Seriously, aerobic exercise alone is more effective than dieting. You can even get away without ever changing your eating habits.
There is only one way to lose fat. That is to burn more calories than you take in (eat).
Here's what I recommend. First, figure out your Basal Metabolic Rate. This is a number that represents the calories your body burns in running its life-supporting processes: breathing, heartbeat, brain activity, cell growth, baby making, etc. What you would burn if you lay on a flat surface and didn't move a muscle. Here's the formula:
BMR = 655 + ( 4.35 x weight in pounds ) + ( 4.7 x height in inches ) - ( 4.7 x age in years )
So for example, using made-up numbers, a woman weighing 125 pounds, 5'5" tall and 30 years old, her BMR would be 1363. (655 + [4.35 x 125] + [4.7 x 65] - [4.7 x 30] = 1363)
If you eat exactly your BMR, you would neither gain nor lose weight. So the trick is to consume fewer calories than your BMR, see? However, and this is very important: Do not eat fewer than 1200 calories a day. Not only is it dangerous to your health, but -- of more immediate interest to you right now, I'm sure -- your body will go into starvation mode. That is, it will think it is being deprived and it will
retain fat to prevent itself from starving.
It's never a good idea to drop below BMR for an extended length of time. You're borrowing trouble. But if you're young and reasonably healthy, probaby ten days won't do much harm.
The above poster is correct; aerobic exercise will burn off fat. BUT, and this is also very important. For maximum effectiveness, you must aerobicize in a fasting state, i.e., first thing in the morning. Otherwise, your body will call on its glucose stores for energy to fuel the exercise, and the stored fat will remain untouched. (Its glucose comes from the food you ate.) You'd have to run or treadmill or whatever long enough to burn off the glucose before it turned to its fat stores, spinning your wheels, in effect. In a fasting state, your body draws directly on the fat, see?
After exercise,
eat, even if it's only a light meal.
I recommend this regimen for a short time only. In the long run, radical loss dieting will result in lost muscle as well as lost fat, and the minute you stop the loss diet and start eating normally, you'll quickly regain the weight in
the form of fat, and you'll be worse off than you were before -- that is, the fat will be back and the muscle will be lost. Ideally you want to lose fat at a rate of 1.5-2 pounds a week. That way you'll be losing unwanted fat and retaining your muscle.
So if you lose the ten pounds in time for the wedding, congratulations. But then be sure to eat and exercise carefully to prevent the above from happening. And know too that if you lose the weight too fast, much of it will be water, anyway. And that weight comes back on
really fast.
Good luck.