10 Tips to Help You Lose 10 Pounds in just a Month
Losing 10 pounds in just a month is a difficult task, but it is doable if you follow the right strategies. The key is to avoid crash diets, calorie restriction, and excessive exercise, and instead focus on developing healthy habits that you can maintain in the long run.
Remember that losing weight requires eating a healthy diet and sticking to a consistent exercise routine in order to burn more calories than you consume. We'll go over how to do just that in this section.
1. Track Your Calories
To lose weight, you must consume fewer calories than you burn. The number of calories you need to eat each day to lose weight varies greatly depending on your age, current weight, height, gender, and activity level.
The first step is to determine how many calories you require to maintain your weight. You can estimate your calorie requirements by using the Dietary Guidelines for Americans chart, which breaks it down by age, gender, and activity level.
To get a more precise figure, use a calorie tracking app to track your calorie intake.
Aim for 2 pounds per week.
Once you have your daily calorie maintenance number, subtract it to get your daily calories for weight loss. According to the Mayo Clinic, if you want to lose 10 pounds in a month, you should aim to lose 2 pounds per week, which means you should cut or burn 1,000 calories per day. This is the most weight loss that can be considered safe and sustainable. (You may be tempted to speed things up by lowering your calorie intake even further, but this can backfire, making weight loss more difficult and potentially harmful to your health).
Keep in mind that you should not eat less than 1,500 calories per day — this is considered the minimum calorie count for weight loss because eating less puts you at risk for nutritional deficiencies and other health problems.
2. Concentrate on your Fibre intake. intake.
According to a February 2015 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, simply aiming for 30 grammes of fibre per day could help you lose weight as effectively as a more complicated diet.
Foods high in fibre include:
Squash acorn
Avocados
Beans
Berries
Edamame
Peas in green
Lentils
Seeds (chia, flaxseed)
Yummy sweet potatoes
If you need some support with your diet and food prep - including sourcing out healthy grocery lists, check out our BodyRock Meal Plan here.
3. Make lean protein a priority.
Most people, women in particular, aren’t getting enough of the right types of protein on a daily basis. If you're trying to lose weight, don't cut back on protein; instead, increase your intake of this nutrient, according to a December 2019 meta-analysis of 18 studies published in Advances in Nutrition.
Why protein?
Protein makes you feel full and helps you maintain lean muscle mass as you lose weight (which is beneficial because muscle burns more calories than fat).
How much Protein do you need each day?
Aim for 1.3 grammes of protein per kilogramme of body weight, with a kilogramme equaling 2.2 pounds. For example, if you weigh 200 pounds, you should aim to consume 118 grammes of protein per day. The formula is as follows:
1.3 x (your body weight / 2.2) = grammes of protein per day
To save calories, choose lean protein-rich foods such as:
Breast of Chicken, Lentils, Ground Turkey, Salmon, Tofu, Yogurt.
4. Reduce Empty Calories
Soda, we're looking at you (and other sweetened beverages). Sugary drinks provide no nutrients, but they can add a lot of calories to your day.
Indeed, a review published in Obesity Reviews in August 2013 concluded unequivocally that sugar-sweetened beverages cause weight gain.
Replace soda, energy drinks, and other high-calorie beverages with water or unsweetened seltzer.
A Massive Impact on your weight loss.
The impact of making the change to zero-calorie drinks (with water on the top of that list) cannot be understated. Think about the calories in the liquids that you are drinking. Stop putting flavours in your coffee, stop asking for 400+ calorie bombs drinks at Starbucks, be aware of the calories in those cold beers. Most people don’t count liquid calories - or seem to be even aware of them. Clean up your go-to drinks, there are likely hundreds of daily calories to be saved there.
5. Get Plenty of Water
According to the American Council on Exercise, you should make sure you're drinking plenty of water to stay hydrated, which helps your body function properly (including burning calories).
According to an August 2015 study published in Obesity, drinking a full glass of water about a half hour before each meal may help prevent overeating.
How much water should I be drinking a day?
A good general rule of thumb is to consume half your body weight in ounces per day. So, if you weigh 200 pounds, aim for 100 ounces of water per day.
6. Avoid Highly Processed Foods
Because research has linked ultra-processed foods to weight gain and obesity (think: those with very long ingredient lists packed with unfamiliar terms), limiting or avoiding these foods will aid in your weight-loss journey.
