acceleration of body fat %

donjtomasco

does body fat % go down faster when you get closer to losing the amout of weight to get to your normal statistical weight? if so, why?

yopeeps025

I figure it would be slower not faster since as you get closer to the goal you have less margin of error with CICO.

harpsdesire

My previous experience has been just the opposite, but I'm not what you'd call a major success story, so...

Cortelli

If you're losing primarily fat and basing the "faster" on absolute pounds lost, yes.

Let's just assume you're losing 100% fat for simplicity (I know, not necessarily realistic). We'll assume you're overweight at 250 lbs. You've got 150 lbs of lean body mass; 100 lbs of fat. Your BF% is 40% (100/250). You lose 1 pound of fat. You're now at 249 lbs, with 99 lbs of fat for a BF% of 39.75%.

You've been losing fat for some time, and are now at 180 lbs. You're genetically gifted and haven't lost any LBM, so you've got 30 lbs of fat left. Your BF% is 16.67% (30/180). You lose another pound of fat so you're at 179 with 29 lbs of fat. You're now at 16.2% body fat (29/179).

In the later, you've lost almost 0.5% BF, or reduced your total BF by 2.8% (0.47 / 16.67). In the prior example, you've lost 0.25% BF, or reduced your total BF by 0.625%.

Basically, each pound of fat represents both a greater percentage of your total body weight and a greater percentage of your total fat stores.

Remember - these are all hypothetical numbers to showcase the math principles at play. In reality, we all lose some LBM over the course of an extended deficit, and that ratio of LBM:fat loss increases as we get leaner. But the idea is that so long as you LBM:fat loss ratio for each bit of body weight lost is less than your current LBM:fat ratio, then the raw BF% reduction accelerates with each bit of weight lost.

Hope that was clear enough.