Why do you always hear that 2
pounds per week is the maximum amount of fat you should safely lose? If
you train really hard while watching calories closely shouldn’t
you be able to lose more fat without losing muscle or damaging your
health? What if you want to lose fat faster? How do you explain the
fast weight losses on The Biggest Loser? These are all good questions
that I’ve been asked many times. With the diet marketplace being
flooded every day with rapid weight loss claims, these questions
desperately need and deserve some honest answers. Want to know where
that 2 pounds per week rule comes from and what it really takes to burn
more than 2 pounds of fat per week? Read on.

Why Only 2 Pounds Per Week?

The truth is, two pounds is
not the maximum amount you can safely lose in a week. That’s only
a general recommendation and a good benchmark for setting weekly goals.
It’s also sensible and realistic because it’s based on
average or typical results.

The actual amount of fat you
can lose depends on many factors. For example, weight losses tend to be
relative to body size. The more body fat you carry, the more likely
you’ll be able to safely lose more than two pounds per week.
Therefore, we could individualize our weekly guideline a bit by
recommending a goal of 1-2 lbs of fat loss per week or up to 1% of your
total weight. If you weighed 300 lbs, that would be 3 lbs per week.

Body Weight Vs Body Composition

Weight loss is somewhat
meaningless unless you also talk about body composition; the fat to
muscle ratio, as well as water weight. Ask any wrestler about fast
weight loss and he’ll tell you things like, “I cut 10 lbs
overnight to make a weight class. It was easy - I just sweated it
off.”

You’ve also probably
seen people that went on some extreme induction program or a lemon
juice and water fast for the first week and dropped an enormous amount
of weight. But once again, you can bet that a lot of that weight was
water and lean tissue and in both cases, you can bet that those people
put the weight right back on.

The main potential advantage
of any type of induction period for rapid weight loss in the first week
is that a large drop on the scale is a motivational boost for many
people (even if it is mostly water weight).

Why do you hear so many diet
and fitness professionals insist on 2 lbs a week max? Where does that
number come from? Well, aside from the fact that it’s a
recommendation in government health guidelines and in position
statements of most nutrition and exercise organizations, it’s
just math. The math is based on what’s practical given the number
of calories an average person burns in a day and how much food someone
can reasonably cut in a day.

How Do You Lose More Than 2 Pounds Per Week?

Can you lose more than 2 lbs
of pure fat in a week? Yes, although it’s easier in the
beginning. It gets harder as your diet progresses. How do you do it? My
rule is, extraordinary results require extraordinary efforts.
An extraordinary effort means a particularly strict diet, as well as
burning more calories through training because you can only cut your
calories so far from food before you’re starving and suffering
from severe hunger.

Simply put, you need a bigger calorie deficit.

If you have a 2500 calorie
daily maintenance level, and you want to drop 3 lbs of fat per week
withe diet alone, you’d need a huge daily deficit of 1500
calories, which would equate to eating 1000 calories per day. You would
lose weight rapidly for as long as you could maintain that deficit
(although it would slow down over time). Most people aren’t going
to last long on so little food and they often end with a period of
binge eating. It’s not practical (or fun) to cut calories so much
and in some cases it could be unhealthy.

The other alternative is to
train for hours and hours a day, literally. People ask me all the time,
“Tom, how is it possible for the Biggest Loser contestants to
lose so much weight? Well first of all they’re not measuring body
fat, only body weight. Then you have the high starting body weights and
the large water weight loss in the beginning. After that, just do the
math – they’re training hours a day so they’re
creating a huge calorie deficit.

But without that team of
trainers, dieticians, teammates, a national audience and all that prize
money, do you think they’d be motivated and accountable enough to
do anywhere near that amount and intensity of exercise in the real
world? Would it even be possible if they had a job and family? Not
likely, is it? It’s not practical to do that much exercise, and
it’s not practical to cut your calories below a 1000 a day and
remain compliant. If you manage to achieve the latter, it’s very
difficult not to rebound and regain the weight afterwards for a variety
of physiological and psychological reasons.

For Fast Fat Loss: Less Food Or Harder Training?

