  • Baggie@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    52
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    7 days ago

    No idea, but any diet that involves weight loss will also need you to quit beer entirely.

  • isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    27
    ·
    7 days ago

    A pound of fat equates to, very roughly, 3500 calories. So you would need a deficit of over 2300 calories per day to lose that much weight in a month. Try to keep your calorie level above 1200/day at a minimum. So if you’re drinking so much beer and eating so much food you’re currently consuming 3500 calories/day or more, then yes, it would be possible. But that’s not exactly a healthy amount of weight loss. Even halving the rate would still be pretty aggressive. I get wanting to see tangible progress, but I would strongly encourage you to do this over two months instead of over a month.

  • Siegfried@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    4 days ago

    I did something like this a few years ago, dropped from 96 to 76kg in three months (44 lb?). You have to know that this rate of weight loss is unhealthy.

    If you are serious about it, aome tips,

    • more than 3l water per day, cut any other drink

    • only eat what you can cook/prepare

    • limit to salad, chicken and fruit. Some fishes are ok and you can add starch only if it’s cold (pasta, potatoes, rice)

    • cut sugar and alcohol to zero

    • 3 days running, 3 days on the gym (you are going to lose a lot of muscule)

    • get an appointment with a doctor and ask for a diet

    • get an app to count calories

    • “free days” are the demon

    Also, one of my worst battles with this was not the diet but everybody around me that is conatantly pushing you to break the diet. At home, my mither got offended because i prepared my meals, my friends were uncomfortable because i only ordered water at bars, people at my workplace was constantly teasing me because “how can you eat this trash”.

    Get an appointment with a nutritionist.

  • scutiger@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    7 days ago

    20 lbs of fat is 70,000 Calories. That means that you need to be at a net deficit of about 2300 Calories daily to lose 20lbs in a month. That’s a huge deficit which would require eating little and working very hard to hit anything near that.

    • Mikina@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      6 days ago

      Is this how the math works? It feels weird - I remember recommended intake for me being around 2000 or something (for a regular 30y.o semi-active male), which would make this require getting into negative calorie intake.

      I know literally nothing about this, though. Or are the 70 000 calories factored from how much a body burns? So, it’s basically impossible in 30 days for someone whose daily burn-rate is lower than 2300, based on his age/sex/activity?

      • scutiger@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        6 days ago

        Basically for every 3500 excess Calories consumed, your body stores about 1 lb of fat, and for every 3500 Calories burned, you lose about 1 lb of fat. If your intake is equal to your output, there’s nothing being stored.

        You would have to get that burn rate 2300 Calories above the intake rate, so yeah if your daily output is 2300 Calories, you’d have to eat literally nothing for 30 days to lose 20 lbs.

  • MalReynolds@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    7 days ago

    Everyone here talking calories and forgetting water weight. Boxers etc. will drop carbs entirely to make a weight cut-off. Two aspects to consider here, glycogen and inflammation, both of which store water. If you are not fat adapted and stop carbs your glycogen will deplete (~500g glycogen + 4x that in water, 2.5kg = 5+lbs), also called hitting the wall in endurance sports.

    If you have systemic inflammation your fat cells will carry a bunch of extra water (you know when your ankle swells up after twisting, that’s water from inflammation), so removing inflammatory stimuli, foods, environment can cause that to get peed out. Depending how many fat cells, the amount will vary, but could easily be 5kg if obese.

    This is how people lose dramatic amounts of weight in the first few weeks of diet. Actually removing fat is a lot harder, but it starts in the kitchen.

    • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      6 days ago

      Yup. Dropping 5+ lbs of water weight in a day or two is possible, especially when targeting glycogen stores.

      Even burning fat or metabolizing protein releases retained water, although not at the same high ratio as with glycogen.

  • nitroemdash@lemmy.wtf
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    6 days ago

    The normal pace is 1 kg/week (~2lb), faster diet will lead to your body malforming, but it’s definitely possible.

