A coworker ordered some tuna without the bread, which struck me as odd. He said that he’s trying to lose 20 lbs in a week. Now, he understands that he WILL fail in this goal. He knows he won’t actually be able to get to 20 lbs. But that’s not the issue here.
I told him it was impossible for him to do it. There’s nothing he could do that would lose him 20 lbs in one week that he would survive. Another coworker suggested that it could happen if we trapped him in a sauna. The second guy also suggested that it’s routine for fighters to drop that much weight for a weigh-in.
So let’s get technical with this. Let’s assume the person has awesome willpower. He weighs 196 lbs and exercises semi-frequently so he’s got some muscle. But he’s an office worker, not an MMA fighter (no matter what his desktop wallpaper is), so he’s not ripped. Prior to the weigh-in, the person doesn’t do anything special to increase his weight but he’s willing to do anything short of severing body parts to lose the 20 lbs.
The way I see it, we’re asking for over 10% weight loss. At most, there’s maybe 7 pounds of tissue to be lost in a week and only, say, 10 pounds of water weight. That requires running the guy to death, sweating him to dehydration and beyond, and he’s still coming up 3 pounds shy. I think I’ve already overestimated the amount of pure fluid weight loss - dehydration occurs at 2% water loss and we’re demanding over 5%?! Plus we’re making the guy run a marathon every day for 7 days? There’s no way he can even lose the 17, let alone a full 20 lbs!
So can this guy go from scale to scale and actually lose 20 lbs in a week without dying? Remember, we don’t care if the weight comes back in the next day- or hour even. We don’t care that “it’s all water weight”. We don’t care if any normal human would actually have the discipline to do this. We just want to know if it’s even physically possible for this guy.
I don’t know about your figures, but not that long ago, the late Arturo Gatti gained about 15 pounds between the weigh-in and the actual fight against Joey Gamache. Presumably he had dehydrated and rehydrated that amout. That’s an extreme case, but 5-10 pounds isn’t unusual at all.
ETA: But to answer your question, 20 pounds of dehydration for your the person you’re talking about does seem like a lot.
Hmm. A marathon every day would burn 100 x 26 x 7 (very roughly) = 18200 calories.
18200 calories / 3500 = 5.2 lbs.
Assuming he eats nothing in all that time, and assuming 2000 calories per day as his recommended intake, that’s another 14000 calories. 14000 / 3500 = 4lbs.
So my starving himself and running a marathon every day he could theoretically lose 9.2 lbs of fat in a week, assuming he doesn’t die.
That leaves 10.8 extra lbs. That sounds an awful lot for water weight, but I don’t know the technical side of it.
I’m going to guess no; and that the above attempt would put him in hospital.
I’ve lost 10 lbs in a single run on a summer day. This was in the days when it was believed you shouldn’t drink during exercise.
If you don’t eat carbs, you will burn glycogen. Glycogen binds with water at a rate of 4 water-1 glycogen.
Normal storage is about a pound of glycogen so there’s another 5 lbs.
20 would be doable but very risky depending on his starting weight.
A few years ago I measured the amount of water lost via sweating - weighed myself before and after an hour (or so) long run. Didn’t drink any water in the mean time, and lost > 30 oz - almost 2 lbs.
So I dont doubt the ability to lose 20 lbs of water weight in a week, but I seriously doubt the ability to do so, from a normal hydration starting point, safely.
But I think you guys are taking your one-day loss and multiplying by 7. You can’t do that. Once you’ve lost the weight, even if it’s 10 lbs, on day one, you’re tapped out. You’ve spent that reserve. There’s not another 10 lbs sitting around that you can lose on day two.
That’s like saying that a guy that’s got $1,200 in the bank can spend $1,000 in a day. So he can spend $7,000 in a week. It doesn’t work like that. The most money he can possibly lose is $1,200 no matter what he does in between.
Even if our guy could lose 19.9 lbs in an hour, he’s got nothing left. If there’s no source from which to draw the other 0.1 lbs from, he loses the contest.
Well, that depends on his starting fat content, surely? You’re right in that he can’t lose more fat than he actually has, but we don’t know how much he has. You’ve said he’s 196lbs, but we don’t know how tall he is, or what the fat/muscle proportions are. Is he 5’ tall? In which case at that weight he has loads of fat to spare. If he’s 7’ tall, he probably has much, much less if he’s 196lbs total.
Where are you getting the stats that he has a starting 7lbs of fat and 10lbs of water? Has that been measured? And, of course, he can lose muscle by starving himself.
MMA fighters do this all the time, though their weight-loss is overseen by the commission that sanctions the fight.
For example, last month Gray Maynard still had 10 pounds to lose between Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon for his Saturday fight against Kenny Florian. He was not in the least worried about it [video here at the 20-second mark].
