Is It Ever Okay to Aim for 2lbs a Week?
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My hernia surgery is VERY important. I had 4 years of peritoneal dialysis. My entire left side, where the dialysis port was located, is literally one massive hernia. It hurts to move, and I can't bend, twist, or turn suddenly. Sometimes, rolling over on that side at night is painful. This is massive surgery. The doctor said he was going to cut through a layer of muscle to put in the mesh. I also have an upper fatty hernia, a hiatal hernia, and a umbilical hernia, which I was obviously born with. All of this is going to be fixed. Right now, it causes a lot of digestive issues as well. I can feel things move through my intestine and get caught in places.0
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lucypstacy wrote: »My hernia surgery is VERY important. I had 4 years of peritoneal dialysis. My entire left side, where the dialysis port was located, is literally one massive hernia. It hurts to move, and I can't bend, twist, or turn suddenly. Sometimes, rolling over on that side at night is painful. This is massive surgery. The doctor said he was going to cut through a layer of muscle to put in the mesh. I also have an upper fatty hernia, a hiatal hernia, and a umbilical hernia, which I was obviously born with. All of this is going to be fixed. Right now, it causes a lot of digestive issues as well. I can feel things move through my intestine and get caught in places.
Ouch.
Well, you're on the right track to get down to your required weight for surgery so keep at it!2 -
Always and never are terrible ways to look at nearly anything related to weight loss/training/diet. I have become recognized as an extremely aggressive weight cutter here. It works very well for me in short bursts of 4-5 lbs./week. Spare me the water weight rhetoric, as my losses remain after carb refeeds, my strength never suffers, and after doing this repeatedly, my LBM is fine.
Now, I would not recommend my methods to most (read 99.9999%) people, BUT according to the always/never way of looking at things, what I do should be wrecking me. However, it's become a key part of my diet and training strategies, and is serving me quite well.0 -
lucypstacy wrote: »My hernia surgery is VERY important. I had 4 years of peritoneal dialysis. My entire left side, where the dialysis port was located, is literally one massive hernia. It hurts to move, and I can't bend, twist, or turn suddenly. Sometimes, rolling over on that side at night is painful. This is massive surgery. The doctor said he was going to cut through a layer of muscle to put in the mesh. I also have an upper fatty hernia, a hiatal hernia, and a umbilical hernia, which I was obviously born with. All of this is going to be fixed. Right now, it causes a lot of digestive issues as well. I can feel things move through my intestine and get caught in places.
Y i k e s !
Here's hoping for a clean repair and swift and complete recovery!!!0 -
lucypstacy wrote: »My hernia surgery is VERY important. I had 4 years of peritoneal dialysis. My entire left side, where the dialysis port was located, is literally one massive hernia. It hurts to move, and I can't bend, twist, or turn suddenly. Sometimes, rolling over on that side at night is painful. This is massive surgery. The doctor said he was going to cut through a layer of muscle to put in the mesh. I also have an upper fatty hernia, a hiatal hernia, and a umbilical hernia, which I was obviously born with. All of this is going to be fixed. Right now, it causes a lot of digestive issues as well. I can feel things move through my intestine and get caught in places.
Oh my. All the best to you on this one. I wish you a speedy recovery.0 -
I'm doing 2 a week. No complaints. Went from 335 to 314 in about 2 months.1
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lucypstacy wrote: »I'm 5'4" and currently 250lbs, so it's still fine. I have to get to 230lbs to have a hernia surgery. Since I'll be laid up in the hospital for a week, I figure that's when I'll cut back to 1lb a week. Plus, the weight should be about right.
I'd strongly encourage you to go to maintenance calories for a while after surgery, as a support to healing.
I had laparoscopic gallbladder surgery while I was losing weight, and kept up my normal calorie deficit. This was not a good plan, but it took several weeks to realize that (I began to feel slightly weakened and fatigued). It would've been a much better plan for me to go to estimated maintenance calories, or at least a miniscule deficit, for 2-4 weeks after the surgery . . . and mine was quite a minor/routine surgery. It took longer than it should've for me to bounce back to a normal energy level.
