Scientifically Are the Last 10 lbs REALLY the Hardest?

_KitKat_

So really, they are not more difficult or more stubborn to get rid of, the only difference is that your deficit has been dialed down to match your newer TDEE so it takes a longer period of time to reach the 3500 calorie deficit. Did I get it right?

By the way, "Duh" isn't really a kind response when someone is asking an honest question.

Additionally, since MFP doesn't tell users to decrease their calorie deficit as they get closer to goal, there are potentially many people that would continue rocking their initial deficit setting all the way to their goal weight and they'd never know that it should have been changed. So I'm not sure it's "common sense".

MFP bottoms out at 1200 calories net, so these people could keep the same settings but the actual deficient would change. When you are working with a smaller deficient it leaves more room for error, so say someone has a fun Friday night those extra 500 calories just ate the deficient for the whole week. Many actually start eating near maintenance to better figure out what number that is for them and just burn calories with exercise to create their deficient. Your body can also not healthily (is that a word) drop weight in the final tens lbs as fast is it can when someone was much larger. I think "harder" just means either takes more work and/or more discipline, early on you can have slip up and slack and still lose...also many people are actually looking for a range not a number since they will fluctuate several lbs at any weight. These fluctuations can mask the final 5-10 lbs, many seem to move to body recomp when this close to goal and focus on body fat %.

lemurcat12

The closer you get to goal, the less body fat you have to lose. People recommend slower when closer because they're encouraging people to maintain muscle mass. If you lose fast at the end, you're going to lose a disproportionate amount of lean tissue.

This. My understanding--although I'm no expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong--is that it's safer to have a larger deficit when you are more overweight, since, especially if you are exercising, you are more likely to lose fat as the majority of your loss. When your fat percentage is lower, there's much more risk that it comes from LBM, which you don't want, so even apart from everything else you don't want to maintain the same deficit.

Just from personal experience I found when I lost before that weight came off easily until I got to 10-15 pounds from goal (meaning going from 23 or a little more BMI to 21+ BMI), and then it didn't--it required the addition of some pretty time-intensive cardio to get me where I wanted (which also fit with my goals at the time). But I also wasn't counting then and didn't adjust what I was eating--in fact, if anything I felt satisfied enough at 23 vs. where I'd been that I was more careless with my diet--so no doubt a lot of that was just the lowered BMR. I'm curious to see what happens this time, although I expect it to be as hard or harder given that I'm older.

lindsey1979

I think it's because it's not as linear as some people would like to believe -- at least, fat loss isn't. As you get closer to your ideal weight, you proportionally have a lot less fat to lose ideally (as you want to maintain as much LBM as possible). So, if you still have a huge deficit as you get closer to your goal weight, you'll likely sacrifice more LBM. To minimize that effect, people suggest a smaller and smaller deficit the closer you get to your goal weight. That, in turn, results in slower weight loss overall.

Like many things, I think there is a law of diminishing returns in weight loss. It may start off as generally linear (not on a daily basis, but overall trend), but the closer you get, the more effort you have to put in to get that extra benefit. So, instead of a linear graph, think of one that tapers off at the end.

This is also why very obese people can manage very low calorie diets whereas that wouldn't be recommended for much leaner people.

GreatDepression

Says the person who a thread ago was declaring that if Americans truly ate 300 calories more per day than we used to we would all be one thousand pounds by now.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/1287703-burning-and-eating-calories-back-what-s-the-point?page=2

I wasn't disputing that Americans eat more today in calories compared to generations past. The point about weighing 1000lbs was to show how absurd it is to simplify weight loss to calories. Your metabolism can change for a myriad of reasons. Feed two individuals 3,500 calories and one may gain weight, the other may lose or maintain. You can't treat it as a simple math equation.

BlueBombers

Not the hardest, just took FOREVER to lose.

neandermagnon

your body evolved to survive food shortages, not to have 6 pack abs in a society that has a constant, abundant supply of food.

when you realise that, then it makes total sense.

the more fat you have, the easier it is to lose, because you're in no danger of starving to death. However, once your body fat pecentage is in the healthy range, then if you are continuously not eating enough food to meet your body's energy needs, then your body's going to change how it burns fat in order to protect you from starvation. When you don't eat enough, your body will start to burn skeletal muscle as well as fat to make the energy shortfall... this makes your fat stores last longer and greatly increase your chances of surviving the food shortage. The less fat you have in your body, the more likely your body's going to burn muscle along with the fat, as opposed to just burning fat. Loss of lean mass = slower metabolism, because your muscle cells are an energy expensive tissue. Your body saves energy this way... good news for surviving a food shortage but bad news if you want 6 pack abs.

