A woman at my work said that this was the accepted standard for people losing weight. I said that was unrealistic. I want to lose 20kgs. I am currently 100kgs and 1.78 metres. I am aiming for Feb 2009.
I said that these unrealistic goals are part of the reason why people fail in losing weight.
All hell broke loose at work and we are not able to discuss it again.
Anyone care to discuss it here or give me some references.
The accepted number I’ve always heard is 2 pounds a week, so your coworker and I are in agreement. To lose two pounds of weight (so again, close enough to a kilogram) you have to have a calorie deficit per week of about 7,000 calories (that’d be 1000 per day.) I don’t know how old you are or what your sex is, but for a guy like me (25, 5’10" and about 245 lbs.) my resting metabolic rate is about 2100 calories. For a rough estimate, based on what I do most of the week, I probably average about 2900 calories burned per day. So, to lose weight at a reasonable rate, I want to eat no more than about 1900-2000 calories per day. That is actually quite a lot of food and I combine it with a low-carbohydrate diet that makes me even less hungry and works better for me than just calorie control alone.
I like to use Calories Per Hour for my dieting. You can get the same rough calculation I did here.
You are not too different from me. Are you losing 2 pounds a week?
Sounds like a lot. It sounds like the amount that yo-yo dieters lose then gain back. My point is that if you really want to lose weight you have to have a long term perspective.
Well, I just got back on the diet this last week. And with a low-carb diet, the first thing that happens is that you lose a ton of water weight as your body switches to ketosis. (I think I’ve lost about 10 pounds in water weight this week.) But I managed to lose 80 pounds in 2007 even with some significant times falling off the wagon. I’m hoping to lose another 80 if possible (not sure with my build and all) this next year. I think that’s pretty long term.
This sounds more like a general weight loss discussion than an actual debate (even if the OP was triggered by a brawl at work).
Off to MPSIMS.
[ /Modding ]
Hold on now. 2 lbs. or so a week is the widely accepted maximum rate for permanent weight loss. In other words, weight loss that is reflective of increasing your metabolic rate (you’re eating fewer calories, eating better quality food and exercising more), and of keeping your “lean mass” (muscle), rather than something like water weight or the result of a yo-yo diet where you eat nothing but celery for 6 weeks, lose a ton of weight, then gain it all back because really, who can eat nothing but celery? Or a starvation diet where you’re losing as much muscle as fat, which also reduces your metabolic rate.
It’s a rule of thumb that is something of an average. If you’re very overweight, you might well lose more than 2 lbs. a week “safely”, but after a few weeks it will level off.
I should add that it is definitely realistic. I lost about 2 to 2-1/2 lbs. a week for about 8 weeks when I first started “down from the mountain”, by eating smaller meals more often, cutting down on refined foods and liquid calories, and exercising more. At that time though I was at about 32% body fat. The less fat you have, the harder it will be to lose “pounds” of fat.
I’m proud to say I’ve kept it off, too. From May, 2006 to Jan, 2007 I lost about 45 lbs., and now a year later I’m at the same weight (actually about 4-5 lbs. less). I feel confident I can maintain this weight (my original target body fat/weight composition) by not stuffing myself (eating only until full, and more often) and exercising. That’s what got me here, and what’s kept me here.
It’s not 2 lbs/wk, that’s just what the maximum for safely losing weight works out to for most people. It’s actually a percentage of your body weight (which I can’t recall exactly right now-- something like 1.5% of your body weight). It does sound like a lot, but it isn’t completely unreasonable, and depending on how you’re losing it it doesn’t have to come through some crazy crash diet. I have no cites I can point to right now, but I had a lot of experience with fluctuating weight through wrestling, and I can tell you that the ~2 lb number is not unreasonable and it is safe, and since it’s not a crash diet it won’t immediately come back or anything like that.
Note though that it is what I always heard of as the maximum that is safe to lose, and consequently you might have to be working for it harder than you might want to. I think that 20 kg in a year sounds perfectly reasonable.
As a data point, I’ve lost 50 pounds since the last week in September, not on a “crazy crash diet” but on an eating plan that entails: [list=a]Cereal for breakfast, to the serving size quoted on the box[li]A light lunch in the 250-300 calorie range[]An evening meal of “real food” probably amounting to about 700-800 calories[]No snacking, except fruit and maybe the occasional sweet biscuit (single figures in a week)[]The odd McMeal or similar replacing the evening meal quoted above[]About 90 minutes of walking per day divided between two sessions.[/list][/li]
How I’m going to transition from that to maintenance is a question I’m prepared to settle when I’ve lost another 50-60 pounds. I expect to need to juggle a bit, but that’s hardly surprising in view of my eating and exercising having been out of whack for the last thirty years.
Oh, and just for shits and giggles I’ve modelled the OP’s intended weight loss as exponential decay over 52 weeks (so the rate of weight loss isn’t constant but the amount lost each week is a constant proportion of how much you have left to lose). I make it that your weight each week should be 100e[sup]-0.0043t[/sup] where t is the week number. 
With a little use of Excel you could easily graph this.
…Why yes, I am a sad math geek. 
Exactly. That’s what you can realistically lose while a) remaining healthy and b) keeping it off. There’s no such thing as an “accepted standard”.
That’s great! whistles
Well, if I could whistle, I would whistle at you.
I’d like to see a graph mapping rate of weight loss to proportion of the weight loss that is lean tissue. Maybe if you go above about 2lb a week the lean tissue part becomes unacceptably high? Maybe beyond a certain point you just can’t lose fat any faster, and any additional weight loss must come from lean tissue? I imagine that is where the max x pounds per week advice comes from, anyway.
Much of the problem is usually that you’re losing neither fat nor lean tissue, but water. It’s easy to lose weight quickly by dehydration, and many fad diets (hopefully inadvertently but my cynical self doubts it) promotes dehydration. Quick results that disappear just as quickly.
I lost a pound a week to 20 pounds total. On the simplest of diets: Don’t eat anything different, just eat less of it. That was 2 years ago New Years Resolution, and it’s still off.
Pounds are like 1/2 kilos each, right?
I don’t think you can lose water long term though… you’d die pretty quickly. I’m wondering about people losing more than 2lb a week or whatever it is, over the medium to long term.
Exactly.
Depending on what you mean by medium and long term, very very few do and remain healthy, and the ones who do are probably genetic freaks. But sure, you can drop a lot of weight for a long time, but it won’t be good for you.
Over the medium to long term, people who lose over 2lb per week tend to experience complications because they’re a) not taking in enough calories or b) getting too little of several key nutrients.
More importantly, if calorie count is kept too low over an extended period of time, the body is designed to switch over to starvation mode and begin hoarding what fat it has left to make sure it has resources to keep you alive until regular calorie intake resumes. The body then switches over to burning muscle tissue for energy, which is definitely not the desired goal of a diet as you should be aiming to gain muscle and lose fat.
It is possible to lose more in a medically supervised ultra-low-calorie diet, but these use methods that trick the body into thinking you are not in a starvation period.
Actually, with Goal Seek [under Tools], one can easily figure out what one should lose per week as a constant percentage of one’s weight at the time, and graph up a nice little chart.
As for the Original Question, I have regularly seen one to two pounds as the recommended loss.