Question on losing 2 lbs/wk please?

You chose way too aggressive a weight loss per week, considering the small amount of weight you have to lose.

Choose 0.5 pounds per week for your calorie allotment. That said, do not go below 1200 calories per day.

If you haven't already, read the stickies at the top of the getting started forum. Very informative and helpful.

Here's how it works.

Axiom: It is unsafe for a female to eat less than 1,200 calories per day, or 1,500 for a male.

Fact: A pound of fat consists of 3,500 calories worth of stored energy.

Alrighty, then. Now we have all the information needed to do the math. Let's look at two examples:

1. A big, tall, fat male wants to lose 2 pounds per week. His TDEE (maintenance calories, i.e. neither gaining nor losing weight - go to tdeecalculator.net for the calculation) is, say, 2800. To lose 2 lbs per week, he must average 1,800 net calories per day. Since that is a safe level of calorie consumption according to the Axiom, he can go ahead and set a goal of 2 lbs per week.

Simple enough. Here's where it gets more complex.

2. A small to average sized female decides to lose 2 lbs per week. Her TDEE is, say, 2000. In order to lose 2 lbs per week, she must average 1,000 net calories. Problem: that's 200 calories less than the 1,200 net calorie minimum for a female. Bottom line, this person cannot lose 2 lbs per week safely. The most she can lose is 800 calories per day (her TDEE of 2,000 minus the 1200 minimum), or 1.6 lbs per week.

Conclusion: A woman with a TDEE of less than 2,200, or a man with a TDEE of less than 2,500, cannot lose 2 lbs per week safely, because it'd require net avg daily calories to be below the safe minimum.

This is why people say "If you're a hundred pounds overweight you can lose 2 lbs per week, but if you're 20 pounds overweight, you need a more modest goal". That's inexact language for which the reasoning is not intuitively obvious, but which is based on the underlying math shown above. As your weight declines, your TDEE declines too, so the amount of weight you can safely lose per week declines as you lose weight, because you bump into the 1200/1500 minimums.

threewins wrote: »

You can speed up weight loss by exercising. That's what I'm doing. Something to consider is that a person's metabolism reduces when eating less to lose weight. I've seen 6% reduction thrown around, but really, if you are losing 1 kg a month, your metabolism is likely slow down less than if you are losing 1 kg a week.

The changes to metabolism (metabolic adaptation) due to calorie restriction are minimal. Peoples calorie requirements will decline as they lose weight due to the fact that there is less of them for their metabolism to drive but your metabolism will more or less keep ticking along just fine.

Exercising can indeed aid weight loss but the 'return on investment' from exercise is pretty poor and it's an inefficient approach to losing weight. Hitting the gym 5 days a week for a pretty vigorous workout (350cal) will increase your weekly rate of loss by 8oz if (and only if) there is no corresponding increase in calorie intake to fuel this increased activity. This is rarely the case because burning more calories, particularly at a level that would have a noticeable impact on the scales will almost certainly come with a noticeable increase in appetite.

Have a protein shake and a banana to refuel after each workout and your rate of loss drops from 8oz/week increase to just an additional 2.5oz per week. Eat just a few mouthfuls more at dinner cause you're a little hungrier and you've negated any additional weight loss from exercise. Eat a bit more than that due to the increased appetite and it's entirely possible for working out to cause the scale progress to slow down or (as was the case with me for most of my life) get the scales moving in the wrong direction.

Now, this is not to say that people shouldn't workout and exercise, they definitely should. Exercise comes with worlds of health and fitness benefits. But the focus in the gym should be about strength and fitness and let the weight loss happen in the kitchen.