And yes the does make losing the last 10lb of fat more difficult, and it makes it more likely you'll lose 10lb of weight yet still have more flab than you want, because a significant amount of the weight you lost was muscle, not fat. Additionally, adaptive thermogeneis can further slow the metabolism and make fat loss even harder... again, the less fat you have to lose the more likely your body's going to do this, because it's a mechanism for surviving a food shortage.

The less you have to lose, the more conservative you need to be with your deficit to avoid loss of lean mass along with the fat. Once you're in the healthy body fat percentage range, then aim to lose fat really slowly, e.g. 0.5lb/week. Additionally, having refeed days (where you eat at or slightly above maintenance) and even entire weeks where you eat at maintenance, can help.

likitisplit

I think you all are ignoring the feedback loops the body has to protect itself from starvation. You're also not defining "last".

Are you talking about going from 26% body fat to 25%? Probably not that hard.

Are you talking about going from 10% to 8%? Totally different ballgame.

albayin

Personally I think there's no science to back this up because...that "last 10 pounds" is often just in our own head...while our body might not need to lose it...say "vanity pounds"...because you might not need to lose it, it makes it harder?

heybales

Because for your last 10 lbs you will be eating at a much smaller deficit than your first 10 lbs.


Common sense really.

What if you maintained the same deficit all the way through the finish line, would they be slower then? No, right?

You may think you are maintaining that deficit, but your body will adapt and you won't.

So while on paper it looks like 1000, results say otherwise.

That's why many of the first posts saying to make it smaller is better.

Going slower by wise purposeful choices is much better than going slower from bad choices and your body just forced it on you.

10 to 1 the former group is actually getting to eat more while losing their 1/2 lb weekly, compared to the latter group getting the same loss but eating a whole lot less.

Throw in binges the latter group does because of eating so little, and it'll take the former group less time too.

sjaplo

Says the person who a thread ago was declaring that if Americans truly ate 300 calories more per day than we used to we would all be one thousand pounds by now.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/1287703-burning-and-eating-calories-back-what-s-the-point?page=2

I wasn't disputing that Americans eat more today in calories compared to generations past. The point about weighing 1000lbs was to show how absurd it is to simplify weight loss to calories. Your metabolism can change for a myriad of reasons. Feed two individuals 3,500 calories and one may gain weight, the other may lose or maintain. You can't treat it as a simple math equation.

Well you can actually - perhaps what you mean to say is that the equation in question would not be linear and there would be many variables to this equation such as age, activity level, medical issues etc, etc.

Aaron_K123

Says the person who a thread ago was declaring that if Americans truly ate 300 calories more per day than we used to we would all be one thousand pounds by now.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/1287703-burning-and-eating-calories-back-what-s-the-point?page=2

I wasn't disputing that Americans eat more today in calories compared to generations past. The point about weighing 1000lbs was to show how absurd it is to simplify weight loss to calories. Your metabolism can change for a myriad of reasons. Feed two individuals 3,500 calories and one may gain weight, the other may lose or maintain. You can't treat it as a simple math equation.

Your metabolism (BMR) changes in a mathematically predictable manner based on your weight. There are models for this stuff. Yeah, you really can treat it like a math equation. If you eat 300 "extra" calories for the rest of your life you don't gain weight forever as you surmised in the linked post, you gain until your weight adjusts your BMR to account for the extra 300 and you stabilize at a new maintenance weight...a weight that you can calculate with the Harris-Benedict equation.

GreatDepression

your body evolved to survive food shortages, not to have 6 pack abs in a society that has a constant, abundant supply of food.

when you realise that, then it makes total sense.

the more fat you have, the easier it is to lose, because you're in no danger of starving to death. However, once your body fat pecentage is in the healthy range, then if you are continuously not eating enough food to meet your body's energy needs, then your body's going to change how it burns fat in order to protect you from starvation. When you don't eat enough, your body will start to burn skeletal muscle as well as fat to make the energy shortfall... this makes your fat stores last longer and greatly increase your chances of surviving the food shortage. The less fat you have in your body, the more likely your body's going to burn muscle along with the fat, as opposed to just burning fat. Loss of lean mass = slower metabolism, because your muscle cells are an energy expensive tissue. Your body saves energy this way... good news for surviving a food shortage but bad news if you want 6 pack abs.

And yes the does make losing the last 10lb of fat more difficult, and it makes it more likely you'll lose 10lb of weight yet still have more flab than you want, because a significant amount of the weight you lost was muscle, not fat. Additionally, adaptive thermogeneis can further slow the metabolism and make fat loss even harder... again, the less fat you have to lose the more likely your body's going to do this, because it's a mechanism for surviving a food shortage.

The less you have to lose, the more conservative you need to be with your deficit to avoid loss of lean mass along with the fat.

Great post. I'm exercising a lot and eating very well and losing about .5lb a week or less. It's a bit disheartening since I started this journey obese and it wasn't "easy" to drop weight fast before but it did happen a lot. Now I'm really trying to stay motivated as I'm only about 15lb from goal weight.