According to a review published in Current Treatment Options in Gastroenterology in November 2019, the main culprits are:
Potato Chips
Desserts and sweets
Sugary beverages
Refined Grains (white rice and foods made with white flour, like white bread and crackers, for example)
Meats, both red and processed
Breakthrough Moment
There are a lot of things to research and consider with all of these nutritional tips. It can be challenging to bring it all together into something aligned and actionable. Instead of taking all of that on, why not check out our simple to follow Meal Plans. Our plans are designed for weight loss, and to make sure that you are eating healthy, whole and delicious foods that cover off all of the ‘tips and tricks’ on how to take control of your diet in a way that is both enjoyable and sustainable. We have an Omnivore Plan, A Vegan / Vegetarian Plan, and an Intermittent Fasting Plan. Having a plan is a lot like having a map - you need one to realize any measurable, long term gains. Get on a good, balanced plan - it will give you the foundation and knowledge that you need to make truly transformative changes.
7. Maintain a Cardiovascular Exercise Routine
Losing weight requires more than just a change in diet. You'll also need a workout plan if you want to lose 10 pounds in a month.
The CDC recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity cardio (walking, biking) or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity cardio (running, swimming) per week to achieve (and maintain) a healthy weight. It does, however, mention that some people may need to do more to see the scale move.
This workout was made for you.
BodyRock HIIT Workout #12 leads you through an abs & core focused burn.
Here at BodyRock.Tv we’ve launched a new workout series called the ‘BodyRock 12 Minute HIIT workout’. Each episode delivers a full body workout, and often the workouts focus on going after the big, fat burning muscles, like when we focus down on lower body. Each BodyRock HIIT workout is just 12 Minutes - which has been scientifically proven to be the most effective workout format for fat loss and general athletic conditioning (tone and lean muscle definition, endurance, agility).
Free workout program.
We publish our free BodyRock HIIT workouts 3X per week, here in the Blogs section of the site. Want a text notification when our free workouts go live? Shoot us a TEXT at our HIIT HOTLINE: 1-775-254-9738. It’s a free service, and it will help keep you motivated and on track to succeed.
Move More.
Choose a cardio activity that you enjoy and that you can do for at least 30 minutes most days of the week. Here are some suggestions:
Running, walking, hiking, swimming, cycling.
8. Increase the Intensity of Your Workouts
BodyRock HIIT workout #5 largely targets the lower body.
Everywhere you look online, it will advise you if you are looking to lose 10 pounds, that you should include high-intensity interval training (HIIT) in your exercise routine.
HIIT entails alternating between periods of exercise (we do 50 seconds here at BodyRock) with short recovery periods (10 seconds). The BodyRock HIIT workout is 12 minutes - or 12 rounds of exercise for 50 seconds each.
According to a February 2018 review in Sports Medicine that looked at 39 studies on the topic, HIIT workouts are one of the most effective ways to burn fat and lose weight.
More for Less.
The best part is that these workouts are quick. In a January 2017 study published in the Journal of Diabetes Research, people who did HIIT for 12 minutes lost the same amount of body fat as those who did moderate-intensity exercise for 26 minutes.
Boost Your Results Further.
The above study was conducted with the participants bodyweight only - meaning that they did not use weights or additional resistance in the study. Our trainers often wear our BodyRock wrist and ankle weights specifically designed to boost the burn of a HIIT workout (they stay in place extremely well), as well as a BodyRock weighted vest.
By wearing this added resistance, you are optimizing every movement your body makes during the workout. By automatically making each exercise load bearing (weighted) you fusing together HIIT and Strength Training into one hyper efficient fat burning training experience. Wearing your weight on your body gives you the added benefit of having your hands 100% free for balance, to assist your movements, or to do any push / pull movements with resistance bands.
9. Strength Training.
Cardio exercises burn calories in the short term, but strength training promotes long-term weight loss and maintenance by helping you build muscle, which, as previously stated, burns more calories than fat (aka supports a higher metabolism).
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends doing full-body muscle-strengthening activities at least twice a week (we have you covered with 3X workouts per week). So, if you want to lose 10 pounds with the help of exercise, you should consider purchasing either the wearable weights mentioned directly above or a dynamic, multi-purpose resistance band like our Pink Thing.
Not sure where to begin? Let us send you some free workouts to try. Just TEXT us at our HIIT HOTLINE: 1-775-254-9738, and we will send you a free workout when they drop.
10. Get Adequate Sleep
You can absolutely (100%) sabotage your weight loss if you don't get enough sleep. Read that again. It’s not a small point.
According to an October 2010 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, cutting calories while sleep-deprived causes a loss of lean muscle mass rather than fat.
Furthermore, according to a November 2019 study published in the Journal of Lipid Research, people who don't get enough sleep tend to store fat faster and feel less satisfied after eating (which can lead to overeating and weight gain).
According to the CDC, adults should get at least seven hours of sleep per night.
I hope that you guys found some value and inspiration in today’s post. We are putting a lot of energy into the new BodyRock HIIT workout series - please let your friends and family know about our workouts and what we are doing here.
If you have been following the workouts, please text us on the HIIT HOTLINE (above) to get free notifications of when new workouts drop.
Best,
Freddy