I'm losing 1.2 Kg a Week is that Bad?

WernerZiegler1

Hi, I lost from last Monday from 4.12.23 to 11.12.23 so in 1 week 1.2 Kg
My weight was last week 87.1 Kg, today it's 85.9 Kg

And my total weight lost in 26 Days is 5.35 Kg
Is that bad or still reasonable?

I eat around 2200 kcal a day with plenty of protein and go to the gym 5 days a week to do at least 20-25 min cardio then lifting for 1 hour etc.

Next question what happens when i lost all the weight i wanted to lose and reached my destination, should i stop doing cardio?

Because i like doing cardio and training my endurance.



Regards

yirara

Hi Werner, you don't seem to have a lot of weight to lose, thus your loss seems a bit steep. Why not eat a bit more, lose slower and preserve more muscles.

And yeah, if you enjoy cardio continue doing it once at goal weight. Cardio (or any other exercise) is not really for weightloss but for health and for keeping your body fit as you age.

WernerZiegler1

yirara wrote: »

And yeah, if you enjoy cardio continue doing it once at goal weight. Cardio (or any other exercise) is not really for weightloss but for health and for keeping your body fit as you age.

Cardio certainly is for weight loss i burn most likely 200-300 kcal when i do cardio.
To you other question i just wanna lose fast my bodyfat so i can focus on building muscles.

yirara

WernerZiegler1 wrote: »

yirara wrote: »

And yeah, if you enjoy cardio continue doing it once at goal weight. Cardio (or any other exercise) is not really for weightloss but for health and for keeping your body fit as you age.

Cardio certainly is for weight loss i burn most likely 200-300 kcal when i do cardio.
To you other question i just wanna lose fast my bodyfat so i can focus on building muscles.

But by losing fast you also lose muscle mass and not just bodyfat because your body can only lose so much fat at a time as it's a lot easier for your body to get energy from muscle than from fat. You want to lose bodyfat and not muscle, right? It also takes a lot more effort to regain muscle than to lose it.

cmriverside

Are you under the mistaken impression that you have to wait until you lose weight before you start on a progressive weight lifting program? That's not true.

WernerZiegler1

cmriverside wrote: »

Are you under the mistaken impression that you have to wait until you lose weight before you start on a progressive weight lifting program? That's not true.

But i wanna do a clean start i eat 160g Proteins a day so my muscle loss shouldn't be that great.

tomcustombuilder

You’re losing muscle by no weight training and losing too quickly. You aren’t obese so your loss is too fast. Get in enough protein and get on a good lifting program

yirara

Just eating tons of protein does not convince your body to use fat for energy instead of muscles. You preserve muscle by training them and eating sufficient protein. What Tom above said: by losing weight too fast you're losing muscle which will be difficult to build up again.

AnnPT77

Werner, you're eating about the same number of calories I eat as a 59 kg li'l ol' lady; you're working out 5 days a week for 1.3 hours; and you're losing almost 1.4% of your current weight per week in circumstances and with goals that would make me recommend 0.5% per week.

I'm perplexed that others are saying you're not lifting, when you say you lift 5x a week for an hour.

But that doesn't matter. The bottom line is that you asked "Is that bad or still reasonable?" about your weight loss rate.

Their advice is right: It's risky, not reasonable. Lose slower, because that will better support your goals.

Second question, no, you don't have to stop cardio when you reach goal weight. You just eat enough extra calories to fuel the exercise fully.

That's why people are saying cardio isn't for weight loss: If you eat the calories to fully fuel the cardio, you won't lose weight.

20-25 minutes of cardio isn't even all that much cardio: The basic mainstream recommendation for general health is to do 5x30 minutes of moderate cardio per week, minimum.

Elite athletes in my sport do many hours of cardio every week, and they have muscles, aren't skinny. Heck, I did more cardio than you're doing now for a dozen years and stayed at a consistent (obese) weight.

It's easy to eat that many extra calories. Your 200-300 calories is equivalent to maybe one serving of peanut butter on a single thin slice of semi-decent hearty bread.

When you get to goal weight, keep doing cardio, fuel it. That'll be fine.

