Why 2 pounds/week max of weight loss?

lucylousmummy

Bottom line - it's not that one can't, it's that it is not healthy long term and harder to keep off if you lose it faster then that.

^^^^^this plus if you do lose it to fast your skin has less chance of bouncing back naturally, and you will be left with saggy skin

phildawson75

My TDEE (1900) + 1000 exercise = 2900 cals burnt
My TDEE (1900) - 500 deficit = 1400 cals consumed

I don't know about anyone else but I'd be totally knackered after 2 days trying to live like that on that amount of cals.

TDEE includes exercise.

No TDEE includes what you expend in your daily activity. Unless your typical day is always doing 1000 cals of exercise then its in addition. If it was the case my TDEE would be 2900 not 1900.

No, TDEE is Total Daily Energy Expenditure, it's a medical term, not something made up, and it includes exercise, it includes everything.

Only if when you calculate the TDEE you add exercise. When I do mine I do, as I tend to know roughly how much I burn a week, however if its different from week to week you might chose to only add daily activity outside of exercise.

You don't add exercise to TDEE. If you expended less energy on a particular day because you didn't exercise the total calories you burned is still referred to as your TDEE.

You're getting confused between my normal TDEE (1900) and the energy expended on a day when an additional 1000 cals is burnt. The TDEE for that particular day would be 2900.
The calculation used my normal TDEE as a base, which should hopefully have been clear. I could have done the below which is the same massive 1500 combined deficit shown in a different way.

My TDEE (2900) which includes 1000 cals solely on additonal daily exercise.
My TDEE (2900) - 500 deficit - 1000 cals exercise

I know you're trying to be pedantic over this, but its coming across has trolling this thread now. You've missed my original point completely.

dapzzz

So, I weighed in today at 219.1 pounds on my Fitbit scale. Granted, this was after vigorous cardio, so a lot of it represents lost water weight. Still, looks like I'm pretty close to achieving my goals.

I'm quite happy with the results. At this point, I'm thinking of setting a new goal of 215 (roughly 5 more pounds) and stabiliizing around that weight.

Going to have my body fat % professionally measured on Friday...that will inform a lot of my decision process.

I am glad that I pursued this more rapid weight loss approach. It wasn't very hard to do, just required eating better and listening to some music on treadmill and the elliptical :-)

BonaFideUK

Unless you're super big, losing more than 2lb a week will probably mean you're losing muscle mass also.

dapzzz

I did some analytics using the Fitbit data. Here is a plot of my weight and body fat % over time:



As you can see, visually it appears as if body fat % is dropping more rapidly than weight.

I also computed the 25th percentile of weight measurements versus the 75th percentile, then divided those two #s.

This statistic is ~0.965 for my weight, ~0.905 for my body fat. Again suggesting that body fat is dropping more rapidly than my weight.

I'll probably do some more analysis at some point in the future to estimate what my weight and bf% loss is/was each week.

dapzzz

Unless you're super big, losing more than 2lb a week will probably mean you're losing muscle mass also.

The relevant question though is, if you are losing 2 pounds or less per week, does this guarantee that all of that lost is fat?

What evidence is there to suggest that going slowly means a higher % of weight lost is fat than going more rapidly?

dapzzz

Just got my BF% measurements today. It looks like my fitbit scale overestimated my body fat by nearly 2 percentage points...it claimed 18.9% this morning, while the Bod Pod claimed 17.2%.

I'm happy about this.