Assuming an excellent nutrition plan, and an excellent exsercise plan, a physical beforehand (with a good bill of health), and say…1 to 1 1/2 hours a day to devote to excercize, how much weight could a 40 year old man safely lose in 90 days?
How much are you starting at? The weight comes off quicker the fatter you are.
What are the basics of the nutrition plan?
The biggest factor is how fat he is to start. A very fat man can lose much more weight than a relatively lean one. Aside from that, there’s a lot of individual variation, and weight’s a pretty poor measure of progress given any exercise plan with a reasonable resistance training component (no plan without this is excellent).
Well, that fat man is me.
For 20+ years I weighed 180-190. (I’m 5’11") I weight trained and ran regularly. I ran 2, 3 and 4 miles on a rotating 3 day basis with 2 days off. At 40 I could run 5 miles in Timberlands if I needed to.
In the last 3 years, I stopped going to the gym, and embarked on a plan to raise the revenue and stock prices of Donatos and McDonald’s single handedly.
Voila!
I am now 234. 234! A year ago, on a lark I lost 18 pounds in 5 weeks simply not eating fast food, so I assume that a comprehensive plan might improve on this.
I want to get in good shape before summer. (not great shape; I know that takes time)
What’s my chances?
Haven’t nailed down the basics of the nutrition plan down yet. Previously I spent $100 for an hour with a certified nutritionist (I can get anal about things). That was years ago.
I have a an exercise plan. I’m open to a nutrition plan.
Any suggestions?
ETA: my job has me on the road a lot. fast food establishments are by far the easiest places for me. I love McDonalds Asian Salad, so easy on the road fare is great for me. I figured I’d visit their web sites and look at their nutrition tables.
The goal is 190# June 1. (from 234 this morning)
Safely possible?
I’m not an expert of any sort - I’ve only had my personal history of weight loss to give me experience.
The general consensus is way too low on how much weight you can safely lose per week. I think the general guideline is something like anything over 1-2 pounds per week is unhealthy. I know this to be untrue.
Now - there certainly are ways to lose a lot of weight at once that are indeed unhealthy. Anytime you force your body to eat lean tissue or muscle to make up your energy needs, you’re doing harm. But that doesn’t mean losing weight faster than that is inherently harmful.
This may seem crackpot, but I don’t think calories in vs calories out is quite the simple rule it’s cracked up to be. In my experience, what you eat seems to be able to make your body more or less willing to store or burn fat. I think there are probably a lot of fundamental flaws in “nutritional science” as popularly practiced today and I tend not to listen to them.
When I lost a ton of weight, I was far more overweight than you - somewhere around 6’2 380, so the weight came off a lot faster. I was also 17-18 at the time, so my body was probably better able to tolerate extreme changes in lifestyle.
I lost around 90 pounds in the first three months - and a lot of people insisted what I was doing therefore must be quite unhealthy - but I’d received a complete physical along with bloodwork and such before I started as a baseline. My doctor was uncomfortable with my diet, and was looking for a reason to prove herself right, that my health had declined - but it had dramatically improved in every way - my LDL lowered and HDL increased until I was in the ideal range, my triglycerides decreased by, IIRC, something like 80%+, and I was in exceptionally good health.
But I ate lots - plenty of protein, all the essential fatty acids I needed, well rounded vitamin and mineral intake. Had I chose to starve myself and start counting calories, it would’ve been both slower and less healthy. I didn’t count calories at all and never denied myself when I was hungry - so my body always got what it needed.
My diet consisted almost exclusively of meats (fresh where possible) of all sorts, cheese, and a variety of fresh vegetables. I took vitamin/mineral suppliments to round things out although I didn’t need to - but it’s essentially never a bad idea, it’ll help fill any needs you might miss.
I pushed myself every day to work harder - but the key is that you should always be working to increase your muscle mass. Resistance training trumps everything else. There’s a limited amount of resistance training your body can optimally sustain, though - you never want to try to build the same muscle groups two days in a row - which gives you plenty of time for the cardio stuff. In my experience, short intense stuff will serve you better than the longer, lower intensity stuff, but your body may be different.
I don’t know what sort of diet plans nutritionists are giving people today, but they were pretty crappy 6-8 years ago when I was doing this. You’ll probably be told to avoid food with good quality protein because it comes with fat - you’ll probably eat too much starch and sugar. It might inhibit your muscle development and possibly cause other health problems.
