It seems like sound advice that, rather than trying to lose weight, overweight people should aim to lose fat. And apparently, the faster you lose weight, the higher the proportion of what you are losing is muscle, bone and other non-fat tissue. But are there any hard figures relating rate of weight loss to the fat proportion of that weight loss?
All I can find is the oft-repeated advice that if you lose more than about 2lb a week, you will “be losing muscle mass too”. Well sure, but I bet any weight loss involves some loss of non-fat tissue. The question is, how much for a given rate of weight loss? I would like to be able to estimate an optimum calorie deficit in order to maximise fat loss and minimise loss of other tissue. I realise that you can counter muscle loss by means of e.g. weight training.
I dont think there’s any possible way to say for sure. It all depends on what exactly you’re doing to lose the weight.
If you lose the weight via starving, you’re going to lose different percentages than if you lost it by excersising and limiting calories.
Also, an Atkins regime would cause you to lose different percentages of tissue than say the grapefruit diet, etc.
I think the “cause” of the weight lose is more important in determining this magic ratio you’re looking for than the “amount” and “speed” of the weight lose.
In addition to the factors Bear_Nenno mentioned, the amount of fat you lose will depend on how fat you currently are. Not surprisingly, fatter people have an easier time losing fat than leaner people.
I was hoping that there might have been some study, e.g. taking a group of people on similar exercise regimes and on ranges of estimated calorie deficits, and measuring their weight loss and how much of the weight loss was lean tissue.
I have seen a study like that before (sorry, no cite), and they came to the conclusion I mentioned above, that fatter people lose more fat than leaner people.
Depends on your diet, exercise regime, and current level of body fat.
I am on a diet and exercise program where I slash 500 calories of intake per day and I burn an extra 700 calories per day (5 days per week) by exercising for a total of 2 pounds per week (Disclaimer: If I was consistently doing that daily). I signed up for some email articles on this site from Tom Venuto. In those emails, he points out studies that show that a combination of diet and exercise will produce the greatest amount of fat loss while maintaining muscle mass. He also advocates not going below certain calorie thresholds because you will start losing muscle mass at a faster rate than fat.