    Also exercise is not as important as proper diet. It’s better to do no exercise and eat little than burn many calories and eat even more.

  • BananaTrifleViolin@piefed.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    6 days ago

    It very much depends on starting weight. Is it possible? Theoretically, yes. Is it safe? No, unlikely for most people.

    20lbs or 9kg is a month is extreme weight loss. To lose 1kg of fat, you need a deficit of 7700kcals. For 9 kg that’s 69,300 kcals deficit needed over the month. Lets say thats over 28 days / 4 weeks: that’d be an average deficit of 2,475 kcals every day.

    An average 30 year old man, who weighs say 80kg and average height.

    • Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) - 1750 kcal a day
    • Total Daily Energy Expenditure (BMR x activity factor, lets say 1.2 assuming they are sedentary) - 2,100 kcal a day.

    So they need 2100kcal a day just to stay as they are. If they did nothing else, the maximum possible deficit they could have is to eat nothing - but they’d only achieve 2100kcal deficit a day, and they’d not last very long.

    For that person to lose 9kg in a month, they would realistically need to massively increase their exercise. Even if they increased their daily energy expenditure to 3,323 kcal a day (1.9 x BMR for a very active person), they’d then need to calorie restrict their diet to only 848 kcal a day to achieve the deficit. Even then a 848kcal intake is dangerously low intake and would require very careful management. And somehow that person would also need to have enough intake to feel able to do all that extra exercise.

    It would put the body under extreme stress and be very difficult to maintain.

    Now if the person was very severely obese - lets say 200kg - the BMR would be 2949kcal (it takes energy just to maintain the fat), and the TDEE would be about 3540kcal if sedentary (even doing nothing, they use more energy). In that situation, if they suddenly became very active, they could boost their TDEE to say 4000-4500 kcal, and would be able to eat 1690-2190kcal a day, and still have a 2475kcal a day deficit. They could lose the 9kg weight in a month. However it is not very realistic for a severely obese person to go from sedentary to extreme activity in such a short period, and maintain it, and while calorie restricting too.

    So it could be done by an obese person, but it’s not realistic then and certainly not for anyone who is only overweight.

    A big mistake people make when they try to lose weight is to try and fix the problem as fast as possible. But fast dieting leads to over exertion, over strenuous food restriction, failure and then despair. Even 1kg a week lose is a very high rate and difficult to sustain. Instead of trying to lose as much as possible in a month, it’s better to aim for a sustainable amount every week for a long time - such as 0.5kg. 6 months of sustained slow lose is generally much more successful and achievable than crash/fast/extreme diets that just fail over and over for 6 months. And generally when people do slow diets, they change habits and have a better chance of maintaining it.

    If someone is actually considering a diet then the real key is: don’t make it a speed race, make it a marathon. Slightly reduce intake, slightly increase activity every day, and aim for a slow but steady loss. A 550kcal deficit every day is much much easier than trying to rush with 1100kcal deficit, and allows a sustainable lifestyle. For example the 80kg 30 year old person could do moderate exercise (e.g. 10,000 steps a day just walking), they could realistically consume 1900-2000kcal a day, maintain a 550kcal deficit each day and lose 0.5kg every week. In a month they’d lose 2kg, and in 4.5 months they’d lose 9kg.

  • zeppo@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    edit-2
    7 days ago

    Sure, I lost 28 lbs in one month when I was first developing type 1 diabetes.

    Other than that, you might want to do calorie calculations. Exercise is great, but it takes a surprising amount of work to counter a given amount of calories. I’ve been tracking my walking with an app that estimates calories, and 4-5 miles is just getting started. I’ve been walking 6-10 miles a day. The app and online sources say 5 miles burns ~500 calories, which is 2-3 beers depending on the type. So exercise like that might be able to stave off weight gain, but it’s unlikely to result in weight reduction. You’d likely want to analyze your diet and cut out any calories over what is medically necessary. Burning more than what you take in results in weight loss. Just be sure you’re covering the basic macros, especially protein, and getting enough electrolytes and vitamins.

