How To Lose 10 Pounds In A Month: Safe & Useful Tips In 2024

Is it realistic to lose 10 pounds in a month? It is possible to lose ten pounds in a month. Various paths lead to a healthy weight; you must identify the habits that suit you best.

You may be one of the fortunate people who are able to lose weight and accomplish long-term weight loss without an exercise routine merely by eating a healthy diet. 

Or you may be someone who needs a weight loss plan consisting of a combination of healthier eating, exercise, and someone like a trainer to motivate them along the way.  Starting or enhancing fat burning requires goal-setting, dedication, and time to find your ideal approach

How To Lose 10 Pounds A Month 

Hydrate Often

Though it may be a challenge for some, drinking adequate amounts of water is one of the best ways to lose 10 pounds in a month. Besides adding zero calories to your diet, hydration supplies you with essential energy to build muscle and reduces your calorie consumption by feeling full. 

Additionally, no biological or chemical reactions happen without water. Drinking a glass of water when waking in the morning and before each meal can help you feel more satisfied and consume fewer calories. Like many energy drinks, sugary drinks contain calories that may prevent you from losing weight.

Furthermore, dehydration, or lack of sufficient water intake, can cause a decrease in your metabolism, increase your body mass index (BMI), and lead to obesity. None of these following tips have the potential to work nearly as well if you are not supplying your body with the water it needs.

To know how much water you should be drinking in a day, take your body weight, divide it in half, and drink that many ounces of water per day at a minimum. Depending on your activity level, you may need more. 

Aerobic Exercise

Aerobic exercise is one of the most efficient ways to meet weight loss goals and burn more calories. This type of exercise is also called cardio, short for cardiovascular exercise, which gets your heart rate up and provides your muscles with the oxygen they need to keep moving. 

The strength and energy to keep your body moving come from the oxygen you create with exercise and the body fat, carbs, and protein your body stores. The more you utilize cardio exercises, the more success you may have at losing fat. 

Besides many of the cardio machines available at a gym, like elliptical or stair-climbing machines, a few examples of aerobic exercises are 

• Bicycling
• Dancing
• Kickboxing
• Jumping rope
• Playing sports
• Running
• Rowing
• Swimming
• Zumba

The more you incorporate aerobic exercise into your routine, the more your body will increase its endurance and ability to work out for longer periods. 

If you’re just starting an exercise routine, aim for several minutes of continuous activity that gets your heart pumping and increases the length of time you exercise as you build stamina.

You may be wondering, how much exercise does it take to burn calories? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention^[1] gives a few examples of how many calories your body burns per 30 minutes of cardio exercise.

• Dancing- 165 calories
• Moderate walking- 140 calories
• Hiking- 185 calories
• Basketball- 220 calories
• Swimming- 255 calories
• Running or jogging at least 5 miles per hour- 295 calories

H.I.I.T. Workouts

Unlike aerobic exercises^[2] that use oxygen for energy, high-intensity interval training (H.I.I.T.) exercises are anaerobic, meaning they are movements that rely on the energy your muscles already have. 

These exercises start with lower-paced movements, then have moments of intense actions, and then transition to slower movements to reduce the intensity. Though brief, usually lasting 10-30 minutes, these powerful exercises can challenge and grow you during your weight loss journey.

H.I.I.T. can be combined with other exercises, like strength training or cardio. For example, you can walk for a couple of minutes and then burst into jogging or running hard for 30 seconds or a minute, then decrease the activity back down into walking, and repeat this several times for ten or more minutes to complete a H.I.I.T. routine. 

Studies show that H.I.I.T. can help reduce waist circumference and whole-body fat mass. You can also effectively do it in less time than other exercises. You can even accomplish a session of this exercise during a lunch break.  

Strength Training

Strength and resistance training is another form of anaerobic exercise and uses energy in short repetitive movements that burn fat, build muscle, and promote strong bones. The muscle you build from exercising this way helps to increase your metabolism since the more muscle you have, the more energy you’ll use. 

Building a lot of muscle can also help maintain your weight, thanks to an elevated metabolism and you can burn more calories even at rest. A large study^[3] over several years shows following a resistance training regimen can significantly reduce the risk of obesity.

Another study^[4] shows that increasing muscle mass may help reduce the need for food intake. Strength training^[5] may also help increase brown adipose tissue (BAT), which plays a prominent role in how your body burns fat.  

