Losing weight near your goal?

AwesomeOpossum74

I started MFP about 6 weeks ago, and I've lost 9 lbs. My SW 207, GW 190. I have MFP configured to lose 1lb/week. I'm sure I'm in the "safe" zone for how quickly I'm losing.

What I'm curious about is why the trend seems to be that people who have a lot of weight to lose are allowed to lose 2lb, but when you get within about 10lb of your goal, you're only supposed 1lb/week? Is there some sort of system shock?

Running_and_Coffee

I had a total of 10 lbs to get to my goal, and the first 5 flew off, the last 5 came off around 1/2 lb a month, and since then, although I didn't increase my calories, I'm pretty much maintaining (losing about a pound a month.) So yeah, when you're close, it gets hard!

cwolfman13

AwesomeOpossum74 wrote: »

I started MFP about 6 weeks ago, and I've lost 9 lbs. My SW 207, GW 190. I have MFP configured to lose 1lb/week. I'm sure I'm in the "safe" zone for how quickly I'm losing.

What I'm curious about is why the trend seems to be that people who have a lot of weight to lose are allowed to lose 2lb, but when you get within about 10lb of your goal, you're only supposed 1lb/week? Is there some sort of system shock?

People with more weight to lose have greater fat stores to compensate for larger deficits. A good rule of thumb is no more than 2% of you body weight per week to lose. If you're losing more than that, you don't have the fat stores to compensate, so you lose more lean body mass in the process.

Even if you can safely do 2 Lbs per week, it's pretty aggressive @ 1,000 calories per day deficit. In many cases this is a matter of being able to consistently sustain that kind of deficit over a long period of time. Another issue is that a target of 2 Lbs per week often takes one to the very lowest calories possible while still being able to get adequate nutrition. Plateaus inevitably happen and having your calories that low gives you nowhere to drop down to safely to keep losing.

apullum

For most people who are close to their goal, the body doesn't have very high calorie needs as compared to someone who weighs more. This makes it much harder to create a calorie deficit.

For example, I am maintaining in my optimal weight range at 1400 calories per day not counting exercise. I would need to eat less than that in order to lose more weight. Even if I went back into a deficit at 1200 calories net per day--the minimum recommended for women--it would take me over two weeks to create a 3500 calorie deficit, which is less than a 0.5 lb/week rate of loss. That's assuming, of course, that all my logging was perfectly accurate, which is hard to accomplish. Most of us occasionally have to estimate calorie content of foods or calories burned in exercise. Those little inaccuracies cut into an already small deficit.

People who are taller than me, of course, might be able to create a larger deficit. And when you are first starting a weight loss plan, you'll likely lose a few pounds of water weight very quickly at first. But it's still going to be difficult, and maybe impossible, to achieve a rapid rate of fat loss in a healthy way when you don't have much to lose.

tl;dr: it's nothing to do with some kind of system shock; it's simply not feasible for people who are close to their goal to sustain a rapid rate of loss.

middlehaitch

It's because when one is close to goal weight one has less fat to lose.
The body can only burn so much fat in a day. Once that fat is burnt the body switches to burning more lean mass, muscle.

With 10lbs to goal it is generally advise to switch to 0.5lbs a week, for the reason above, so it is easier to transfer into maintenance by upping cals by 250, and because some people, especially smaller women, cannot drop their calories any lower than 1200, which will often leave them with a 0.5losd or less per week.

There is research on how much cals of fat one burns per lbs of body fat per day. I can't find it at the moment, but I think it was something like 30cals per lbs (quite willing to be corrected on that if someone can dig up the paper)

Cheers, h.

CarvedTones

I slowed down to make the adjustment easier. Just slightly increased daily calories as I got closer.

spiriteagle99

It does make it easier to transition to maintenance since there isn't a very big adjustment in how much you eat. It's easy to regain the weight you lost by assuming you can now eat everything you want, which isn't generally true, unfortunately. It also makes it easier to figure out how many calories you actually need to maintain a certain weight rather than keep on losing. It took me about 3 months before I really achieved a good balance because I didn't slow down my rate of weight loss until I had already lost the weight I intended to lose.

AwesomeOpossum74

cwolfman13 wrote: »

AwesomeOpossum74 wrote: »

I started MFP about 6 weeks ago, and I've lost 9 lbs. My SW 207, GW 190. I have MFP configured to lose 1lb/week. I'm sure I'm in the "safe" zone for how quickly I'm losing.

What I'm curious about is why the trend seems to be that people who have a lot of weight to lose are allowed to lose 2lb, but when you get within about 10lb of your goal, you're only supposed 1lb/week? Is there some sort of system shock?

People with more weight to lose have greater fat stores to compensate for larger deficits. A good rule of thumb is no more than 2% of you body weight per week to lose. If you're losing more than that, you don't have the fat stores to compensate, so you lose more lean body mass in the process.

Even if you can safely do 2 Lbs per week, it's pretty aggressive @ 1,000 calories per day deficit. In many cases this is a matter of being able to consistently sustain that kind of deficit over a long period of time. Another issue is that a target of 2 Lbs per week often takes one to the very lowest calories possible while still being able to get adequate nutrition. Plateaus inevitably happen and having your calories that low gives you nowhere to drop down to safely to keep losing.

I'm assuming your reply is just an example, and not related to me personally.
I'm certainly not at 1000 cal daily deficit. More like between 1-300 deficit/day from my daily goal. I'm not trying to lose 2lbs a week, it just happens like that, as I'm not into just eating to fill my goal gap. And it looks like I'm eating average 2400-2500 cals a day (with exercise), so I'm not close to the minimum 1500 cals.

I'm nearly 200lbs. From your 2% remark, are you saying I could safely lose 4lbs/week? Wow! That's a bit of interesting news, but I don't think I'd want to do that.