What is the Best Rate of Weight Loss (Fat Loss Sweet Spot Series)

Hey everybody, Dr. O here

Welcome to Part 3 of the Fat Loss Sweet Spot series. We just got done talking about how dieting too aggressively can cause your body to use lean

mass for fuel. We also talked about how lean and obese subjects respond differently to aggressive calorie

deficits because your body fat levels determine when aggressive is too aggressive

Now we're going to look at the simplest way to tell if you are in two steep, of a calorie deficit, your rate of weight loss. So number two on our first five points here

So what should a good rate of weight loss look like? Generally it should be between 0.5% and 1

of your total body weight per week. That means if you if you weigh 200 pounds, you can lose up to

two pounds a week, 300 pounds, up to 3 pounds a week, and 400 pounds up to 4 pounds a week

Right? The whole like lose one pound or two pound per week thing doesn't make any sense when you

take size and consideration. Telling someone that weighs 4 pounds a week, 400 pounds that they should only lose 1 to 2 pounds per week

Doesn't make any sense. Four pounds of weight loss per week is perfectly fine at that size

You can be more aggressive if you have a lot of fat to lose because your body fat is protecting

you from losing lean mass. We covered that in the last video. But a 4 pound weight loss per week for someone that weighs 170 pounds would be a terrible idea

Let's actually see. It's been studied. So what does the science say? metabolic adaptation to calorie restriction and subsequent refeating

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment Revisited. So they had 32 non-obes subjects. They weighed 171 pounds on average

They ate 50% of their energy needs for three weeks. That's an average of 1,353 calories per day

And they also only ate 49 grams of protein per day. So I'm going to come back to this study when we talk about protein intake later

So if they were dieting smartly and they were losing 0 to 1 of their body weight per week over this three week period they would have lost between 2 and 5 pounds in three weeks But in this study the change in their body weight was 13 pounds or six kilograms in three weeks You probably be super excited about losing seven and a half percent of your body weight in three weeks

but, right, there's a huge caveat here. Their body fat provided all the energy that it could

Lean mass like muscle had to make up the difference. So here's the shocking stats from this study

Calorie restriction. Remember, they were only eating 50% of the calories they needed

reduced fat mass by 114 grams per day. So they lost a quarter of a pound of fat every day over three weeks

Again, sounds great, but the same calorie restriction reduced their fat-free mass

so lean tissue like muscle, by 159 grams per day or 0.35 pounds

So every day, they were losing a quarter of a pound of fat and over a third of a pound of fat-free mass

Right? So over 58% of their weight loss was fat-free mass. This is terrible

So what did it actually do to their body? This calorie restriction led to reductions in resting metabolic rate

So the resting metabolic rate went down 266 calories per day in only three weeks of dieting

The energy cost of walking went down 22%. Their metabolism was adapting and trying to save every calorie

Their leptin levels dropped 44%. Leptin's a hormone released by fat cells that tells the brain how much fuel you have on your body

and so leptin leads to subconscious increases in movement and it leads to an increase in your metabolic rate and a decrease in hunger

So a drop in leptin would slow your metabolic rate, make you very hungry, all negative things

Then T3, which is the most metabolically active form of thyroid hormone, which regulates your metabolism, dropped 39%

And their testosterone dropped 11%. So all in the name of losing a few extra pounds over a three-week period, they saw these massive changes

changes. Basically, they push their bodies too hard and their bodies fought back. This is what

metabolic adaptation is, your body fighting back from extreme calorie deficits that it can't tolerate

They became skinny fat really So what does skinny fat look like Let me show you So here this is an image from Wikipedia but you can see variations in visceral fat content in men with the same waist circumference So we have what do we have here Eight different examples All of them had the same waist circumference but look at the

one in the middle on the top. Only half a liter of visceral fat. And you see the fat tissue would be

that white tissue, the subcutaneous fat on the outside, and not much fat in the middle. But then go

all the way down to the bottom couple of guys, right? They're 4.2 liters of visceral fat, 4.3 liters of

us real fat. So they had the same waist circumference, but some of them were much leaner than the

others and some of them had a lot more fat than the others. So this is what skinny fat means

Losing lean mass to get the scale to move is never worth it. Go back to part one in this series if you

don't believe me. All right. So again, we're trying to find our fat loss sweet spot. It's okay if you're

losing one and a half percent or two percent of your body weight for the first couple of weeks

or really the first few weeks if you have a lot of fat to lose like a lot of fat to lose like a I did. Some of this is just excess body fluid, excess bowel contents, et cetera. So you can also

be more aggressive if you control all the other factors on this list. If you're eating protein

you're exercising, et cetera. You should be on the less aggressive side if you can't, right? If you

don't exercise or can't exercise, if you have a lot of stress, if you're sleeping poorly

I'd recommend you aim closer to half a percent of body weight per week. If you're pulling all

the right levers, then I think there's no problem with losing. 1% of your body weight or maybe slightly over per week

All right, so how did I apply this personally? I averaged 4.9 pounds of weight loss per week for the first 10 weeks of my program

which means I was losing between 1.2 and 1.3% of my body weight per week

At that time, I was doing 1 60-hour fast and 2 36-hour fasts per week

early on in the plan when I had tons and tons of fat to lose. I was 414 pounds there on the left

So at that time, though, after 10 weeks, this is when I started to transition to less aggressive fasting programs as my body fat levels dropped

Right So it took me 10 weeks to lose my first 50 pounds It took me 16 weeks to lose my second 50 pounds And it took me 22 weeks to lose my third 50 pounds My weight loss didn slow because my metabolic rate was dropping

My resting metabolic rate went up, remember, because I was adding muscle and I was getting

my metabolism tested. My resting metabolic rate went up 181 calories per day

My physical activity was also going up. Over that time, I went from just walking to walking and resistance training and working with

a personal trainer, et cetera. So my metabolic rate was going up. The calories burned in physical activity were going up

My weight loss didn't slow because my metabolism was tanking or adapting

My weight loss slowed on purpose because I was being less aggressive to preserve my lean mass

So check out these videos for more information about how I started to add more food as my body fat dropped

So I obviously still lost a ton of weight in a short period of time. But I slowed my weight loss on purpose because I wanted to preserve every ounce of month

that I could and actually build more of it. So slow your weight loss as you reach your goal, right

Aim for 0.5% of body weight per week as you get close to your goal

So you can start at 1%, start it higher than that, but you slowly want to decrease the amount of weight you're losing per week

if your goal is to preserve lean mass, which it should be, right? Lean bodybuilders, they may even aim for losing a quarter of a percent

0.25% of their body weight per week at the end of their programs getting ready for the stage

Right. So don't be in such a hurry to lose weight that you lose muscle in the process

And also just keep in mind, I keep saying it, the little things become huge at the end of your

weight loss journey. All right. So finding your fat loss sweet spot point number two, the rate of

weight loss. These first two points have focused on making sure we aren't eating too little or dieting

more aggressively than our bodies can handle. The next three points, now it's time to focus on

sending as many signals as we can to tell our bodies that muscle is a top functional priority

and not a potential fuel source. That's what we're going to hit in the next three videos of this series

I hope this one helped. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed