Who has a good article explaining WHY 2lbs a week goal

Rae6503

doesn't work for people with only 10-15lbs to lose? I think I've seen a few around but I'm too busy to go searching right now.

Thanks.

infamousmk

This needs to have some linkage in the UOMFPFAQ!!

SergeantSunshine_reused

When you only have 10-15 pounds to lose you are going to have to go below 1200 calories in most cases to get a 1k calorie deficit. Or have a calorie deficit plus a lot of cardio.
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/why-big-caloric-deficits-and-lots-of-activity-can-hurt-fat-loss.html

I have been posting this a lot lately xD sorry if im getting repetitive!

Jeff92se

At that point, a person with only 10-15lbs to lose, might be at a pretty low bodyfat %? So a 2lb per week rapid (relatively) loss might not be realistic or "healthy"?

15lbs for someone that's about 150lbs i sabout 10% of your total weight.

cmriverside

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/61706-guide-to-calorie-deficits

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/12250-1000-calorie-deficit-not-for-people-with-healthy-bmi

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/6159-this-1200-calorie-thing-is-driving-me-up-a-wall

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/8977-your-body-s-thoughts-on-calories

Rae6503

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/61706-guide-to-calorie-deficits

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/12250-1000-calorie-deficit-not-for-people-with-healthy-bmi

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/6159-this-1200-calorie-thing-is-driving-me-up-a-wall

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/8977-your-body-s-thoughts-on-calories

Excellent. Thanks. Lyle's is a little too complicated for my target audience, although I would appreciate some simple non-MFP articles if anyone has some.

cmriverside

Sorry, I thought we were smarter here

myofibril

The following article by Tom Venuto is pretty good and accessible. It doesn't answer the question directly but contains a lot of relevant info:

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Why do you always hear that 2 pounds per week is the maximum amount of fat you should safely lose? If you train really hard while watching calories closely shouldn’t you be able to lose more fat without losing muscle or damaging your health? What if you want to lose fat faster? How do you explain the fast weight losses on The Biggest Loser? These are all good questions that I’ve been asked many times. With the diet marketplace being flooded every day with rapid weight loss claims, these questions desperately need and deserve some honest answers. Want to know where that 2 pounds per week rule comes from and what it really takes to burn more than 2 pounds of fat per week? Read on.

Why Only 2 Pounds Per Week?

The truth is, two pounds is not the maximum amount you can safely lose in a week. That’s only a general recommendation and a good benchmark for setting weekly goals. It’s also sensible and realistic because it’s based on average or typical results.
The actual amount of fat you can lose depends on many factors. For example, weight losses tend to be relative to body size. The more body fat you carry, the more likely you’ll be to safely lose more than two pounds per week. Therefore, we could individualize our weekly guideline a bit by recommending a goal of 1-2 lbs of fat per week or up to 1% of your total weight. If you weighed 300 that would be 3 lbs per week.

Body Weight Vs Body Composition

Weight loss is somewhat meaningless unless you also talk about body composition; the fat to muscle ratio, as well as water weight. Ask any wrestler about fast weight loss and he’ll tell you things like, “I cut 10 lbs overnight to make a weight class. It was easy – I just sweated it off.”

You’ve also probably seen people that went on some extreme induction program or a lemon juice and water fast for the first week and dropped an enormous amount of weight. But once again, you can bet that a lot of that weight was water and lean tissue and in both cases, you can bet that those people put the weight right back on.

The main potential advantage of any type of induction period for rapid weight loss in the first week is that a large drop on the scale is a motivational boost for many people (even if it is mostly water weight).

Why do you hear so many diet and fitness professionals insist on 2 lbs a week max? Where does that number come from? Well, aside from the fact that it’s a recommendation in government health guidelines and in position statements of most nutrition and exercise organizations, it’s just math. The math is based on what’s practical given the number of calories an average person burns in a day and how much food someone can reasonably cut in a day.

How Do You Lose More Than 2 Pounds Per Week?

Can you lose more than 2 lbs of pure fat in a week? Yes, although it’s easier in the beginning. It gets harder as your diet progresses. How do you do it? My rule is, extraordinary results require extraordinary efforts. An extraordinary effort means a particularly strict diet, as well as burning more calories through training because you can only cut your calories so far from food before you’re starving and suffering from severe hunger.

Simply put, you need a bigger calorie deficit.

If you have a 2500 calorie daily maintenance level, and you want to drop 3 lbs of fat per week with diet alone, you’d need a huge daily deficit of 1500 calories, which would equate to eating 1000 calories per day. You would lose weight rapidly for as long as you could maintain that deficit (although it would slow down over time). Most people aren’t going to last long on so little food and they often end with a period of binge eating. It’s not practical (or fun) to cut calories so much and in some cases it could be unhealthy.

The other alternative is to train for hours and hours a day, literally. People ask me all the time, “Tom, how is it possible for the Biggest Loser contestants to lose so much weight? Well first of all they’re not measuring body fat, only body weight. Then you have the high starting body weights and the large water weight loss in the beginning. After that, just do the math – they’re training hours a day so they’re creating a huge calorie deficit.

But without that team of trainers, dieticians, teammates, a national audience and all that prize money, do you think they’d be motivated and accountable enough to do anywhere near that amount and intensity of exercise in the real world? Would it even be possible if they had a job and family? Not likely is it? It’s not practical to do that much exercise, and it’s not practical to cut your calories below a 1000 a day and remain compliant. If you manage to achieve the latter, it’s very difficult not to rebound and regain the weight afterwards for a variety of physiological and psychological reasons.

For Fast Fat Loss: Less Food Or Harder Training?

Trainers are becoming more inventive these days in coming up with high intensity workouts that burn a large amount of calories and really give the metabolism a boost. This can help speed up the fat loss within a given amount of time. But as you begin to utilize higher intensity workouts, you have to start being on guard for overtraining or overuse injuries.That’s why strict nutrition with an aggressive calorie deficit is going to have to be a major part of any fast fat loss strategy. Unfortunately, very low calorie dieting has its own risks in the way of lean tissue loss, slower metabolism, extreme hunger, and greater chance of weight re-gain.

My approach to long term weight control is to lose weight slowly and patiently and follow a nutrition plan that is well balanced between lean protein, healthy fats and natural carbs and doesn’t demonize any entire food group. To lose fat, you simply create a caloric deficit by burning more and eating less (keeping the nutrient density of those calories as high as possible, of course).
But to achieve the extraordinary goals such as photo-shoot-ready, super-low body fat or simply faster than average fat loss, while minimizing the risks, I often turn to a stricter cyclical low carb diet for brief “peaking” programs. I explain this method in chapter 12 of my e-book Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle (it’s my “phase III” or “competition” diet).

The cyclical aspect of the diet means that after three to six days of an aggressive calorie deficit and strict diet, you take a high calorie / high carb day to re-feed the body and re-stimulate the metabolism. Essentially, this helps reduce the starvation signals your body is receiving. It’s also psychological break from the deprivation which helps improve compliance and prevent relapse.

The higher protein intake can help prevent lean tissue loss and curb the hunger. A high protein diet also helps by ramping up dietary thermogenesis. A high intake of greens, fibrous vegetables and low calorie fruits can help tip the energy balance equation in your favor as fibrous veggies are very low in calorie density and some of the calories in the fiber are not metabolizable. Healthy fats are added in adequate quantities, while the calorie-dense simple sugars and starchy carbs are kept to a minimum except on reefed days and after (or around) intense workouts.

There’s No Magic, Just Math

In my experience, a high protein, reduced carb approach in conjunction with weights and cardio can help maximize fat loss – both in terms of increasing speed of fat loss and particularly for getting rid of the last of the stubborn fat. Helps with appetite control too. But always bear in mind that the faster fat loss occurs primarily as a result of the larger calorie deficit (which is easily achieved with sugars and starches minimized), not some type of “low carb magic.” If your diet were high in natural carbs but you were able to diligently maintain the same large calorie deficit, the results would be similar.