Aaron_K123

There is an "essential" fat level at about 4% for men and I think around 10% for women (could be wrong on the exact numbers). Presumably if you get that low and continue to try to caloricly restrict your body would switch from getting calories from fat and start to burn your muscle instead. My understanding though is that this process is switched on only when you get down to essential fat. You can see evidence for this in competitive bodybuilders who maintain extremely high muscle mass while cutting down to 4-5% bodyfat. The suggestions I've seen here about it actually getting harder seems to be that when you get low percent bodyfat (like 8-10% for a man) that your body starts to "resist" losing fat.

I'm not sure that is true...I am skeptical of that and would want more than a "common sense" explanation before I accepted it. If I have learned anything from science its that peoples common sense has a real bad reputation for describing actual reality.

MickeyCastello

For me, the last ten pounds was harder mentally. I wanted so badly to "get there" and I was really excited about it, which made it seem like the last weeks were taking forever. In my opinion though, maintenance is way harder than losing the last ten pounds.

Edited for punctuation and spelling

likitisplit

There is an "essential" fat level at about 4% for men and I think around 10% for women (could be wrong on the exact numbers). Presumably if you get that low and continue to try to caloricly restrict your body would switch from getting calories from fat and start to burn your muscle instead. My understanding though is that this process is switched on only when you get down to essential fat. You can see evidence for this in competitive bodybuilders who maintain extremely high muscle mass while cutting down to 4-5% bodyfat. The suggestions I've seen here about it actually getting harder seems to be that when you get low percent bodyfat (like 8-10% for a man) that your body starts to "resist" losing fat.

I'm not sure that is true...I am skeptical of that and would want more than a "common sense" explanation before I accepted it. If I have learned anything from science its that peoples common sense has a real bad reputation for describing actual reality.

It's actually very hard to lose fat without losing muscle at any weight.

albayin

In my opinion though, maintenance is way harder than losing the last ten pounds.

you don't say~

Aaron_K123

There is an "essential" fat level at about 4% for men and I think around 10% for women (could be wrong on the exact numbers). Presumably if you get that low and continue to try to caloricly restrict your body would switch from getting calories from fat and start to burn your muscle instead. My understanding though is that this process is switched on only when you get down to essential fat. You can see evidence for this in competitive bodybuilders who maintain extremely high muscle mass while cutting down to 4-5% bodyfat. The suggestions I've seen here about it actually getting harder seems to be that when you get low percent bodyfat (like 8-10% for a man) that your body starts to "resist" losing fat.

I'm not sure that is true...I am skeptical of that and would want more than a "common sense" explanation before I accepted it. If I have learned anything from science its that peoples common sense has a real bad reputation for describing actual reality.

It's actually very hard to lose fat without losing muscle at any weight.

Oh yeah I believe that, I'm just not sure it is harder at one percent bodyfat than at another percent bodyfat unless you are down to your essential fat.

danielleparmar4

I've been told by my trainer, that the last 10 lbs are the most difficult to lose, because the longer you stay in a calorie deficit, the slower your metabolism becomes over time. I lost 10 lbs and have another 10 to go. I didn't have much to lose anyway, so I'm finding it very difficult to get the last lbs off. The idea is, that when you hit a plateau, which is what you are going though now I'm assuming, you should slowly increase your calories (very slowly and only macro-targeted, healthy calories) so that your body's metabolism increases.

You do this until your weight stabilizes. It took me about a month and half for my weight to become stable (within a pound) and it should stay that way for a week at least. I gained a couple, and then I stabilized. Once you've accomplished this, you drop your caloric intake to what it was -- 1-1.5 lbs loss per week. I'm just starting this phase, accompanied by 3 days of strength training and 2 days of long cardio. I'm told, they will come off much easier because my metabolism is functioning normally again. It does make sense though, from a scientific standpoint. If your metabolism drops by staying in a deficit for too long, your body can go into starvation mode -- in other words -- fat-storing mode, and those 10 last pounds will never come off because your body is working hard to store fat. This is the best explanation that anyone has ever given me, and it makes the most sense. He also told me, you should do this program as a cycle. So 3 month slight deficit with more cardio, and then 3 month maintenance plain with strength training. It'll keeps your metabolism in check, I'm told. Hope that helps!

MickeyCastello

In my opinion though, maintenance is way harder than losing the last ten pounds.

you don't say~

Unequivocally, but then I'm relating only my experience. YMMV

pita7317

As most others said already, towards the ultimate goal weight, it takes longer because of the deficeit factor.
However, in the last 3 weeks I lost 2.4 lbs, which puts me at 7.4 to goal.
So needless to say, I don't find these last lbs the hardest. Just have to really focus on staying within your numbers.
This coming from a non exerciser , just portion control works for me.