Why do you always hear that 2 pounds a week is the maximum you should lose? If you train hard while watching calories carefully shouldn't you be able to lose more weight 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? With the diet marketplace flooded with rapid weight loss claims, these questions need and deserve a little of honest answers. Want to cognize 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.
The truth is, two pounds is not the maximum you able to safely lose in a week. That's only a general recommendation and a good benchmark for setting weekly goals. It's sensible and realistic because it's based on average or typical results.
The actual amount of fat you could lose depends on numerous factors. For example, the more body fat you carry, the more probably you'll be to safely lose more than two pounds per week. Therefore, we could individualize our guideline 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.
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 water fast for the first week and dropped an enormous amount of weight. But you can bet that a lot of that weight was water and lean tissue and you can bet those people put the weight right back on.
Why do you hear so many diet and fitness professionals insist on 2 lbs a week max? 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.
Can you lose more than 2 lbs of 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, and burning more calories through training because you can only cut food intake so much 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 only 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 duration of binge eating. It's not practical (or fun) to cut calories so much and it could be unhealthy.
The alternative is to train for hours and hours a day, literally. People ask me, "Tom, how is it possible for the Biggest Loser contestants to lose so much fat? First of completely they're not measuring body fat, only body weight. Then you have the high starting body weights and large water weight loss in the beginning. After that, just do the math - they're training hours a day to create a huge calorie deficit.
But without the trainers, dieticians, teammates, a national audience and all that prize money, do you think they'd be motivated and accountable enough to do that amount and intensity of exercise in the real world? Would it even be possible if they had a job and family? Not likely. 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 regain the weight afterwards for a variety of physiological and psychological reasons.
Trainers are becoming more inventive these days in coming up with high intensity workouts that burn a lot of calories and really give the metabolism a boost. This can help speed up fat loss. But as you begin to use higher intensity workouts, you must initiate 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, hunger, and weight relapse.
My approach to long term weight control is to lose weight slowly and patiently and follow a nutrition plan that's well balanced between lean protein, healthy fats and natural carbs and does not demonize any entire food group. To lose fat, you simply create a caloric deficit by burning more and eating less while keeping the nutrient density of those calories as high as possible.
But to achieve the extraordinary goals e.g. photo-shoot-ready, super-low body fat or 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 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, 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 which helps improve compliance and prevent relapse.
The higher protein intake can help prevent muscle loss and curb hunger. Protein also helps ramp 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 those foods are 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 around intense workouts.
In my experience, a high protein, reduced carb approach in conjunction with weights and cardio can help maximize fat loss - both for increasing speed of fat loss and particularly for getting rid of the last stubborn fat. But always bear in mind that the faster fat loss is a happen of the bigger calorie deficit, not some type of "low carb magic." If your diet was high in natural carbs but you were able to maintain the same large calorie deficit, the results would be similar.
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 do not mention calories at all.
Faster fat loss IS possible. My question is, are you willing to tolerate the hunger, low calories and high exercise? Do you have the work ethic? Do you have the dietary restraint necessary to halt yourself from binging and putting the weight 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 you're 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 increase 50-100 pounds overnight, so why 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 a "results not typical" fat loss transformation, 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 watch out if you go shopping for a fast weight loss program in today's shady marketplace.
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