Ruthy3907

Hi there. New here.

Long story short: Been working out/eating better since February when I weighed in at my biggest: 272. Now down to 253.4 as of this morning. The thing is, I just recently decided I want do a "decade a month": 250s this month, 240s next month, etc. Well, a few days ago I was still 5.6 pounds from my goal and the end of the month is on Friday. So I decided to do a REALLY strict week and lose those 5.6 lbs.

The past three days have been GREAT: Eating about 1500-1600 calories and walking/working out a lot and I've lost 2.2 of those pounds.

Question is: how healthy is it to do this regularly? Don't think I could, honestly, but I'm just curious. Can it really be healthy to lose 5 lbs a week?

-Ruthy H
ruthy3907.blogspot.com

jjwaverly42

You can lose 5 lbs. in a week, but only about 1.5 lbs. will be fat. The rest will be water, protein and muscle. You want to minimize losing muscle. The body can't metabolize fat any faster than 1.5 -ish pounds in a week. This is why exercise and proper protein intake is important while slimming. In fact, the most important thing you can do is to keep tabs on your %body fat. You want your waist, thighs, and hips to be reducing while losing, while building some muscle. Lean weight should rise, while fat weight should fall. If you make your goal to lose (for example) 10% body fat, sometimes that is more realistic than setting an arbitrary amount of weight to lose. I've known athletes to lose 10% of their body fat and not lose a pound. Yet, they were in fabulous shape. Good luck to you.

tandoorichicken

IMO if you're getting enough protein and fat in your diet and minimizing carb intake to vegetables and fruits (so you're still getting plenty of fiber) I think it's absolutely possible to lose 5 lbs per week starting out, especially if you started at ~270lbs. If you get enough protein and fat you'll stave off muscle loss and it will be primarily fat and water (people often pooh-pooh water loss, but it still counts as weight lost and helps reduce size too). Just note that as you lose more weight it will be more difficult to keep the same rate of weight loss. By the time you make it to the low 200s and below you may only be able to lose 2-3 lb per week. Don't get discouraged by this, as you'll still be burning fat; there's just less to burn now so your body has to "hunt" for it. It's a simplistic analogy but it works. You may also be building muscle at the same time too so scale weight loss will slow down.

Good luck!

-Nik

VegaSinclair

I watch the Biggest Loser and they seem to lose about that much in a week. Of course they are constantly working out since they are taking off from their jobs and they have nutritionist and trainers constantly helping them. It seems most of them lose around 2% of their body weight each week. So 5lbs is doable but you also have to realize that the closer you get to your ideal weight, the harder it will be to lose those last pounds.