You wrote:
” Do not believe anybody who says that you can lose 5 pounds a week.”
I lost 25-30 pounds in six weeks. I did no deliberate exercising. All I did was move to Italy, walk everywhere, and ate plenty (drank wine every day too). I also had to walk up 147 steps to get to my apartment while there.
To lose 5 lbs of fat, you have to burn approximately 17500 calories above your calorie intake.
When I go for my 1 hour brisk walk every day, I burn about 440 calories in that hour. That would mean, for me, I’d have to walk almost 40 hours to burn that many calories.
Now you said that you lost 25 to 30 lbs in your time in Italy. There’s a good chance that at least some of your weight loss wasn’t fat, but other things like toxins or water. All weight loss really means is that you’ve loss mass, but that mass isn’t necessarily fat. Depending on your diet, like if it was low protein, you could have found that some of that weight loss included muscle.
But you’d really know what it was unless you tested for fat percentage before and after your visit. But congratulations, at any rate.