Should You Attempt Fast Weight Loss?

How many times do we see infomercials promising to cut 10 pounds in a week or 30 pounds in a month?

I know it is good marketing to give people what they want in a fast weight loss diet, but what they want is not necessarily what they should get.

As I mentioned in the last post that a diet is a short-term band aid to something that probably needs surgery.  A diet conveys a quick fix that never can be sustained.  A nutritional lifestyle change is more about forming new habits that you can sustain for the rest of your life.

If you feel like you have excess weight, realize that is caused by habits that you have formed for months or years.  It is going to take some time to fix this.  As you may have heard it takes at least 3 weeks to create a new habit and break an old one.

People grow frustrated with their years of fat increase so they want to make it go away all at once.  Dusting it under a rug with a pill or starvation is not only unhealthy, but rarely effective.

According to the ACSM, you should only lose about 2 pounds a week at max.  I know that is going to cause a lot of frustration for some of you and it flies in the face of fast weight loss tips you may have heard. True health isn’t about weight loss, but instead burning fat and maintaining your muscle.

If you exceed 2 pounds a week, then you will lose muscle along with it.  Often muscle can be more than 50% of the weight loss when you start to exceed 2 pounds a week.  Any fast weight loss becomes counterproductive to losing fat by lowering your % of lean muscle as well.

More Muscle

The higher the percentage of your body composition consisting of lean muscle, or the overall more pounds of lean muscle mass you have, the easier it is to burn fat.

I know some of you are scared of muscle because you don’t want to be a bodybuilder.  For those of you that are reading this with that mindset, remember that everyone has the same muscle, it is just a matter of how much of it you have.  The higher the percentage of lean muscle, the less fat you have whether you weigh 100 pounds or 300 pounds.

Small Calorie Deficit

Fat can be cut in one of two ways.  The first way is to eat less calories than you need daily to maintain your current weight.  Usually you want to eat around 500-800 calories less than your calorie maintenance number.  Or you can do 15-20% of that number because 500-800 calories may be too low if you are a female having a minimum of 1200 calories or a male needing a minimum of 1800 calories.

In the last post, The Right Weight Loss Tips, I put a formula to help you figure out what your daily calorie requirement is.

Exercise

The second way to get rid of fat is through exercise.  This is the most effective way.  You don’t risk running into starvation mode if you are maintaining calories and exercising daily.

It will not only avoid losing muscle, but exercise will trigger your body to say, “I need to keep this muscle to survive.”  Carbs are then burned for energy and stored as glycogen rather than being stored as fat.

Exercise won’t make you lose muscle or cancel out the food you ate.  That is an old wives tale.

Aerobic exercise and weightlifting combined can make a huge difference in your physical appearance and emotional well being.  If you have tried diets, I am sure they have come with pain and frustration, which makes them partially hard to maintain.

If you can have this balance while maintaining expectations, then this can be your ideal fast weight loss plan.

In the end, it isn’t about diet pills or powders or any other fast weight loss program on TV.  It is about choosing the right type of foods like whole wheats, lean proteins, fruits and vegetables.  Eat small, frequent meals every 3 hours or so.  That type of exercise and nutrition will help you achieve the right type of weight loss.