How to Get Skinny Fast: 10 Ways to Become Skinnier

Before we get into how to get skinny quick, there’s something you need to understand:

There are many ways to “get skinny,” but most won’t leave you looking the way you want.

That’s because the majority of the advice you find online about how to get skinny really fast will leave you looking “skinny fat”—and that’s probably not what you’re gunning for. 

Most people want to be lean but not skinny, toned and not flabby, and strong and not . . . well . . . weak.

However, getting a body like this requires a slightly different approach to weight loss than “get skinny as quick as possible by any means necessary.”

In this article you’ll learn everything you need to know about how to get skinny fast without sacrificing health, muscle, happiness, or sanity in the process. 

How to Get Skinny Fast

There are many tactics you can use to trim your midsection and get skinny arms, legs, and so forth, but the 10 most important pivots are as follows: 

1. Maintain an aggressive calorie deficit. 
2. Do heavy resistance training.
3. Eat plenty of protein.
4. Plan your meals.
5. Eat a lot of fruits and vegetables.
6. Track your progress.
7. Limit liquid calories.
8. Do some cardio.
9. Get enough sleep.
10. Take the right supplements. 

And really, the first three are the straws that stir the drink. Get those right, and you’ll get skinny (and build muscle) without a hitch. Do the other seven tactics too, and you’ll get there faster and more enjoyably.

1. Maintain an aggressive calorie deficit.

To lose fat, you must eat fewer calories than you burn (known as a “calorie deficit”), because when you consume less energy than your body requires, it uses stored fat for fuel.

The larger your calorie deficit, the faster you’ll lose weight. Reduce your intake too much, however, and  you prime yourself for muscle loss and binge eating. 

Thus, striking a balance is crucial.

With this in mind, I recommend setting your calorie deficit at 20-to-25% (eat 20-to-25% fewer calories than you burn every day). This is enough to lose fat lickety-split without losing muscle or wrestling with excessive hunger, lethargy, and the other hobgoblins of low-calorie dieting.

2. Do heavy resistance training.

Lifting weights doesn’t just help you hold onto muscle while you’re dieting—it helps you lose fat, too.

To maximize the fat-burning effects of resistance training, do the following:

3. Eat plenty of protein.

One strategy most guides on how to become skinny fast overlook is eating enough protein.

This is a mistake. 

High-protein dieting beats low-protein in every way, especially when you’re dieting to get skinny fast.

To lose fat as quickly as possible, aim to eat 1-to-1.2 grams of protein per pound of body weight daily.

And if you’re very overweight (25%+ body fat in men and 30%+ in women), this can be reduced to around 40% of your total daily calories.

4. Plan your meals.

We make around 35,000 decisions per day. As the day wears on, and the number of decisions we make mounts, we begin to suffer from decision fatigue—the impaired ability to make decisions that are rational, pragmatic, and prudent.

That’s why it can be difficult to make healthy dinner choices after a long day at work, and why you often find yourself ordering take-out pizza rather than cooking the salmon you had waiting in your fridge. 

A solid solution to this stumbling block is to plan your meals ahead of time.

Doing so eliminates the need to make decisions about what to eat when you’re already tired, ensuring you always have pre-prepared healthy, nutritious meals that help you stick to your weight-loss goals.

5. Eat a lot of fruits and vegetables.

Including fruits and vegetables with every meal helps you get skinny quickly because they’re low in calories and fat, so you can enjoy generous portions without overshooting your calorie limit.

Vegetables also take more chewing than many other foods, and several studies show that foods that require prolonged chomping boost satiety and, thus, weight loss, more than soft-textured foods.

Some good options to include in your weight loss plan are:

6. Track your progress.

Tracking your progress is one of the best ways to keep yourself motivated to lose weight for two reasons: 

1. It quantifies your progress in a tangible, rewarding way.
2. It gives you real-time feedback indicating if you’re on the right track or need to adjust course.

If you want to be successful with your weight loss goals, track . . .

• Your average weight every 7-to-10 days
• The number of calories in all the food and drinks that pass your lips every day (if you’re following a meal plan, then this takes care of itself)

And if you want additional motivation and data to quantify your results, measure the following:

• The size of your waist every week
• The way you look every week (using progress pictures)

(Check out this article if you’d like to learn more about tracking changes in your body composition.)

7. Limit liquid calories.

Alcoholic drinks, sugary sodas, and fruit juices offer little in the way of nutrition and can significantly increase your daily calorie intake.

Likewise, eliminating (or at least severely limiting) these from your diet can reduce your calorie intake by hundreds each day, which can cause rapid weight loss. That’s why it’s best to avoid them when you’re trying to get skinny fast.