Trainers are becoming more
inventive these days in coming up with high intensity workouts that
burn a large amount of calories and really give the metabolism a boost.
This can help speed up the fat loss within a given amount of time. But
as you begin to utilize higher intensity workouts, you have to start
being on guard for overtraining or overuse injuries.That’s why
strict nutrition with an aggressive calorie deficit is going to have to
be a major part of any fast fat loss strategy. Unfortunately, very low
calorie dieting has its own risks in the way of lean tissue loss,
slower metabolism, extreme hunger, and greater chance of weight
re-gain.

My approach to long term
weight control is to lose weight slowly and patiently and follow a
nutrition plan that is well balanced between lean protein, healthy fats
and natural carbs and doesn’t demonize any entire food group. To
lose fat, you simply create a caloric deficit by burning more and
eating less (keeping the nutrient density of those calories as high as
possible, of course).

But to achieve the
extraordinary goals such as photo-shoot-ready, super-low body fat or
simply faster than average fat loss, while minimizing the risks, I
often turn to a stricter cyclical low carb diet for brief
“peaking” programs. I explain this method in chapter 12 of
my e-book Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle (it’s my “phase III” or “competition” diet).

The cyclical aspect of the
diet means that after three to six days of an aggressive calorie
deficit and strict diet, you take a high calorie / high carb day to
re-feed the body and re-stimulate the metabolism. Essentially, this
helps reduce the starvation signals your body is receiving. It’s
also a psychological break from the deprivation which helps improve
compliance and prevent relapse.

The higher protein intake can help prevent lean tissue loss and curb the hunger. A high protein diet
also helps by ramping up dietary thermogenesis. A high intake of
greens, fibrous vegetables and low calorie fruits can help tip the
energy balance equation in your favor as fibrous veggies are very low
in calorie density and some of the calories in the fiber are not
metabolizable. Healthy fats are added in adequate quantities, while the
calorie-dense simple sugars and starchy carbs are kept to a minimum
except on refeed days and after (or around) intense workouts.

There’s No Magic, Just Math

In my experience, a high
protein, reduced carb approach in conjunction with weights and cardio
can help maximize fat loss – both in terms of increasing speed of
fat loss and particularly for getting rid of the last of the stubborn
fat. It helps with appetite control too. But always bear in mind that
the faster fat loss occurs primarily as a result of the larger calorie
deficit (which is easily achieved with sugars and starches minimized),
not some type of “low carb magic.” If your diet were high
in natural carbs but you were able to diligently maintain the same
large calorie deficit, the results would be similar.

I’m seeing more and more
advertisements that not only promise rapid weight loss, but go so far
as saying that you’re doing it wrong if you’re losing
“only” two pounds per week. “Why settle” for
slow weight loss, they insist. Well, it’s certainly possible to
lose more than two pounds per week, but it’s critically important
to understand that there’s a world of difference between rapid
weight loss and permanent fat loss.

It’s also vital to know
that there’s no magic in faster fat loss, just math. All the
new-fangled dietary manipulations and high intensity training programs
that really do help increase the speed of fat loss all come full circle
to the calorie balance equation in the end, even if they claim their
method works for other reasons and they don’t mention calories
burned or consumed at all.

Beware of The Quick Fix

Faster fat loss IS possible.
My question is, are you willing to tolerate the hunger, low calories
and high intensity exercise for that kind of deficit? Do you have the
work ethic? Do you have the supreme level of dietary restraint
necessary to stop yourself from bingeing and putting the weight right
back on when that aggressive diet is over? Or would you rather do it in
a more moderate way where you’re not killing yourself, but
instead are making slow and steady lifestyle changes and taking off 1-2
lbs of pure fat per week, while keeping all your hard-earned muscle?

Remember, 1-2 pounds per week
is 50-100 pounds in a year. Is that really so slow or is that an
astounding transformation? You don’t gain 50-100 pounds over
night, so why should anyone expect to take it off overnight?
Personally, I think short-term thinking and the pursuit of quick fixes
are the worst diseases of our generation.

If you want to be one of those
“results not typical” fat loss transformations, it can be
done and it may be a perfectly appropriate short-term goal for the
savvy and sophisticated fitness enthusiast. It’s your call. But
when you set your goals, it might be wise to remember that old fable of
the tortoise and the hare, and buyer beware if you go shopping for a
fast weight loss program in today’s shady marketplace.

Train hard and
expect success,

Tom Venuto
Fat Loss Coach
www.BurnTheFat.com

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