I’m seeing more and more advertisements that not only promise rapid weight loss, but go so far as saying that you’re doing it wrong if you’re losing “only” two pounds per week. “Why settle” for slow weight loss, they insist. Well, it’s certainly possible to lose more than two pounds per week, but it’s critically important to understand that there’s a world of difference between rapid weight loss and permanent fat loss.

It’s also vital to know that there’s no magic in faster fat loss, just math. All the new-fangled dietary manipulations and high intensity training programs that really do help increase the speed of fat loss all come full circle to the calorie balance equation in the end, even if they claim their method works for other reasons and they don’t mention calories burned or consumed at all.

Beware of The Quick Fix

Faster fat loss IS possible. My question is, are you willing to tolerate the hunger, low calories and high exercise for that kind of deficit? Do you have the work ethic? Do you have the supreme level of dietary restraint necessary to stop yourself from binging and putting the weight right back on when that aggressive diet is over? Or would you rather do it in a more moderate way where you’re not killing yourself, but instead are making slow and steady lifestyle changes and taking off 1-2 lbs of pure fat per week, while keeping all your hard-earned muscle?

Remember, 1-2 pounds per week is 50-100 pounds in a year. Is that really so slow or is that an astounding transformation? You don’t gain 50-100 pounds over night, so why should anyone expect to take it off overnight? Personally, I think short-term thinking and the pursuit of quick fixes are the worst diseases of our generation.

If you want to be one of those “results not typical” fat loss transformations, it can be done and it may be a perfectly appropriate short-term goal for the savvy and sophisticated fitness enthusiast. It’s your call. But when you set your goals, it might be wise to remember that old fable of the tortoise and the hare, and buyer beware if you go shopping for a fast weight loss program in today’s shady marketplace.

Train hard and expect success,

Tom Venuto
www.BurnTheFat.com

myofibril

Oh, this additional article by Tom V also explains simply why moderate calorie deficits (hence slower fat loss) is better for leaner folks:

http://www.burnthefat.com/calories-in-a-pound-of-fat.html

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Most fitness conscious people have heard that there are 3,500 calories in a pound of fat, so if you create a deficit of 3500 calories in a week, you lose a pound of weight. If you create a deficit of 7000 calories in a week, you lose two pounds, and so on. Right? Well, not so fast…

Dr. Kevin Hall, an investigator at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda has done some interesting research about the mechanisms regulating human body weight. He recently published a new paper in the International Journal of Obesity that throws a wrench in works of the “3500 calories to lose a pound” idea.

Some of the equations in his paper made my head hurt, but despite the complex math he used to come to his conclusions, his article clearly prompts the question, "3500 calories to lose a pound of WHAT?" His paper also contained a lot of simple and practical tips you can use to properly balance your caloric intake with output, fine tune your calorie deficit and help you retain more muscle when you diet.

Below, I’ve distilled some of the information into a simple bullet-point summary that any non-scientist can understand. Then I wrap up with my interpretation of how you can apply this data in your own fat loss program:

Calculating the calories required to lose a pound and fine-tuning your caloric deficit

3500 calories to lose a pound has always been the rule of thumb. However, this 3500 calories figure goes back to research which assumed that all the weight lost would be adipose tissue (which would be ideal, of course).

But as we all know (unfortunately), lean body mass is lost along with body fat, which would indicate that the 3500 calorie figure could be an oversimplification.

The amount of lean body mass lost is based on initial body fat level and size of the calorie deficit

Lean people tend to lose more lean body mass and retain more fat.

Fat people tend to lose more body fat and retain more lean tissue (revealing why obese people can tolerate aggressive low calorie diets better than already lean people)

Very aggressive low calorie diets tend to erode lean body mass to a greater degree than more conservative diets.