8. Do some cardio.

To use cardio to boost weight loss, here’s what to do:

• Do at least two low- to moderate-intensity cardio workouts per week of 20-to-60 minutes each. 
• Do one HIIT workout weekly if you enjoy it.
• Limit total cardio to 2-to-3 hours weekly.
• Do your cardio and weightlifting on separate days if possible, and if you have to do them on the same day, lift weights first and try to separate the two workouts by at least 6 hours.

 . . . and if you want to use cardio to target stubborn fat specifically, try combining fasted cardio with a yohimbine supplement. 

9. Get enough sleep. 

Research shows that people who don’t get enough high-quality sleep while dieting lose less fat than those who do.

What’s more, studies show that getting enough sleep helps your body burn fat instead of muscle, and makes you feel less hungry while in a calorie deficit, which means you’re less likely to overeat.

So, the takeaway here is simple: if you want to get skinny as fast as possible, you need to sleep enough, and that means getting seven-to-nine hours of shut-eye every night.

10. Take the right supplements.

The best supplements to help you get skinny quick are:

• Caffeine: Taking 3-to-6 mg of caffeine per kilogram of body weight per day raises the number of calories you burn and increases strength, muscle endurance, and anaerobic performance. For a clean, delicious source of caffeine, try Pulse.
• Yohimbine: Taking 0.1-to-0.2 milligrams of yohimbine per kilogram of body weight before fasted training increases fat loss and is particularly helpful with losing “stubborn” fat. For a 100% natural source of yohimbine, try Forge.
• Phoenix Fat Burner: Phoenix speeds up your metabolism, enhances fat burning, and reduces hunger and cravings. You can also get Phoenix with caffeine or without.

(And if you’d like to know exactly what other supplements you should take to reach any and all of your fitness goals, take the Legion Supplement Finder Quiz.)

FAQ #1: How do you get skinny legs?

Many guides on how to get skinny legs or how to get skinny thighs fast recommend you eat “special” foods and do specific leg exercises to lose fat on your legs.

However, this is a fallacy—you can’t “spot reduce” fat. That is, there’s no diet or exercise plan that will target leg fat specifically.

Instead, focus on reducing your overall body fat percentage, which will also reduce the amount of fat covering your legs.

And the best way to do this is to combine the advice in this article with a large helping of patience. In fact, that latter point is really the key—instead of focusing on getting skinny legs fast, focus on sticking firmly to the plan, and let your body transform in its own time. 

As long as you’re losing fat and looking better every week, you’re on the right track, and there’s no reason to rush things.  

The good news is that women—who are predisposed to storing a disproportionately large amount of their total body fat on their legs—tend to lose fat from their thighs before they lose it from other parts of their body.

And men tend not to store much fat on their legs at all, so they’re less likely to have an issue with getting rid of leg fat specifically. 

FAQ #2: How do you get skinny arms?

Many guides on how to get skinny arms recommend you eat “special” foods and do specific biceps and triceps exercises to lose fat on your arms.

As with getting skinny legs, though, you can’t “spot reduce” arm fat.

The real solution is to reduce your body fat percentage, and your arms will get skinny automatically.

The best way to do this is to follow the advice in this article for several weeks or months, or as long as it takes to get your arms to the size and definition you want. 

The good news is that your arms normally only store a lot of fat when your body fat percentage is high. As such, these areas are the first to get leaner when your body fat percentage starts to decrease. In other words, if you follow the steps in this article, your arms will get skinny fast. 

FAQ #3: How do you get skinny in a week?

You can’t. A safe, healthy, and realistic goal is to lose 0.5-to-1% of your body weight per week, which is around 1-to-2 pounds of weight loss per week for most people.

That said, the more fat you have to lose, the faster you can safely and healthily lose it.

People who are very overweight (men over 25% body fat and women over 35%) can often lose 2-to-4 pounds per week without issue.

Either way, seven days isn’t enough time for you to “get skinny.”

A more sensible approach is to allow yourself at least three months to reach your goal weight or size. This is enough time to lose at least 12-to-24 pounds for most people, which should have a significant impact on how you look.

FAQ #4: How do you get skinny overnight?

You can’t. Of course, that doesn’t stop people trying.

The most common ways people try to “get skinny overnight” are to not eat, not drink, and do cardio.

And while they’ll sometimes look a little leaner the next morning, this is due to a loss of water weight, not true fat loss. The reality is that even if you don’t eat for an entire day, you aren’t going to lose enough fat to see a significant change in your appearance. 

What you will probably experience, though, is . . .

• Hunger
• Thirst
• Headaches
• Fatigue, weakness, and/or dizziness 
• Disrupted sleep
• Bad breath

Thus, it’s better to give yourself more time to get skinny. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, after all. 🙂