Best wishes!

P.S. 20-25 minutes of cardio x 5 days may build some endurance when you're starting out and out of shape, but that's not the cardio prescription to build endurance long term. That doesn't mean it's bad. Keep doing it.

springlering62

I’ve been in maintenance for three years. I enjoy cardio. I do muscle madness and aqua classes and swim laps, as well as other things.

There’s absolutely no need to give up something you enjoy when you reach maintenance.

Easy solution: Just eat more.

Yay!

WernerZiegler1

I told you that i do lifting + i eat lots of proteins, carbohydrates, fats.
But It's a fact that i have plenty of fat visceral fat around my belly so i want to get rid of that how i supposed to do that without losing weight?
You tell me that 0.5 Kg a week is good, but with that i would sit here for months till i reached the body fat i want.

But alright, what should I do then what should be my calories if it's 2200 kcal now?

I burned 1.2 Kg that makes 9000 Calories / 7 = 1.286 kcal +2200 kcal = 3400-3500 kcal that's my maintenance even if i cut 500 kcal from that it looks way to much.

frhaberl

I think a helpful way of looking at this may be that there is an optimum range where you can see progress on both your weight loss and muscle building goals, but on either end of that range are less desirable outcomes. AnnPT77 has shared her experience with eating enough to build muscle but more than would support weight loss. On the other end of the spectrum is what many here are warning about, eating in a large enough deficit to lose weight, but at the expense of muscle retention/growth.

If you started adjusting your diet and exercise just 26 days ago, it may be a bit too soon to know what your average weight loss is. You've given two data points (1.2 kg loss in the past week and 5.3 kg in the past 26 days) but I can see a scenario where you had a large water weight loss in the first week that is inflating the overall number and your body likes to shed weight in chunks (mine weight graph has a number of "drastic" drops with "plateaus" in between, despite consistent eating and exercise habits).

My advice would be to ask yourself is this a HEALTHY pace for me to lose weight at? And when you think of health, consider mental, emotional, and social in the overall health picture. Some things I have noticed when my weight loss is not at a healthy rate:
- Higher anxiety. This shows up for me both in my dreams as well as catching myself in an anxious thought loop throughout the day. Not to mention the panic I can feel if something throws off my eating plan.
- Getting sick more frequently and/or taking longer to recover from an illness.
- Having "hungry" and/or "low energy" days more frequently or with higher intensity.
- Finding myself avoiding social situations because it's too stressful to think about how to fit it in with my weight loss goals (food and/or interfering with exercise).
- Catching myself thinking "I can't wait until I'm at goal so I can go back to 'normal'".
- Catching myself feeling frustrated/angry with loved ones because they are making my weight loss harder (when they are actually very supportive and their behavior/requests would represent a more balanced approach).
- Continuing negative self talk and self image despite objectively significant progress.
- Asking myself "What is the big hurry to lose this fast" and not being able to come up with a good answer.

I'm currently working through a lot of these thoughts for myself, so my apologies if this seems like a bit of a ramble.

AnnPT77

WernerZiegler1 wrote: »

I told you that i do lifting + i eat lots of proteins, carbohydrates, fats.
But It's a fact that i have plenty of fat visceral fat around my belly so i want to get rid of that how i supposed to do that without losing weight?
You tell me that 0.5 Kg a week is good, but with that i would sit here for months till i reached the body fat i want.

But alright, what should I do then what should be my calories if it's 2200 kcal now?

I burned 1.2 Kg that makes 9000 Calories / 7 = 1.286 kcal +2200 kcal = 3400-3500 kcal that's my maintenance even if i cut 500 kcal from that it looks way to much.

Below is a nutrition priorities pyramid from Renaissance Periodization, a generally well-regarded site for science-based advice about eating to support body composition and performance. Getting the right calories for one's goals is the foundation of the whole thing, in their view the very most important component. (To be clear, they didn't convince me of that; it's kind of motherhood and apple pie common sense. They just have a nice graphic about the obvious.)



I can't tell you what to do. You have to do you. You asked for advice. That's the only reason I'm saying what I am: Trying to answer your questions as clearly and fully as I can.

