How fast is too fast?

emmaling142 wrote: »

I joined MFP on 1st February this year, weighing exactly 160lbs and as of the 20th February, I weighed in at 152.4lbs.

I entered my information, 20 year old, 5''3 sedentary female, aiming for a 2lbs a week loss, on MFP and the NHS website and my calorie goal of 1200 per day is an average of the two different sites. As I am now averaging closer to 4lbs a week, am I losing weight faster than is healthy?

Hey I'm in the same boat actually! ... Started 4.5 weeks ago at 216lbs and now weigh 198. 1600 calorie diet it's going really well and I do lots of cardio and lifting

If you are obese I would suggest that a safe deficit to aim for is up to 25% of your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), which includes both your Non Exercise Activity thermogenecis (NEAT) and your Exercise Activity expenditure (EA).

If you are overweight or normal weight, and are interested in preserving the most amount of lean mass that you can, a deficit of up to 20% of TDEE is what I would suggest.

If you are interested in losing the least amount of lean mass and/or attempting to build muscle mass while losing weight (which might be possible for younger individuals who have sufficient fat available to them and have not engaged in strength/progressive resistance training in the recent past) you might be best off looking at a 10% deficit off of TDEE.

Given your likely sub 2000 Cal TDEE based on your description of yourself, deficits of more than 500 Cal a day seem overly aggressive. Of course your current APPARENT results argue that your TDEE is much larger than 2000 Cal.

Why APPARENT? Because your results could well be heavily influenced by initial water weight losses; but, they could also be an artefact of your use of scale weight to judge your progress.

it is extremely highly recommended that you start using a trending weight application or website to judge your trending weight progress as opposed to concentrating on scale weight.

Scale weight is subject to water weight variation which is orders of magnitude larger than your underlying trending weight change. Sodium in meals, water retention due to exercise, your monthly cycle, all affect your weight much more and much faster than a reasonable caloric reduction ever can.

Start using Libra for Android, Happy Scale for iphone, www.trendweight.com (which I use), or www.weightgrapher.com. Note that a Fitbit.com account, freely available without a Fitbit product, can be used to send weight information to Trendweight and MFP through automatic account integration.

Most of these programs can benefit from a good month of data (that includes at least one TOM cycle) before they will yield a trend and can be relied upon to provide useful results.

Think fondly back to this moment when you first realized that your scale mostly lies!

Daily numbers do not always reflect your underlying weight trend. Using a trending weight app or web site to base your eating decisions on will result in better decision making!