    • furby@infosec.pub
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      7 days ago

      Ketoacidosis for the weightloss win! But also death. That said ketogenesis works pretty well for weight loss so cutting out carbs can help cut fat - but loosing that fast you may end up with loose skin to such an extent that the aesthetic weight loss isn’t worth it.

      Few carbs, drink water and walk far - let us know how you get on!

  • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    6 days ago

    Yes, and more. I dropped 40 pounds in about a month. Although it was due to extreme stress, so I don’t recommend that. But, it is physically possible, so there are other routes you can try.

    You’ve probably heard it before, but the key to quick fat loss is dropping carbs, including beer. Sorry.

    Track your carbs using a macro tracking app, because you don’t know how many carbs you are eating, you just don’t, and you’ll be surprised. Once you learn which foods are full of carbs, you can stop using the app, it’s just a learning tool, not something you need to keep doing.

    Get it below 100g a day, and watch the fat burn away, and you’ll start feeling so much better, after the first couple of weeks. It can be a hard adjustment for some people, but it’s worth it.

    Exercise is only about 20% of it, diet is 80%, which makes sense. It’s much easier to not consume the food in the first place, than to burn it off after it’s already fat.

    However, to be healthy, not just lose fat, you need to do both diet and exercise. That’s why it’s always presented that way--“diet AND exercise”, not “diet OR exercise”.

    It’s best to make the commitment to a permanent lifestyle change, rather than just aiming for a goal weight and then going back to drinking beer every day. You’ll QUICKLY gain the fat back, faster than you lost it, and that is disheartening.

    If you just give up, you could end up with type 2 diabetes in 15 or 20 years, and that makes being old much worse. So, it’s worth the effort.

  • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    6 days ago

    Of course you can, the question is should you?

    If you don’t eat for a month you’d drop 10 kilos. But then you’d grow them back with interest.

    Better to lose maximum 1 kilo (2 lbs) per month if you really want to lose it.

    And yeah, beer isn’t the way forward for sure, except if you aim for a big belly and skinny legs…

    Ditching all sugars is a good start IMO.

    Good luck!

  • garbagebagel@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    6 days ago

    Stop drinking beer.

    If you’re serious and your doctor thinks it’s fine (and you have some extra money) you can go on a glp-1 but even then a doctor wouldn’t recommend more than 2 lbs / week. I know people that have lost 10-15 lbs in the first few weeks so I’m sure it’s not out of the question. There are healthier ways to lose weight though.

  • zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    6 days ago

    You can drop 20 pounds in a month, but you probably shouldn’t unless your overall size and weight make 20 pounds not as significant as it would be to the average human.

  • CubitOom@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    7 days ago

    Drink lots of water, to help with skin elasticity. Losing more than 3 lbs a week normally results in extra saggy skin.

  • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    7 days ago

    Generally it’s best not to focus on losing weight but on adjusting calorie intake. Because muscle weighs more than fat, water weighs more than either, and the goal is generally to feel fit, not light.

    When wrestling I used to do the “drop a kilo class” thing by bulking up in a way that could rapidly store water, then running to temporarily shed that water before weigh in, then immediately rehydrate up to the next weight class. That was usually around 10 lbs of weight, but I was dropping it and regaining within a 6 hour period.

    Losing weight for health reasons isn’t going to be the same for everyone. Personally I find the best way for me to lose weight is to increase my metabolism, which I find I can do through endurance running in threshold temperatures. But for other people that just makes them tired and hungry without their metabolism adjusting. And without the metabolic change, you don’t get the added benefit of literally burning off stored energy.

    Also, depleting fat cells isn’t the same as removing fat cells. Those cells are still there, and it’s going to take months for cellular change to happen in your body. So 20 lbs of weight loss in a month will mostly be loss of water, muscle, and energy stored in the fat cells. And as soon as you stop starving yourself, it’ll all come back. And that can happen in a matter of days.