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So I've just started on a healthy diet and have started working out regularly. I'm just wondering how many pounds is healthy to lose in a week? How much is unhealthy? Any side effects of losing weight too fast?
depends if you want to maintain muscle mass or not. If your goal is to retain your muscle while losing fat, I wouldn't lose more than around 2/wk, maybe 3 max. If you don't care about losing more muscle along with it, you could probably squeeze by with 4, or possibly 5, but that's getting up there of over exercising/under eating. You need all the nutrients and such that food provides to stay healthy, which is the biggest goal. If you do it right, I would say 2-3. slow and steady wins the race.
No such thing as a scientifically studied blanket set of relevant numbers to worry about. Your goal is to get healthier - eating healthy (healthy food and portion size and frequency) and exercising is on the right path. See where those things take you.
depends if you want to maintain muscle mass or not. If your goal is to retain your muscle while losing fat, I wouldn't lose more than around 2/wk, maybe 3 max. If you don't care about losing more muscle along with it, you could probably squeeze by with 4, or possibly 5, but that's getting up there of over exercising/under eating. You need all the nutrients and such that food provides to stay healthy, which is the biggest goal. If you do it right, I would say 2-3. slow and steady wins the race.
This, plus another factor is how big you are to begin with.
I'd agree that if you're trying to retain muscle, you shouldn't go over 2-3/week, but if you're over, say 300 pounds, you can definitely go over that. If the OP was, say, a 130 lb woman, I wouldn't recommend more than 1/week.
The side effects of losing weight TOO quickly can be:
1) As houstan-dan said, you could be missing out on nutrients
2) You're more likely to gain weight back if you don't develop the habitual behavior that goes along with a healthier lifestyle. So if you just stop eating and drop like 30 pounds quickly, you didn't develop the "healthy lifestyle" disciple needed to keep that 30 pounds off. This strongly applies to surgical weight loss methods.
3) If you are particularly large and lose weight too fast, your skin doesn't have time to adjust. Sometimes, this is unavoidable, but you wouldn't be helping yourself by losing it so fast that your skin can't catch up.
There are no numbers set in stone. You may have great results the first week and most of that will be water weight.
A lot depends on what you weigh to start with. It's really all about percentage of body weight. If you weigh 100lbs, a 1 pound loss can be pretty significant. It means more than a 1lb loss for someone who weighs 300lbs.
If you have some really good weeks, great. Don't even worry about losing too much too fast because you will have bad weeks down the road. Even weeks where you gain. If your goal is truly a different lifestyle, weighing once a month might be a more true picture. It would be smart to take a vitamin every day!
But keep this in mind. Diets don't work. Whatever you are doing to lose weight has to be a sustainable new lifestyle you can live with forever, as in the rest of your life. The very word diet is synonymous with deprivation and punishment. If your change to a healthy diet ends when you have lost the weight you wished to lose, you will be right back here in 6 months trying to lose the same weight again. And the next time it will be a little harder because you are teaching your body to use it's fuel ever more efficiently. Store as much fat as possible, the lean times are coming!
It took me way too long to figure this out. But this is the way it is! And maintenance for me means I 'diet' about half the time. It's a battle that is never won. I weigh every day and if I am over my goal for 2 days in a row, I have to cut back till I see my magic number again. This way my weight is always under control.
Yes, the general guideline is that losing too much more than three pounds a week usually isn't healthy. That said, I have seen very overweight people that will sometimes drop much more than that in a week, when they suddenly start working out regularly and eating healthier. Keeping a food journal and watching portion size can play a huge role in this.
I think the safety issues are minimized by the long term health benefits. I'm not advocating crash dieting or anything like that, though.
I like to aim for 1 lb per week. It's not too severe to cut out 500 cals per week, especially if you do it in part by working out. You could even aim as high as 1.5 lbs per week. Start losing too much and you're probably going to burn off a lot of muscle. Make sure you lift weights to maintain your muscle mass. You can of course lose more if you're morbidly obese. One guideline many people give is not to aim for more than 1% of your weight.
Depends on how big you are to start. The leaner you are the less you should aim to lose each week. Going too low with calories (generally under 1k) messes with your hormones and generally isn't a good strategy for longer then a couple weeks.
As long as you're getting enough protein and are doing resistance training you don't have to worry too much about muscle loss.
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