There are ways to lose ten pounds a week, but in most cases, they involve illness and water weight loss. You can lose more than 1-2 pounds a week and still be healthy, but the rate won’t necessarily continue throughout your weight loss efforts. There are healthy ways to lose weight and unhealthy ones. The unhealthy ones include fad starvation diets. The problem with a fad diet is that you often lose a lot of water weight, making the weight loss anything but permanent.
Each person is unique.
If you’re grossly overweight and combine a healthy diet with a program of exercise, you’ll probably lose more than a pound or two a week for a while. Too rapid of weight loss can lead to gallstones, flabby skin, fatigue, muscle wasting, metabolic disorders and even hormonal imbalances, which include metabolic disorders. That mostly occurs on starvation diets. A healthy diet combined with exercise will build muscle tissue as you lose weight. The more muscle tissue you have, the higher your metabolism.
Expect your weight loss to slow slightly as you shed those extra pounds.
Unless you boost your workout intensity, the more weight you lose, the slower the weight loss becomes. If you’re thirty pounds overweight, it’s like carrying a thirty pound weight with you everywhere. As you lose weight, that extra burden becomes lighter and burns fewer calories. While building muscle tissue will increase the calories burned, you might see a slow down. Initial weight loss can also be water weight, not fat loss. That’s also temporary.
Aim for a pound or two a week and appreciate it if you lose more.
One big problem with most people who want to lose weight is that they focus too heavily on day to day changes. Your weight is constantly going up and down. That’s why weighing once a week is best. The amount of glycogen available in the muscle tissue is what makes a difference. When you first cut calories, the body burns the glycogen stores in the muscles to provide energy, plus 3 times that weight in water. You can lose over a pound of weight loss initially from glycogen loss with up to 4 pounds in water, but it is replenished later. So, fluctuations are normal.
Track your exercise and diet for reference. If you find your progress isn’t what it should be, review the week and see what you could have done differently.
Not only can extremely cutting calories and over-exercising cause illness, it can be counterproductive. You can end up losing lean muscle mass or find your program is suffering due to fatigue, making weight loss harder.
Taking it slow gives you time to form new habits. When you make regular exercise and healthy eating a habit, you never face the problem of being overweight again.
At Rising Fitness, we can help you with a personalized program of exercise and nutrition to help you lose weight in a healthy manner and establish habits that will keep that weight from returning.