Obviously, I'm not your granny, so you'll make your own decisions about this. But please consider taking a diet break while you heal, or at least checking with your doctor about the extent of your calorie deficit after surgery.
P.S. You may also experience some water weight retention for healing after surgery, which you may see as a weight gain. If you know your consumption is where it should be, please don't let this worry you. Even in my post-surgery calorie deficit, I saw a couple of weeks or so that looked like a plateau, before the water weight dropped off.3 -
Well, I'm not going to be as strict on myself while healing. For the first week, I'll be in the hospital. I'm sure they'll me up on my feet as soon as I can comfortably walk, but I'm also going to listen to my body. I honestly not sure where my maintenance level will be at that weight. I'll have to look it up.2
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TimothyFish wrote: »TimothyFish wrote: »How much you have to go doesn't matter. If 2lbs is more than 1% of your weight then it is too aggressive. If it is less than 1% of your weight then it is fine.
Not necessarily. I'm at ~154 pounds and I want to lose about 12 more pounds. There's no way that I could aim for 1.5 pounds per week because that would put me at a daily calorie goal of about 850. The weight loss goal ranges stated above have been a better fit for me but, even then, they are a bit aggressive for me and I've lost more slowly than that in order to have a sustainable daily calorie goal.
There are a number of things at play here. First, is it safe for a 154 lb person to lose 1.5lbs in a week? Probably, since 1-2 lbs is generally considered safe. Second, is it safe for a 154 lb person to eat less than 1200 calories per day? Probably not. Third, why would a deficit of 750 calories cause a 154 lb person to eat only 850 calories? Because that person is sedentary. Fourth, is it safe for a person to be sedentary? Probably not. Fifth, if a person is as active as health organizations recommend, would they burn enough calories during the day that a 750 calorie deficit has them eating more than 1,200 calories? Probably.
It seems to me that the issue is one of an unsafe activity level, not an unsafe calorie deficit.
There can be medical or disability issues that cause a person to be sedentary.0 -
The biggest issue with the more than 2 lbs per week of fat loss is that many people find that it is harder to maintain a consistent rate of progress (there is some research showing a greater decrease in metabolic rate with very large deficits, 30% or more). This, however, can be somewhat offset by having periods of refeeds weekly and taking diet breaks when applicable.
Generally, it is easier to think of body fat as a circular diagram: in the circular diagram, you have fat on the outside and muscle on the inside. The greater the circle is on the outside, the more of it you can take away without it impacting the circle on the inside. The smaller the circle is on the outside, however, the greater chance you have of impacting the circle on the inside, which is why huge calorie deficits are an awful idea for someone who is already fairly lean, 10 to 14% body fat.
If you want to learn more about rapid fat loss the right way, I recommend you check out this video with Eric Helms:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN9Df3O9mOI 3 -
Is It Ever Okay to Aim for 2lbs a Week?
That's what I did. I lost 15 kg in my first 16 weeks which got me nice and comfortably back within my normal BMI range again.0 -
TimothyFish wrote: »TimothyFish wrote: »How much you have to go doesn't matter. If 2lbs is more than 1% of your weight then it is too aggressive. If it is less than 1% of your weight then it is fine.
Not necessarily. I'm at ~154 pounds and I want to lose about 12 more pounds. There's no way that I could aim for 1.5 pounds per week because that would put me at a daily calorie goal of about 850. The weight loss goal ranges stated above have been a better fit for me but, even then, they are a bit aggressive for me and I've lost more slowly than that in order to have a sustainable daily calorie goal.
There are a number of things at play here. First, is it safe for a 154 lb person to lose 1.5lbs in a week? Probably, since 1-2 lbs is generally considered safe. Second, is it safe for a 154 lb person to eat less than 1200 calories per day? Probably not. Third, why would a deficit of 750 calories cause a 154 lb person to eat only 850 calories? Because that person is sedentary. Fourth, is it safe for a person to be sedentary? Probably not. Fifth, if a person is as active as health organizations recommend, would they burn enough calories during the day that a 750 calorie deficit has them eating more than 1,200 calories? Probably.
