Lose 20 Pounds in the Next Eight Weeks!

There is a secret to losing weight and keeping it off for good. It's the same secret to losing weight fast. But before disclosing that secret , let's take a second look at the story of America's most famous dieter, Subway spokesperson Jared Vogle.

Growing up in a Jewish home in Indianapolis, Indiana, his father was a doctor, his mother a teacher, Jared was already raised to have healthy habits growing up. During his teenage years, however, Jared developed an "eating problem." As he was later to tell CBS television's program 48 Hours, "Food was comfort to me. It replaced personal relationships. It replaced extracurricular activities. It replaced everything in my life."

Even before he reached the age of 20, Jared had some serious problems related to his weight. Weighing between 400 and 450 pounds (which is 190 and 210 in kilos), Jared found that his weight was physically painful for him to handle. His joints began to hurt even when he was simply lying down. It was difficult for him to to breathe. Like many other people of extreme weight, Jared had to be careful not to break any of the furniture. The emotional pain that Jared cured with eating food was replaced by the physical pain directly related to being overweight.

It's not exactly easy to keep up a weight of 450 pounds. Jared made a habit of consuming approximately 10,000 calories a day. Jared would start his day with a cup of coffee laced with a shocking 10 packets of sugar and 10 creams. He would then eat two or more bacon-and-egg breakfast sandwiches and an extra-large order of hashed brown potatoes.

Lunch was usually a whole meat-and-cheese pizza, with extra meat and cheese, topped off by a big dessert. For a mid-afternoon snack, Jared would eat two large bean and meat burritos, again with extra meat and cheese. Jared would take dinner at an all-you-can-eat Chinese food buffet, making around two or three trips to the buffet table, with ice cream for dessert. And then Jared would top it all of with a late-night snack which was often a burger, fries, and pie.

When Jared reached age 21, in 1998, he concluded that his physical pain was finally greater than the pains that caused him to overeat in the first place. That's when he noticed that the Subway sandwich shop near his apartment was advertising seven different sandwiches with just six grams of fat each, and Jared calculated that he could lose weight by eating two Subway sandwiches and a bag of no-fat chips/crisps every day, consuming nothing else but water. Jared resolved to find the willpower to follow his drastic diet and the rest, as the classic cliché goes, is history.

Jared lost about 20 pounds (9 kilos) a month for a whole year, somehow finding the discipline and willpower to stick to his diet the whle time. Once wearing pants with 62-inch (160-cm) waistline, Jared lost enough weight, and kept the weight off, so that in 2010 he was able to finish the New York City Marathon, running the 26-mile (42-km) course in 5 hours, 13 minutes, and 28 seconds. Jared got his weight down to 190 pounds (87 kilos) and then gained about 30 pounds (14 kilos) back, but he has remained relatively thin, and far more healthy, for nearly 14 years.

Jared shows us how to lose weight and keep it off, but is the secret really Subway sandwiches. It's actually something more subtle, as two more weight loss stories reveal.

 

The Secret to Losing Weight and Keeping It Off, Whether It's a Little, or a Lot

Jared Vogle has the best-known weight loss story, but his is hardly the only one, and women can be equally successful with their own plans. Donna Lennart, whose story was featured in Good Housekeeping, has followed Weight Watchers for five years, reducing her weight from 243 pounds (110 kilos) to 160 pounds (72 kilos), and keeping it off. Chris Spirou's weight ballooned to 270 pounds (132 kilos)--and then she got pregnant. She managed pregnancy and gestational diabetes and then stuck to Jenny Craig to lose 130 pounds and keep it off four four years.

But what if you don't need to lose 200 pounds? What if you just need to lose 20 pounds? Scientific research tells us that the principles that worked for Jared, Donna, and Chris can also work for you.

Sponsors of the meal replacement product Healthy Solutions sponsored research in the use of calorie-restricted diets to encourage moderate weight loss. Healthy Solutions dieters were told to eat as many of the company's 300-calorie meals as they wanted (at separate times, not all stirred together in a great big bowl!), up to 5 meals a day. They also encouraged dieters to eat all the fresh fruit and vegetables they wanted.

In the Healthy Solutions study, dieters took advantage of the permission to eat all the fruit and vegetables they could, and most ate five of the prepackaged, restricted calorie meals as well. But the average participant in the study lost 44 pounds (20 kilos) in three months, and kept it off as long as they continued to use the prepared meals.

In another study, also funded by the makers of Healthy Solutions, Dr. James W. Anderson of the University of Kentucky tracked the progress of people who had lost 100 pounds or more with meal replacement products. Those who continued to use meal replacements after they had reached their target weight loss an average of 137.4 pounds (63 kilos) during the initial diet, but continued to maintain a weight loss of 90 pounds (41 kilos) even four years later. Those who were unsuccessful on the diet were those who ate too little, especially when a lack of fat in the diet triggered gallbladder disease.

What is the common element of Jared Vogel's Subway Diet, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, and Healthy Solutions, for dieters who make those programs work?
 

Dozens of diet plans work for a month, two months, or maybe even a year, but diet plans that require the dieter to make the decisions, and do the shopping, and the cooking, and the cleaning up, usually fail. Buying a digital scale and weighing your food, buying a digital scale and weighing yourself, drinking 8 glasses of water every day, telling everybody you know that you are trying to lose weight, and especially planning to diet for a few weeks and then go back to your old ways of eating, simply do not work.

The weight-loss method that works for both the short term and the long term is letting vegetables and fruit fill your stomach and letting someone else you can trust count your calories. Then when you reach your target weight, continue letting someone else do the calorie counting for you, but eating all the low-calorie food you need to fill you up.