So, essentially my answer is that losing weight that fast is practical and can be perfectly healthy, but it’s often not if you’re starving your body to get there. You shouldn’t let yourself go hungry - listen to your body. If you can’t maintain a high weight loss rate without going hungry, you’re eating the wrong stuff.
So yes, I feel that your goal would be safely possible if you were to really work at it - although you might find that with muscle growth, your body will be in as good a shape at 200 as you expected at 190 - don’t get too focused on the numbers. But if you ever feel like you are depriving your body of anything, you’re venturing into unsafe territory. I’m not sure you can achieve your goal following the plan of a nutritionist, though.
I’m 45 and have lost about 25 pounds since Xmas, just by cutting portion sizes. The weight loss has plateaued over the last month or so. Now that my cardiac issues are under control, I plan to gradually add exercise to my regime, which should kick-start further weight loss.
The nutritionist at my gym says that 2 lbs is about the most a healthy person should lose per week. Fatter people can lose more. However, if your goal is to promote lean muscle mass (which appears to be the overall thought at my gym), then 2lbs/week, she says, should not be exceeded.
My totally non-expert opinion says that it’s easier to lose your weight first then build up muscle. I saw something on Extreme Makeover where this dude lost a ton of weight (he was hefty to begin with, much heavier than the OP), and he had loose skin. It didn’t look that gross, not like on the supermarket tabloids that don’t seem to exist anymore (the ones with alien invasions and return of Christ headlines).
I’m 230 at the moment (6’2"), and my goal is also 190 by June 1. That’s about 20 lbs/month, or 5 lbs/week, roughly. Some people will say this is unsafe, and I say hogwash.
I’ve gone up and down the scale pretty regularly, topping out at 260 and bottoming out at 175. At my height and build, 2 lbs/week is virtually nothing, and it would take months to see or feel a noticeable change. 2 lbs/week for a 150 lb, 5’2" woman may be reasonable, but for a man with our height/build/starting weight, I think we can pretty safely aim for 3-5/week and be totally safe.
Disagree strongly.
Building muscle is a significant factor in the fat-losing process - the muscle tissue requires more energy than fat to keep going even during inactivity, so it ups your energy expenditure.
Resistance training also has a longer-lasting effect to raise the metabolism than cardiovascular training, resulting in a higher expenditure for longer.
Plus, if you’re losing weight in a way that doesn’t increase muscle mass (and I’m not talking necesarily about body builder style bulking up), chances are you’re doing something unhealthy, losing lean tissue. This damages your body, reduces your energy expenditures, and forces your body to go into starvation mode and makes you more likely to regain the weight or at least slow the weight loss as your body tries to desperately hold onto every bit of food you eat.
This is the stance that my gym takes. I don’t totally disagree with it. Let me ask you this, since you appear to have a good handle on the subject, and when I ask this question at my gym, I don’t get a straight answer:
What is the optimal course of action for someone who clearly has a lot of fat to lose? Please keep in mind the notion that weight gain/weight loss is a function of calories in versus calories out. The “Heavy Loser” will not be able to convert all that fat mass into lean muscle mass (or maybe they will, I don’t know enough about biomechanics/biochemistry), I don’t think. The HL will see more immediate results from burning his calories through high heart rate training, i.e. anaerobic training, than they will in lower calorie burning, lower heart rate aerobic training. The aerobic training will produce more muscle and lean muscle mass, but doesn’t the anaerobic training more quickly lead to the desired weight (and ultimately mass) loss?
Most people can’t burn fat and build muscle at the same time. I can, but I’m a ridiculously healthy 21 year old male, and I expect that will change.
But yes, most people have to divide their weight control into two portions, muscle gain and fat burn. You’re either doing one or the other. For most people, the two goals have opposite requirements: muscle gain requires more calories, while fat loss requires less. So you have periods where you bring in lots of protein and carbohydrates to build muscle, in which you’re always increasing your resistance training, and another phase in which you’re simply maintaining the muscles you already have and cutting back on calories to burn fat. I want to re-emphasize that most people can not do both of these at the same time.
Build muscle first. Larger muscles require more energy to maintain when inactive, so your resting metabolism will rise significantly more than a cardio-centric exercise routine.
I’m not sure where all of this “safe weight to lose” stuff comes into effect. If you have a strong heart and are eating right, then whatever weight you burn should be safe.
