Coming from someone who lost 40 pounds in about 3.5 months back in the summer before junior year of
High School, I'll tell you what I did(and it works to this day if I ever go on vacation and put on 2-3 extra pounds from laziness
). I also started at about 185 and worked my way down to 145, and have remained at a steady 150 for about 5 years now(and started martial arts and turned my life around
).
This is high school, so I had pretty much free summers, but you can always use an abbreviated version of this schedule for yourself. Starting at 185, and starting on June 1st -- I knew that being a male, it takes about 2500-2600 calories for me just to maintain my weight. I cut that down to 1800-2000 calories a day by doing the following:
Breakfast: Oatmeal in milk, Banana, Water
Lunch: Turkey Sandwich(cannibalism!), Cheese(string cheese, slice of cheese, block of cheese cut from a one of those huge hunks -- I need my cheese), Banana, and water.
Dinner: Whatever was served, but I never ate anything exceeding 500 calories. Anything you want, you can eat here up to that 500 calorie limit. Ah, and Water.
Before I slept(after my last workout): Whey protein in milk
As you can see, dairy was a huge part of my diet, and I'm a firm believer in its metabolism kicking activities. Never once did I feel hungry with this diet and it always evened out to ~2000 calories.
For the workout part:
Walk 3 times a day, 30 minutes. That's about it...my mp3 player is my best friend here. Just keep rotating new music/entire new albums onto it and you won't even realize how fast your walk goes by. The reason I walked 3 times a day was that I wanted to burn 600 calories a day, and each 30 minute walk session burned about 200-230 calories.
So with my intial calorie deficit from eating right, I was cutting out 500-600 calories, and on top of that I was losing about 600 calories from walking. That's about 1200 calories a day, which in 3 days would mean I lose 1 pound of fat(1 pound = 3500 calories). I lost about 2.5 pounds a week, and every 28 days(man, I have this HUGE journal of those 4+ months, all 130 days) I would drop 10-12 pounds. I dropped more because I took every opportunity I could to substitute some full court basketball for a single walk. And did you know for a 170 pound person, a 60 minute full court basketball game burns close to 700+ calories? It's pretty insane...
Hehe yeah...so basically in 112 days, I had dropped about 35-38 pounds. I settled about 3-4 pounds higher than that in the end though, and I've stayed there ever since.
If you simply abbreviate this schedule and take two walks a day(morning and night) you won't be very much behind either. Probably end up losing 8-10 pounds every 28 days(very good rate).
Ah yes, and why did I drink that whey shake right before I slept? Well, sleep stacks(or things body builders eat before they sleep) are for the purpose of increasing the effectiveness of sleep. They do crazy things like take a Zinc/Mg complex about 2 hours before they sleep, then eat oatmeal and cottage cheese because cottage cheese contains the slow-absorbing protein casein, which will "repair" you all night as you sleep. I take whey with milk(and not with water) before I sleep because it makes the whey absorb slower, throughout the night. I'm a firm believer that if you eat the right thing before you sleep, no harm will come of it.
Good luck in all your fat-dropping endeavors, just my 2 cents
edit: Btw, this walk-plan also increases your endurance dramatically without you getting sore. I did it every sincle day as well -- just fight through it if you feel the slightest bit sore. Did you know orangutans (or chimps, I can't remember) walk four miles a day and they're not even made to walk :O. We humans should at least do a bit more (each 30 minute session was 2 miles, so in the end I aimed to do 6 miles of "travelling" a day).