Spending at least one session with a certified personal trainer can increase your knowledge and skill on the best fat-burning exercises for your body. Strength and resistance training can be in your home, at a gym, or anywhere you can move around.

There are practical ways you can include strength training in your routine. Use these techniques 12-15 times each, and repeat three times for a focused workout.

• Resistance bands are rubber bands in different shapes, sizes, and firmness that resist stretching them, which strengthens your muscles. You can use this free-hand or suspension equipment that anchors one side of the bands.
• You can do repetitive planks, lunges, squats, pushups, and more using your body weight. This is a great way to start building muscle if you’re new to exercising.
• Lift weights like dumbbells, barbells, or kettlebells.
• Use weight machines at a gym or create your own home gym to increase your endurance. The instructions for use are generally on the machine. 

Healthy Eating

Making sure your eating habits consist of healthy foods will take care of your digestive system and increase your chances of weight loss. Decreasing your calorie intake may be helpful in losing weight, but each individual is different.

Recording a food journal can help you track what you’re eating and when you’re eating, making counting calories easier, as well as identifying where you’re going wrong if you tend to “cheat” unconsciously. Here are a few ways to optimize your healthy eating. 

Meal Prep

Planning and prepping your food before you need it can save you time and energy to spend working out or sleeping. It also helps ensure that you have a healthy meal waiting for you, making it less likely that you’ll overeat. 

Formulating a simple meal plan to lose 10 pounds in a month can help set you up for success. There are many resources online, or you can find a nutritional counselor to assist you.  

Prepping a high-protein breakfast with healthy fats is an excellent way to fuel your body for the day. Lunch and dinner with low-calorie alternatives like lean protein, brown rice, and vegetables can be a good choice. 

Increasing your nutrient and fiber content with foods like whole grain bread, green beans, wheat pasta, and avocado can help you to feel satisfied and lose weight.^[6]

Processed foods, like white bread, are often high in refined carbs and break down into sugar which can lead to weight gain. For example, you may want to avoid foods that stimulate hunger and increase carbohydrate intake, like refined whole-grain bread and refined wheat pasta, since their filling fiber content is often stripped away during processing.

Intermittent Fasting

This type of fasting has gained popularity as more physicians and celebrities share its benefits related to losing weight. This way of eating focuses on when you eat, not what you eat, and not on cutting calories. 

There are many fasting schedules to choose from, a common one being a 16-hour timeframe of fasting and eating all your daily calories within the other eight hours left in the day, like from 11 AM to 7 PM. 

While this type of fasting is not for everyone, a review of studies^[7] highlights that intermittent fasting promoted weight loss of 0.8% to 13.0%^[8] of baseline body weights while showing no adverse reactions.

Eating Slowly

When you eat slowly, you give your body time to start digesting the food, release hormones, and send signals to your brain that you’re full. 

This process takes about 20 minutes, meaning you can overeat what you’re able to consume in those 20 minutes! If you eat quickly, you consume calories your body may not need. 

This study on eating speed shows that eating slowly can reduce the risk of obesity, BMI, and waist circumference.

Get Enough Sleep

Getting enough sleep can play an essential role in fat loss and getting to your goal weight since sleep deprivation^[9] can lead to weight gain. Here’s how that works. 

Not getting enough sleep can raise ghrelin levels, a hormone that increases appetite. Sleep deprivation can also lower leptin levels, causing you to feel less complete, and tempting you to increase your calorie intake. It’s a double hormonal whammy toward weight gain.

The results of this recent study^[10] with 80 participants show that increasing their sleep time by 1.2 hours had a significant decrease in food intake, showing the potential that good sleep hygiene^[11] has to affect your weight. 

Just like lack of sleep can throw your hormones off balance, adequate rest and sleep can help rebalance your hormones and benefit your overall health. 

Try A Non-Stimulant Fat Burner Supplements

Fat burners are weight loss supplements that can boost your metabolism, reduce fat absorption, and reduce appetite to aid in weight loss.

Some contain stimulants like caffeine that can cause energy crashes, preventing you from an optimal day and burning as many calories as possible. There are some safe fat burners that have natural ingredients and no stimulants.

The Bottom Line

You can lose weight safely and follow our tips to increase your success in losing ten or more pounds within a month such as staying hydrated, doing aerobic and anaerobic exercises, H.I.I.T. exercises, strength and resistance training, eating healthy, getting adequate sleep, and taking non-stimulant fat burners.

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