It seems to me that the issue is one of an unsafe activity level, not an unsafe calorie deficit.
Not everyone can be active. Whether inactive by choice or necessity, an unsafe calorie deficit is still unsafe. Weight loss isn't exclusive to those who are active so a weight loss goal of 1% isn't always fine.
I can think of a few examples of people who can't be active and in every case they have health problems that would be helped if they could be active. Saying, "Not everyone can be active" is just an excuse for promoting an unhealthy lifestyle.0 -
I really wish people would express some of these limits as a % of total calories expended in a day, aka TDEE.
If 1% or 2lbs is a 75% deficit off a low tdee I would not view it the same as i would view an acceptable 25% cut for someone who is obese.
In general 15-20% cuts (i.e. caloric deficits)when people are normal weight or low overweight, increasing to 25% when obese seem to work fine for results over time with minimal side effects.
As to the OP, assuming your deficit is not wildly above ~25%, 2lbs a week is fine.
My only other comment is, that depending on the type of hernia and dangers it presents, and depending on ease of access to surgery and availability of surgical dates in your world, I would be tempted to keep on losing weight as opposed to putting the loss in the backburner for semi elective surgery.
I am not suggesting that you should keep to a large deficit while healing. To the contrary, doing so will slow down your healing, so reducing or eliminating weight loss while healing makes a lot of sense.
But there are a few weeks of healing to do and having recently gone through minor hernia surgery I can guarantee you that my thoughts were along the lines of "holly crap this would have been so much harder at my original weight" (and our starting points were extremely similar, if you consider the couple of inches I have on you)
Of course there are a whole whack of considerations that may make a delay a bad idea... just throwing out to you that weight loss is just as much of a health necessity for you moving forward and that you have no reason to only aim for limited short term results... think of achieving and maintaining long term a large loss.
That's an interesting concept that may be worth exploring but my initial thought is that it may difficult to deal with the extreme cases. When talking about the average TDEE of 2,000 calories, and the midpoint of the "safe" weight loss of 1-2 lbs per week, the percentage would be 37.5%. A person with a TDEE of 1,800 would have a deficit of 675, which would drop her below 1,200, so that limit still isn't the limit on the low side. A person with a TDEE of 3,000 calories would have a deficit of 1125, which might not be so bad for an obese person. But what if they aren't obese. My TDEE is between 3,000 and 4,000 calories most days and I weight 205lbs. Me that it is okay to cut up to 1,500 calories out of my diet doesn't make sense. Some athletes have TDEEs that are as high as 8,000 calories per day. 37.5% of 8,000 is 3,000 calories. Telling someone with a low body fat percentage isn't a good idea.
Ideally, we would make recommendations on how much body fat a person has rather than on what a person's TDEE is or how far they are from their goal weight. The problem with that is that few people know their body fat percentage. And for those who do, the calculation isn't simple and easy to remember. Health guidelines usually say something like 1-2lbs per week because that is easy to remember. Of course, that is about 1% of body weight for people between 100 and 200 lbs. And since some studies have suggested that obese people losing more than 2lbs is probably safe, 1% of body weight may be the best easy recommendation we have. That's not to say that it is perfect. It wouldn't make sense, for example, to tell a 250lb guy with 10% body fat that it's okay for him to lose 2.5 lbs per week. On the other hand it might be fine to tell a 150lb woman with 50% body fat that losing 2.5 lbs per week is okay. It could be an interesting topic for a thesis.0 -
If you are obese, 2lbs per week is fine.0
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TimothyFish wrote: »I can think of a few examples of people who can't be active and in every case they have health problems that would be helped if they could be active. Saying, "Not everyone can be active" is just an excuse for promoting an unhealthy lifestyle.
But... by your own words those people can't be active. Saying that things would be better if they were doesn't actually make them able to rise and walk.
When I had an undiagnosed ankle fracture, osteochondritis dissecans, and bone fragments in the joint, trying to be active slowly degraded the cartilage and left me in agony after the shortest of walks.