Of course, being an elite athlete, he’s an exception and has honed his weight cutting process to a science.
If a fighter cannot make his required weight on weigh-in day, there have been cases where the commission has refused to allow the fighter to lose any more weight, even as little as 1/2 pound.
So, to answer the OP’s question, losing 10-15 pounds in one week is routine for MMA fighters. I would guess that if a fighter needs to lose 20 pounds, he will do it over a longer period of time and not cram it into one week.
For the average person, losing 20 pounds in one week would be very risky, as you suggest.
Tsk. Tsk. I covered that in the OP. He’s not allowed to maim himself.
He’s 5’9" and a little over 30. He’s also a former soldier so he’s probably more to the muscle end of the scale than the fatty end. I got the 7 lbs from assuming that a pound of fat is 3500 calories and a marathon is roughly 2400 calories. Let’s say that there’s an additional 1500 calories (note: I said additional) just to keep him alive and we’re at roughly 1 lb/day.
Then I tried to guess how much water he had in him. It seems that MMA fighters can lose roughly 10% of their weight through some vigorous training in a week, but he’s not an MMA fighter and we’ve already accounted for the tissue loss. So let’s say that’s 5% for a normal person. I looked up what constitutes dehydration and it said 2%. But that’s just the first phase, so I doubled it to get REALLY dehydrated, so I have some confidence in our 5% figure. On a 200-lb person, that’s 10 lbs.
As a rule of thumb you can go 3 days without water. That level of dehydration will cause bodily functions to start to fail. So there are most definitely limits to how much water a healthy human can lose and survive. Add in exercise and you start running into serious problems quickly.
I’ve lost 7-8 lbs in a long dayhike but quickly drank water at the end. I’ve lost 8-10 lbs in week while exercising and dieting and that weight has stayed off. I think I could have reached 15 lbs in week when I was at my heaviest, but not now that I’ve dropped 60 lbs.
Yes, but as has been said, your body will make up for that water loss when you drink fluids. You can’t just do this for seven days straight and not rehydrate along the way. I lose about 5 pounds on a one-hour run in hot weather, if I don’t take in additional drink. I will usually drink about 2 pounds of that water right back after the run, but in the next few hours, my body will naturally reach its normal equilibrium through my food and liquid intake, and I will be back at my starting weight.
My water weight has fluctuated between 45.2% and 52.1% over the last several years which is measured by my body scan weight scale and my weight has fluctuated between 240 and 265 over the same number of years, so (depending on the accuracy of the scale) it is technically possible for a 250 lb. man to lose 250*(.521-.452)=17.25 pounds of water within a one week period and also lose roughly a pound a day of fat with vigorous exercise for a total of 24.25…but I would not suggest that…I felt very dehydrated at 45% and pretty well at 50%.
Your are terribly wrong and I think there is nothing else that makes someone look so pathetic as someone insisting something cant be done when it can. I have done it myself and I know many more that have done it, you can actually do it alone with just water weight, let alone if you lost actually pounds of fat, etc. In fact I have done it within 36 hours and hey, Im still alive…so Im guessing that if someone was determined and disciplined and wanted it bad enough, he/she could do it in one week. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news to you buddy!
As a wrestler back in the day, many of us did this routinely (Sunday was “meal day,” and the rest were devoted to making weight). Granted this was NOT HEALTHY and is now strongly discouraged in most areas.
As a 112-pounder (normal body weight being closer to 150), I would lose an average of 3-5 pounds during a single practice (depending on how “sucked out” I was). Once you’ve managed to thoroughly deplete your body of everything it loves (water, food, etc), it becomes incredibly difficult to keep dropping. I once spent over an hour running in a plastic suit in 100+ degree heat and only lost 1/4 lb (and darn near passed out on the scale). We also worked out for about 6 hours a day (2 hours before school, 2 hours after, and then a gym/sauna combo).
There are plenty of tricks to sucking weight, which I won’t post here in the interest of not encouraging it.
Also importantly, as soon as you start re-hydrating and/or eating, the weight comes back shockingly quickly. I swear to Og, it seems like a glass of water can add 4 lbs.
I would not have mentioned this, except that the OP specified water loss:
I was recently hospitalized for two days, and ate very little during that time. When I got home I weighed myself and found I had gained 18 pounds! It was obviously all (or almost all) water from the IVs they put in me.
Despite trying to drink a lot (because of what I was recovering from) I lost the entire 18 pounds in about 6 1/2 days.
I have done Weight Watchers multiple times - it works, if you can stick to it.
The most recent time, I lost 17 pounds in the first week, simply by following the plan. That was well more than twice as much as I had ever lost in a week, and I can’t explain how it happened. Women were treating me like I was their new god or something.
EDIT : 17 pounds represented less than 10% of my loss goal - it’s not like I went from 200 to 183 in a week…