term to talk about weight loss rate over time

oat_bran

(It's probably the question mostly for the physicists here haha, I was't sure which section to put it in.)

Is there a term to talk about "speed" (probably not the right word) with which one loses weight over a period of time ?

To clarify what my question is about, imagine two people, both have lost, say, 10 pounds over a period of 10 weeks. The first person was losing more or less steadily, around a pound a week, while the other was losing 2 pounds first week, then gaining 1, than maintaining, then losing 3 than gaining a half and so forth. But at the end both lost 10 pounds in 10 weeks.

So the speed which with which they lost weight was different, but the net speed?/velocity?/rate? of weight loss was the same. What is the right term here?

joyanna2016

Average?

AnnPT77

Not an engineer or physicist. Wish I knew who was. Might be something as simple as "rate variability", but I don't know.

If we were talking statistics, a pound a week would be the average (mean) in both cases, but the standard deviation of the two people's weight observations would be different (larger for the yo-yo-er).

I'm not a statistician, either. 😉

cwolfman13

oat_bran wrote: »

(It's probably the question mostly for the physicists here haha, I was't sure which section to put it in.)

Is there a term to talk about "speed" (probably not the right word) with which one loses weight over a period of time ?

To clarify what my question is about, imagine two people, both have lost, say, 10 pounds over a period of 10 weeks. The first person was losing more or less steadily, around a pound a week, while the other was losing 2 pounds first week, then gaining 1, than maintaining, then losing 3 than gaining a half and so forth. But at the end both lost 10 pounds in 10 weeks.

So the speed which with which they lost weight was different, but the net speed?/velocity?/rate? of weight loss was the same. What is the right term here?

Arithmetic Mean Rate

oat_bran

cwolfman13 wrote: »

oat_bran wrote: »

(It's probably the question mostly for the physicists here haha, I was't sure which section to put it in.)

Is there a term to talk about "speed" (probably not the right word) with which one loses weight over a period of time ?

To clarify what my question is about, imagine two people, both have lost, say, 10 pounds over a period of 10 weeks. The first person was losing more or less steadily, around a pound a week, while the other was losing 2 pounds first week, then gaining 1, than maintaining, then losing 3 than gaining a half and so forth. But at the end both lost 10 pounds in 10 weeks.

So the speed which with which they lost weight was different, but the net speed?/velocity?/rate? of weight loss was the same. What is the right term here?

Arithmetic Mean Rate

Great, thanks! I knew there must be a term for this! Though I though it's something more simple.