After surgery to remove the loose bone fragments, swimming and walking helped a lot. Before that, attempting it just made the condition worse. How, exactly, do you think that wearing away the inside of my ankle joint would have helped with a condition caused by wearing away the inside of my ankle joint?9 -
I have a goal of 2lbs a week but my actual weight loss is 1.5lbs a week. So it's working great for me!2
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TimothyFish wrote: »I can think of a few examples of people who can't be active and in every case they have health problems that would be helped if they could be active. Saying, "Not everyone can be active" is just an excuse for promoting an unhealthy lifestyle.
But... by your own words those people can't be active. Saying that things would be better if they were doesn't actually make them able to rise and walk.
When I had an undiagnosed ankle fracture, osteochondritis dissecans, and bone fragments in the joint, trying to be active slowly degraded the cartilage and left me in agony after the shortest of walks.
After surgery to remove the loose bone fragments, swimming and walking helped a lot. Before that, attempting it just made the condition worse. How, exactly, do you think that wearing away the inside of my ankle joint would have helped with a condition caused by wearing away the inside of my ankle joint?
My point is that since we know that inactivity is unhealthy regardless of the reason people are inactive, we shouldn't tell people that can be more active than they are that it's okay for them to be inactive. Of course one shouldn't walk on a broken ankle, but there's no reason why a person with a broken ankle can't do laps around the block on crutches, or use a hand crank bicycle for a bicycle ride. Even sitting in a recliner and lifting weights is better than being completely sedentary.1 -
TimothyFish wrote: »I really wish people would express some of these limits as a % of total calories expended in a day, aka TDEE.
If 1% or 2lbs is a 75% deficit off a low tdee I would not view it the same as i would view an acceptable 25% cut for someone who is obese.
In general 15-20% cuts (i.e. caloric deficits)when people are normal weight or low overweight, increasing to 25% when obese seem to work fine for results over time with minimal side effects.
As to the OP, assuming your deficit is not wildly above ~25%, 2lbs a week is fine.
My only other comment is, that depending on the type of hernia and dangers it presents, and depending on ease of access to surgery and availability of surgical dates in your world, I would be tempted to keep on losing weight as opposed to putting the loss in the backburner for semi elective surgery.
I am not suggesting that you should keep to a large deficit while healing. To the contrary, doing so will slow down your healing, so reducing or eliminating weight loss while healing makes a lot of sense.
But there are a few weeks of healing to do and having recently gone through minor hernia surgery I can guarantee you that my thoughts were along the lines of "holly crap this would have been so much harder at my original weight" (and our starting points were extremely similar, if you consider the couple of inches I have on you)
Of course there are a whole whack of considerations that may make a delay a bad idea... just throwing out to you that weight loss is just as much of a health necessity for you moving forward and that you have no reason to only aim for limited short term results... think of achieving and maintaining long term a large loss.
That's an interesting concept that may be worth exploring but my initial thought is that it may difficult to deal with the extreme cases. When talking about the average TDEE of 2,000 calories, and the midpoint of the "safe" weight loss of 1-2 lbs per week, the percentage would be 37.5%. A person with a TDEE of 1,800 would have a deficit of 675, which would drop her below 1,200, so that limit still isn't the limit on the low side. A person with a TDEE of 3,000 calories would have a deficit of 1125, which might not be so bad for an obese person. But what if they aren't obese. My TDEE is between 3,000 and 4,000 calories most days and I weight 205lbs. Me that it is okay to cut up to 1,500 calories out of my diet doesn't make sense. Some athletes have TDEEs that are as high as 8,000 calories per day. 37.5% of 8,000 is 3,000 calories. Telling someone with a low body fat percentage isn't a good idea.
