I guarantee everyone has had this same experience: you decide to lose weight, follow your plan for a day, hop on the scale the next morning and hallelujah! Progress! A pound cut right away. You’re happy and everything is great! Another day goes by and another pound is gone.
But then, After a few more days, you stop seeing the progress, and maybe you even observe a weight gain on certain days. How is it possible? Is my scale lying to me? After experiencing this myself, I did some research and calculations on how much weight we can actually lose per day and I want to share my findings with you.
How Fast Can We Lose Weight? Practical Calculations
Let's start with the basics - one gram of fat provides nine
calories of energy. So, to lose one gram of fat, you need to create a 9-calorie
deficit. Or, if you have a calorie deficit of 500 - you consume 1,500 calories
and you spend 2,000 calories, meaning you'll lose 55 grams of fat every day.
Just 55 grams or roughly 0.1 pounds. This will be the actual weight loss that you will have.
- How much time it will take you to lose one pound?
- About 8 days.
- What about losing 10 pounds with a 500-calorie daily deficit?
- 80 days or 2 months and 20 days.
- 20 pounds?
- 160 days or 5 months and 10 days.
That's a quite long period of time! Let's speed up our fat
loss process. You can increase your level of physical activity by adding one solid
exercise per day spending 2500 calories daily while decreasing your calorie
consumption by an additional 300 calories to 1200 calories total. That's quite
aggressive, but it's good to be aggressive when you want to lose fat. Fat
deserves it! Your new daily calorie deficit will be 1300 calories. It means
that each day you'll lose about 144 grams of fat or 0.3 pounds.
- How much time it will take to lose one pound?
- About 3 days versus 8 days before.
- What about 10 pounds? 32 days.
- What about 20 pounds? 64 days or2 months and 4 days.
Let's consider an
extreme case. In order to minimize the calorie intake, you start fasting,
basically no calorie intake. And you’ll still maintain an average calorie
expenditure of 2,000. I don't believe you can work out on a regular basis while
fasting. Without exercising while fasting, your daily calorie deficit is 2,000 calories
and you'll lose about 222 grams of fat daily. It's about a half-pound!
- How much time it will take you to lose one pound?
- Now about 2 days.
- What about 10 pounds? 20 days.
- 20 days of fasting! One critical point!
In our calculations, we assume that many other factors besides calorie balance don't change, basically, everything stays the same. But you should expect one major shift - if you remain in a calorie deficit for an extended period of time your body starts optimizing its calorie expenditure which is base for your weight loss.
Basically, your body becomes more efficient in spending calories and will
require fewer calories daily. You are teaching your body how to be thrifty.
Your basal metabolic rate will go down and it will have a negative impact on
your weight loss process.
Let me share my personal experience -my typical daily calorie spent is about 2,800 calories. My basal metabolic rate is1,800 and about 900 calories are my active energy. So, when I go into the weightless mode, I cut my calorie consumption to about 2,000-2,200 calories and have a daily calorie deficit of 600-800 calories.
This means that
to lose 3 pounds of extra fat, it takes me about 18 days! So, now we know how
much fat we can practically lose daily,
But what about our other quandary - fast weight loss in the
beginning and then significant slowdown, or even weight gain later. The answer
is quite simple - you can lose weight, not fat, quite fast by emptying your
digestive tract or dehydrating your body.
The most common reason why we see such weight loss in the
first few days is that we've emptied our stomachs. The typical weight of food
in the average person's digestive tract is about 4to 6 pounds.
Reducing this amount to 2 or 3 pounds at the beginning of your weight loss journey will give you a speedy 2-3 pounds weight loss. Dehydrating your body with the dehydrating drinks like coffee, tea, or alcohol will make your scale happy with a quick drop in weight.
Going to steam rooms or
saunas is another quick weight loss trick. Steam rooms are considered the golden
standard in body dehydration. This process is something that boxers, wrestlers
and other athletes do on a regular basis before being weighed in for
tournaments.
For the professionals, this short-term weight loss can reach up to 20 pounds! 20 pounds just in a few days! That's incredible, but also extremely unhealthy for the body in the long term. You'll like what it does to the look of your body, but your body will hate you. So, that's it for today!
Food To Burn Fat and Lose Weight at Quickest
With all those calculations above mentioned, to lose your weight/ fat at quickest as you can. You must have a proper diet knowledge. It is worth
mentioning your weight loss depends 80% on what you eat and 20% on your exercise.
The best way to burn such fat is to follow the low-calorie diet with a sufficient
amount of exercise in a daily routine. Here is a list of top 10 food that will
help to burn your fat and lose weight more efficiently.
1. Nuts
They slim your stomach by keeping it fool eating about 24
almonds a day will satisfy your hunger for longer.
2. Olive oil
It contain monounsaturated fat therefore it helps keep your
cholesterol under control and satisfy cravings.
3. Berries
They have a lot of fibre just one cup of raspberry has 6
gram. It hurts you feel full and more satisfied.
4. Eggs
Our body makes vitamin B12 to metabolize fat, it is highly
recommended to eat egg for breakfast, it gives you a lot of energy and it's an
excellent source of protein.
5. Lean meat and fish
Salman, tuna and Turkey are perfect examples for this type
of foods, they are full of Omega 3 fatty acid. The function is to prevent
stress chemical to promote fat abs.
6. Milk
the main source of calcium helps breakdown fat and
also prevent it from forming.
7. Oatmeal
It boosts energy, reduces cholesterol, maintains blood sugar
level, builds muscles, helps burn fat and regulate the digestion.
8. Apples
they are packed with nutrients and are a rich source of
vitamin C, they also have a lot of dietary fibre that helps our digestive
system.
9. Tomatoes
On average, a large-sized tomato contains around 33 calories which give sense of fullness. It also has a lot of health
benefits for your whole body.
10. Protein powder
It contains amino acid that burns fat and build muscles.
Adding 2 teaspoons to a smoothie will create affect busting and tastier drink.
Small Exercise To Burn Fat & Lose Weight at Quickest
To lose fat you do not have to do heavy, extensive and rough
exercise.
The basic concept of exercise: to burn fat, you have to
use the muscles in order to generate heat and produce energy deficit so that
fat can be metabolized in that specific area resulting in sufficient weight loss due to fat digestion rather than your muscles.
Here is the list of 10 small, light exercises that you should be
including in your daily routine for around half an hour in combined to get rid
of excessive fat lodged in your body.
- Single leg jackknife
- Bridge
- Knee Tuck Crunch
- Heel Touch
- Flutter Kicks
- Toe Tap Leg Lifts
- Leg Drops
- Plank
- Scissor Kicks
- Toe Touch
To demonstrate this exercise, there are several tutorials
videos in different social media platform and offline fitness cassettes
available in the market which will give you an idea of how to perform this exercise.
Just for the mentioning, each of these exercises should range
between 5 to 10 minutes according to your comfort. While doing this exercise
you don't have to stress your body extreme level.
By the end, I hope you got the idea how to lose weight and
how long will it take?
This simple calculations, food ideas and light exercise are
very much effective to burn down your body fat and help to lose weight.