Yes: get liposuction, or amputate a limb.

Seriously, though, it's impossible. Your body won't do it. Remember: to lose a pound of fat you have to burn off 3200 calories above and beyond what you consume. That's presuming a *normal* metabolism. If you crash diet, your metabolism gets way below normal. Plus, the more times you do this, the slower you permanantly make your metabolism.

You can try it, but if you lose 20 lbs in ten days without surgical intervention, I'll eat my computer.

So lemme guess: you have a big party or trip next Friday. It's too late to be sweating over weight, just try to have fun, anyway.

I agree it is impossible to lose 20lbs in 10 days. Unless you never dieted before, and you have 20lbs of water retention. 1 or 2 lbs a week is healthy.....

I have to agree that losing 20 pounds in 10 days is probably not possible, and in any case it's really not a good idea. Having said that, however, Fran McCullough's "Living Low Carb" offers some ideas on emergency weight loss:

"First of all, pull out all the stops with the supplements: liver cleansing, L-carnitine, omega-3s. Drink even more water than usual - a gallon a day wouldn't be too much - and exercise even more than usual. Eat enough protien but not too much, and try to keep it to fish, eggs, and protien shakes. Cut back drastically on the dairy products or eliminate them altogether. Keep fruit to an absolute minimum. Drop the alcohol. Be careful about nuts, and emphasize green vegetables and salad. Check to be sure your calories are somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500, depending on your size.

"Don't follow this regimen for more than two weeks at a time; you don't want to send your body into starvation mode, which will slow down your metabolism and leave you with a permanent limited calorie budget (McCullough 65)."

Hope that helps.

Absolutely possible. The Catabolic or negative calorie diet does it for people every day. One guy lost 60 pounds in 60 days. You can check this diet out at www.barke.com. Be sure to drink the Appple cider vinegar recommended (filtered, unpasteurized - from health food store); the tablets are not the same, nor is pasteurized ACV from the supermarket.

This guy emailed me and said to drink the ACV and do 30 minutes of exercise each day. This is a LC diet as well - that's how it started off, then the doctor recommending it noticed that people actually lost more weight on this diet that people who are fasting. The negative calorie foods are listed on this site as well.

Good Luck.

Hate to break it to you, but the concept of negative calories is a scam. The amount of calories you burn digesting food is practially nil. The muscles involved have been working virtually 24/7 since the day you were born: they're very efficient. All they do is move stuff, very slowly, through your digestive tract. The rest of the work is chemical. There's no way it burns many calories at all. People who lose weight on that diet do so because they're eating a ton of fruit and vegetables and lower their overall calorie intake. They'd lose more than someone fasting because fasting causes your metabolism to hit the floor.

My personal rule: never trust anything sold via MLM.

The only way someone could lose that much weight in a short period of time would be if s/he was very overweight. The original poster was only 160 lbs.

Kristine,

I'm dealing with this negative food theory on a different board - these girls even list steak, meat, fish, all kinds of fruit, etc. as "negative calorie" (I won't jump on that band-waggon until they add chocolate). I have searched the net and all I can find are Pro-sites.

Do you know any good sources that document that this is bogus?

I'll keep looking, too.

Thank you.

Hi Kristine,

I know how you feel about this and that's okay. I went from 185 to 172 pounds in one week. My goal weight is 140 which would put me at a BMI of 23%. As you note about the guy who lost 60 pounds, I had a lot of weigt to lose, maybe that's why I lost 13 lbs in one week.

Whether it's negative calorie or whatever, it worked for me when I wanted to lose weight fast. I also lost more when I ate more vegetables. I think the meat is what makes this work so well since this is a major source of calories and fat. This is the original low carb diet.

It would have made sense to me if the list of 'negative calorie' foods were all very low calorie: lettuce, celery... but pineapple and other sugary fruit? And they claim that you can eat cake, as long as you also pig out on the 'negative calorie' stuff to make up for it? There's no good science to back it up. At least Atkins and other low-carb proponents can back up their claims.

Thelma: I tried finding the links with a google search, but guess what? A google search only turns up MLM pages of people who want you to pay money for the "e-book." I tried searching with the terms "scam" or "myth" thrown in, and it didn't help much.

Okay, I finally found:

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/psych...y/catabolic.htm

http://www.cableone.net/kkelly/articles/catabolic.html

Note that part of the "scientific evidence" supporting this diet is the fact that it works three times faster than starvation. Well, starvation shuts down your metabolism. Any diet works better than starvation. But there's simply no food that requires your body to burn energy just to digest that food. Now that doesn't mean you won't lose weight if you eat a lot of the foods on that list, thereby going on a calorie-reduced diet - but their whole marketing scheme seems to be based on deceptive advertising, IMHO.

Thanks Kristine,

I didn't mean for you to go through any trouble, just thought that you might have some links already available. So again, big thanks.

I had tried that search at google with scam and myth, too, but apparently, I gave up scanning the resultes too soon....

No problem: actually, I should bookmark them myself, because I often come across people who ask about it on other boards and stuff.