Ideally, we would make recommendations on how much body fat a person has rather than on what a person's TDEE is or how far they are from their goal weight. The problem with that is that few people know their body fat percentage. And for those who do, the calculation isn't simple and easy to remember. Health guidelines usually say something like 1-2lbs per week because that is easy to remember. Of course, that is about 1% of body weight for people between 100 and 200 lbs. And since some studies have suggested that obese people losing more than 2lbs is probably safe, 1% of body weight may be the best easy recommendation we have. That's not to say that it is perfect. It wouldn't make sense, for example, to tell a 250lb guy with 10% body fat that it's okay for him to lose 2.5 lbs per week. On the other hand it might be fine to tell a 150lb woman with 50% body fat that losing 2.5 lbs per week is okay. It could be an interesting topic for a thesis.
You're the one who introduced the 37.5% figure. TDEE-25% is as high as you go by that measure (and only for the obese; otherwise TDEE-20% or less). So, 20% of a 3,000 calorie/day TDEE would correspond to a 600 cal/day deficit - which is quite reasonable. 20% of a 2,000 calorie/day TDEE corresponds to a 400 cal/day deficit. The idea is that somebody with a lower TDEE needs to move more to be able to sustain a larger deficit in a healthy way. Want a 500 cal/day deficit? Move enough to increase the TDEE to 2,500 cals/day. Can't move more due to disability? Accept that a slightly smaller deficit is a healthier choice. These are, of course, long-term values. A week or two at a slightly higher deficit (while you figure out the right numbers for you) never hurt anyone.
As for the athlete example, why would an athlete burning 8,000 calories/day be looking to lose weight? People with low bodyfat would be encouraged to eat at maintenance. The TDEE-x% values are for those who want/need to lose weight.2 -
TimothyFish wrote: »TimothyFish wrote: »TimothyFish wrote: »How much you have to go doesn't matter. If 2lbs is more than 1% of your weight then it is too aggressive. If it is less than 1% of your weight then it is fine.
Not necessarily. I'm at ~154 pounds and I want to lose about 12 more pounds. There's no way that I could aim for 1.5 pounds per week because that would put me at a daily calorie goal of about 850. The weight loss goal ranges stated above have been a better fit for me but, even then, they are a bit aggressive for me and I've lost more slowly than that in order to have a sustainable daily calorie goal.
There are a number of things at play here. First, is it safe for a 154 lb person to lose 1.5lbs in a week? Probably, since 1-2 lbs is generally considered safe. Second, is it safe for a 154 lb person to eat less than 1200 calories per day? Probably not. Third, why would a deficit of 750 calories cause a 154 lb person to eat only 850 calories? Because that person is sedentary. Fourth, is it safe for a person to be sedentary? Probably not. Fifth, if a person is as active as health organizations recommend, would they burn enough calories during the day that a 750 calorie deficit has them eating more than 1,200 calories? Probably.
It seems to me that the issue is one of an unsafe activity level, not an unsafe calorie deficit.
Not everyone can be active. Whether inactive by choice or necessity, an unsafe calorie deficit is still unsafe. Weight loss isn't exclusive to those who are active so a weight loss goal of 1% isn't always fine.
I can think of a few examples of people who can't be active and in every case they have health problems that would be helped if they could be active. Saying, "Not everyone can be active" is just an excuse for promoting an unhealthy lifestyle.
Tim I'm sorry but you are so very wrong here
Good luck6 -
TimothyFish wrote: »My point is that since we know that inactivity is unhealthy regardless of the reason people are inactive, we shouldn't tell people that can be more active than they are that it's okay for them to be inactive. Of course one shouldn't walk on a broken ankle, but there's no reason why a person with a broken ankle can't do laps around the block on crutches, or use a hand crank bicycle for a bicycle ride. Even sitting in a recliner and lifting weights is better than being completely sedentary.
Yeah... I think the physio treating my damaged shoulder would have had words about my doing any of those things. Being on crutches for two weeks after surgery darn near dislocated the thing as it was.
It's my experience that most people with chronic conditions are pretty solid on how much they can do. The last time my mobility was seriously restricted and I followed someone's advice to do more, I ended up barely able to hobble for a month.
I don't think we do tell people who can be more active that it's OK not to be. And I also don't think it's remotely ethical to tell people who can't be more active to do things that will cause them physical damage. Leave that to the medical professionals.7
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