If I were you, with your goals as I understand them from your posts, I'd eat a bit under maintenance calories, get excellent nutrition, do some cardio (as you are), and put a priority on faithful adherence to a good (professionally well thought out) progressive lifting program. Specifically, if my best estimate of my maintenance calories were 3400-3500, I'd eat around 2900 to 3250. But I'm not you.

Yes, it would take a week to a couple of weeks to lose a half kg, but it would be likely to be almost entirely fat loss, and that calorie level would support really good performance and results in the gym. If I'm correct in assuming that you're relatively young as well as male, you might even slowly add a little muscle mass at the higher-calorie end of that. I'm not sure how tall you are, but if you're in fact male, I'm guessing you don't have a huge total amount of weight to lose.

To the bolded ("even if i cut 500 kcal from that it looks way to much") specifically: If your calorie needs estimate and food/activity logging are accurate, you'd expect to lose a bit under half a kg a week when eating at an average of 500 calories under your maintenance calories. I don't know why that "looks too much". I started out myself at around 83kg, not that much less than where you are now, averaged a bit under half a kg a week loss. I didn't lose noticeable strength, and my athletic performance was as good at the end as the beginning, in objective terms. (I'd been athletic for a dozen years by then.)

Theoretically, you could maybe lose belly fat without losing weight (by using some of that fat to fuel mass gain) but that would be veryVery slow. Generally, losing fat means losing weight though, sure.

By the way, if you have fat visible on the outside of your belly, it's more likely subcutaneous fat than visceral fat. Visceral fat is the fat that's stored more inside the body cavity, packed in around the internal organs. It's not good. It might show up on certain types of medical scans, and does influence waist measurement sometimes, but it's generally not what people are talking about as externally visible belly fat that they think has a negative appearance.

frhaberl wrote: »

I think a helpful way of looking at this may be that there is an optimum range where you can see progress on both your weight loss and muscle building goals, but on either end of that range are less desirable outcomes. AnnPT77 has shared her experience with eating enough to build muscle but more than would support weight loss. On the other end of the spectrum is what many here are warning about, eating in a large enough deficit to lose weight, but at the expense of muscle retention/growth.

(snip rest of really good post, a thing @frhaberl is making a pattern in posts here)

As an aside to the bolded, I don't know exactly how/where, but I think I communicated something unclearly.

I've never intentionally eaten enough to build muscle but more than support weight loss, not that I'd think of as that, anyway. I've gained muscle while staying at the same obese/overweight weight (some fat loss, no weight loss), I've lost weight while trying to hold onto as much pre-existing muscle as possible, I've maintained weight without any specific intention of building muscle mass. (I have some physical/athletic goals, but that's not explicitly one of them.)

I'm a mysteriously good li'l ol' calorie burner for my demographic (F, age 68), but it nonetheless still freaks me out to see much younger men with a hearty exercise schedule and long term mass gain ambitions eating as little as it takes to sustain my much smaller, older, 100% more female body. That's the only reason I mentioned my maintenance calorie intake. OP seems to be losing fast, and is eating at about my maintenance calories. That makes my brain go "yikes". Maybe that's the wrong impulse.

PAV8888

This is hilariously funny to me, because the exactness in the graph below is completely unintentional. Heck I WOULD like to be achieving a -250 Cal a week at this point of time!

I set out to show to the OP that it is not unexpected for a relatively active male to find themselves burning in the 3000 Cal range.

In actual fact I am a few days shy of 58 yo, NOT above average height at 172.25 cm and I weight more than 13kg less than the OP!

I was actually wondering today why I have seen zero scale movement lately. Maybe I should spend more time looking at my graphs and less time wondering!



Actual caloric expenditure can be influenced by our choices and we can certainly do more to spend more or less to spend less. We can also influence the apparent calories that we burn based on the quality of our logging.

But, beyond that, the numbers just are. And our feelings as to what they SHOULD be do not really matter.

And yes, as detailed in a post above, unsustainable behavior often both feels and feeds impatience. If what you're doing is long term sustainable then your impatience level will be minimal. And long term sustainable is what you want, assuming you want your new physique to stick for a bit.