I also want to add that a big, big reason behind how much I exercise is the privilege of eating ice cream every night 
I think you’re getting aerobic and anaerobic excercises confused. Jogging is an aerobic excercise - you can process enough oxygen to sustain the process, whereas lifting weights is anerobic - you consume oxygen at a greater rate than it can be restored to your muscles.
You also don’t turn fat into muscle in any meaningful sense. Burning fat reserves can be used to fuel muscle growth, but so could simply eating more. I’ve from people who specifically gained extra fat to be able to turn it into muscle and it shows a misunderstanding as far as I know.
So to answer your question about having a lot of fat to lose - the amount of calories you expend scales upwards with the amount of lean tissue your body has. A fat, out of shape person may burn X calories per day just from maintaining those tissues, whereas someone with a greater lean body mass may burn X times 1.3 calories. And so by building that mass, you’ll expend more calories in general, but just to keep the tissue functioning and during excercise.
You also seem to be getting stuck on the issue of losing mass. As I said in a previous post, don’t get caught up on weight numbers. If you lose 30 pounds in weight - while losing 40 pounds in fat but gaining 10 pounds in muscle, are you worse off than someone who lost 40 pounds of fat and gained no muscle and hence lost 10 more pounds than you? Not at all - you’re in better shape healthwise and for the long term.
Even so, if you wanted to lose 100 pounds, you’d (in my experience) get there faster by focusing on strength training and also doing cardio in addition to it, and during your rest times, than by spending the same amount of time on cardio training. Essentially, building your muscle mass is not only burning fat in the process, but also laying infrastructure for more fat burning in the future.
I throw this tidbit into every weight loss thread I see: according to food psychologist Brian Wansink, the average person can eat 200 less calories per day than normal and never even notice. That adds up!
That’s a pretty good rule of thumb, as is 1% of a person’s body weight. (So, 2 pounds a week for a 200 pound person, but fatter people can lose more.)
Thanks for answering my question so quickly. This is what I’m starting to turn my exercise regiment into as I seemed to have plateaued. Do you split your cardio and lifting days? Is your lifting more heavy, low reps (high weight, 4-6 reps)? Or, is it more moderate (moderate weight, 10-12 reps)?
Today is April 24. Your target date of June 1 leaves you only 5 weeks to lose 44 pounds. That is an average of 8.8 pounds per week - a calorie deficit of 36,680 per week, or 4,527 per day. I don’t think that is doable in a healthy manner. Maybe if you were 150 lb. overweight to begin with…
Anyway, I am in the end stage of a “biggest loser” type context where I work. I started at 196 lbs and set a goal of 166 lbs over the course of the 90 day contest - 2.5 pounds per week. The plan included radical changes in eating habiits (Not a diet! I eat just as much as I used to, only much wiser choices) and regular excercize (4-5 days per week at the gym).
The eating plan includes 3 meals per day of 300 - 400 calories each plus 2 snacks per day at 100 - 200 calories each, a daily total of ~1600 calories. My diet is now heavy on fruits and vegetables, but still includes lean meat daily. Snacks are fruits, nuts or granola type bars. Rice cakes come in assorted flavors now that take the place of cheese puffs, potato chips, etc. Just figure out your base calorie intake needs (online calculators are everywhere), multiply by an activity factor and that is your target for weight maintenance. Stay between the base calorie amount and the calorie amount for your activity level and you will lose weight.
I go to the gym 4-5 days per week. A typical day is 45 minutes hard cardio/endurance (6.5 to 7 miles on the cross trainer in 45 minutes, pulse never exceeds 85% of max) and 30 minutes weights. Since my goal for this contest is weight loss, my lifting routine is circuit training, large muscle groups, and more reps with lighter weights. Generally I burn about 550-650 calories per workout. That, coupled with the 700-800 calorie per day intake deficit adds up to the 9000 calories per week I need to burn 2.5 pounds (1 lb = 3600 calories). After the contest is over I’ll increase the weights and decrease the reps to bulk up what I’ve toned over the last 90 days.
Results so far: I’m at 170 lbs with 10 days remainig in the contest - pretty much right on track.
The main point is this: Figure out if your goal is reasonable, what it will take to meet it, build a plan and stick to it.
(psst. It’s March.)
When I was in elementary school, kids used to say if you didn’t know the date plus or minus 3 days you were legally insane. You must be positively batshit :D.