Whether the weight loss is lean or fat gives you the real answer of what is the required energy deficit per unit of weight loss
The metabolizable energy in fat is different than the metabolizable energy in muscle tissue. A pound of muscle is not 3500 calories. A pound of muscle yields about 600 calories.

If you lose lean body mass, then you lose more weight than if you lose fat.

If you create a 3500 calorie deficit in one week and you lose 100% body fat, you will lose one pound.But if you create a 3500 calorie weekly deficit and as a result of that deficit, lose 100% muscle, you would lose almost 6 pounds of body weight! (of course, if you manage to lose 100% muscle, you will be forced to wear the Dieter’s Dunce cap)

If you have a high initial body fat percentage, then you are going to lose more fat relative to lean, so you may need a larger deficit to lose the same amount of weight as compared to a lean person

Creating a calorie deficit once at the beginning of a diet and maintaining that same caloric intake for the duration of the diet and after major weight loss fails to account for how your body decreases energy expenditure with reduced body weight

Weight loss typically slows down over time for a prescribed constant diet (the “plateau”). This is either due to the decreased metabolism mentioned above, or a relaxing of the diet compliance, or both (most people just can’t hack aggressive calorie reductions for long)

Progressive resistance training and or high protein diets can modify the proportion of weight lost from body fat versus lean tissue (which is why weight training and sufficient protein while on calorie restricted diets are absolute musts!)

So, based on this info, should you throw out the old calorie formulas?

Well, not necessarily. You can still use the standard calorie formulas to figure out how much you should eat, and you can use a 500-1000 calorie per day deficit (below maintenance) as a generic guideline to figure where to set your calories to lose one or two pounds per week respectively (at least that works “on paper” anyway).

Even better however, you could use this info to fine tune your caloric deficit using a percentage method and also base your deficit on your starting body fat level, to get a much more personalized and effective approach:

15-20% below maintenance calories = conservative deficit
20-25% below maintenance calories = moderate deficit
25-30% below maintenance calories = aggressive deficit
31-40% below maintenance calories = very aggressive deficit (risky)
50%+ below maintenance calories = semi starvation/starvation (potentially dangerous and unhealthy)

(Note: According to exercise physiologists Katch & Mcardle, the average female between the ages of 23 and 50 has a maintenance level of about 2000-2100 calories per day and the average male about 2700-2900 calories per day)

Usually, we would suggest starting with a conservative deficit of around 15-20% below maintenance. Based on this research, however, we see that there can be a big difference between lean and overweight people in how many calories they can or should cut.

If you have very high body fat to begin with, the typical rule of thumb on calorie deficits may underestimate the deficit required to lose a pound. It may also be too conservative, and you can probably use a more aggressive deficit safely without as much worry about muscle loss or metabolic slowdown.

If you are extremely lean, like a bodybuilder trying to get ready for competition, you would want to be very cautious about using aggressive calorie deficits. You’d be better off keeping the deficit conservative and starting your diet/cutting phase earlier to allow for a slow, but safe rate of fat loss, with maximum retention of muscle tissue.

The bottom line is that it’s not quite so simple as 3,500 calories being the deficit to lose a pound. Like lots of other things in nutrition that vary from person to person, the ideal amount of calories to cut “depends”…

Note: The Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle program not only has an entire chapter dedicated to helping you calculate your exact calorie needs, it was designed very specifically to keep a fairly conservative approach to caloric deficits and to maximize the amount of lean tissue you retain and minimize the amount of metabolic adaptation that occurs when you’re dieting. The approach may be more conservative, and the fat loss may be slower, but it has a better long term track record… You can either lose weight fast, sacrifice muscle and gain the fat back like 95% of people do, or lose fat slow and keep it off forever like the 5% of the people who know the secrets. The choice is yours. For more information, visit: http://www.burnthefat.com

References:

Forbes GB. Body fat content influences the body composition response to nutrition and exercise. Ann NY Acad Sci. 904: 359-365. 2000

Hall, KD., What is the required energy deficit per unit of weight loss? Int J Obesity. 2007 Epub ahead of print.

McArdle WD. Exercise physiology: Energy, Nutrition, and Human performance. 4td ed. Williams & Wilkins. 1996.

Wishnofsky M. Caloric equivalents of gained or lost weight. Am J Clin Nutr. 6: 542-546.

psuLemon

MSF74 - Great stuff!

Uncovering6pack

When you only have 10-15 pounds to lose you are going to have to go below 1200 calories in most cases to get a 1k calorie deficit. Or have a calorie deficit plus a lot of cardio.
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/why-big-caloric-deficits-and-lots-of-activity-can-hurt-fat-loss.html

I have been posting this a lot lately xD sorry if im getting repetitive!

Another girl who reads Lyle's work! Excellent choice.

fteale

You don't need an article, it's fairly obvious. If you only have 10 odd pounds to lose you can't get a 1000 cal deficit and still be eating a reasonable amount of calories. I maintain at 1500. If I tried to lose 2 lbs a week, I'd be on 500 cals a day. Not possible.

Rae6503

You don't need an article, it's fairly obvious. If you only have 10 odd pounds to lose you can't get a 1000 cal deficit and still be eating a reasonable amount of calories. I maintain at 1500. If I tried to lose 2 lbs a week, I'd be on 500 cals a day. Not possible.

That's a VERY low maintenance. I maintain at 2300, so I could theoretically eat 1300 calories a day. But yeah, I'd accidentally eat my arm if I tried that.

Jeff92se

Why do you want to lose that much? Or just curious?

Rae6503

Why do you want to lose that much? Or just curious?

The question isn't for me. I just wanted to share some articles with some friends who've been trying to eat at 1200 calories and wondering why it's not working.


I'm bulking right now. I eat a LOT.

Uncovering6pack

You don't need an article, it's fairly obvious. If you only have 10 odd pounds to lose you can't get a 1000 cal deficit and still be eating a reasonable amount of calories. I maintain at 1500. If I tried to lose 2 lbs a week, I'd be on 500 cals a day. Not possible.

An article can explain what happens in the body and an in depth explanation. That is the not so obvious part.

Iamfit4life

When you only have 10-15 pounds to lose you are going to have to go below 1200 calories in most cases to get a 1k calorie deficit. Or have a calorie deficit plus a lot of cardio.
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/why-big-caloric-deficits-and-lots-of-activity-can-hurt-fat-loss.html

I have been posting this a lot lately xD sorry if im getting repetitive!

lemonadem

bump for later!

Figuringoutme

250lb woman bmr 2500
Cuts 1000 cal= 2 pounds a week loss

1500lb woman bmr 1500
cuts 1000 cal= 2 pounds a week loss

For the smaller girl it would put her down to 500 net calories a day. Which is to low

Rae6503

250lb woman bmr 2500
Cuts 1000 cal= 2 pounds a week loss

1500lb woman bmr 1500
cuts 1000 cal= 2 pounds a week loss

For the smaller girl it would put her down to 500 net calories a day. Which is to low

Just FYI, you should NOT be calculating your deficits based on your BMR but rather on your TDEE which is some multiplier applied to the BMR.

pink59eldo

When you only have 10-15 pounds to lose you are going to have to go below 1200 calories in most cases to get a 1k calorie deficit. Or have a calorie deficit plus a lot of cardio.
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/why-big-caloric-deficits-and-lots-of-activity-can-hurt-fat-loss.html

I have been posting this a lot lately xD sorry if im getting repetitive!

Thanks for the link, I enjoyed it!

daydream58

TEE calc: http://www.health-calc.com/diet/energy-expenditure-advanced

Is this a good one?

Also for checking the diet plan... is this good?

http://www.health-calc.com/diet/weight-loss-calculator

Says my TEE is 3193 which the second calculator says is HIGH, but not in the middle of high... more towards risky... seems to be very different from MFPs estimates, that's for sure. This is confusing and frustrating sometimes. Those times being when you think you're doing everything right and your scale is just not moving much.