1 pound per week, too much?

I recently told my mother about my goals for losing some weight, and she said that it was unhealthy to lose one-two pounds a week. i have read all over this site that it is not. i am aiming for 1-1.5 pounds a week. What should i tell her?

How much do you weigh and what are your end goals? Are you changing just your diet or are you also adding exercise in there. What was your diet before and what is it going to be now. What kind of exercise (if any) are you doing to start doing and how often.

These all factor into what is “healthy weight loss” for YOU.

But, since i have done the research for obese people (since that’ what I was in), I will respond assuing you are “obese”. I can’t tell from your profile because you don’t have that data public so correct me if you are not obese and I’ll respond a different way ;)

Assuming you are obese:
.5 – 2 lbs per week is the medical “healthy” weight loss. Mayo Clinic reference

With that said, it is possible to lose more, in a healthy way. I went from eating huge restaurant lunches every day with coworkers and eating dinner 3 nights a week at restaurants where I would order an appetizer (to be shared with my wife), full meal, and often times a dessert (to be shared with my wife) and doing ZERO exercise…. to doing weight watchers and exercising 5 days a week. The result… I have lost 23% of my body weight to date and am still losing at an average rate of almost 3 pounds per week and I feel great. In the beginning, I wasn’t eating enough and as a result, I was feeling very dizzy whenever I would stand up. The message, LISTEN TO YOUR BODY. With the exception of the hunger in the beginning (because your stomach has to shrink)

So it really depends on how drastically you change your lifestyle. If you’re changing your eating only, I’d say the “up to 2 lbs per week” would hold true. If you’re changing both your diet AND exercising a lot, it’s out the window (assuming you have a lot to lose).

The numbers on the scale is not enough to determine if the weight loss is “healthy”. Don’t listen to your mother, listen to your doctor. If your doctor is old school as well, go to a dietitian or a nutritionist. It costs money, but your overall health is worth it.

I lost 4 lbs per week for 4 months. And I’m perfectly healthy. I ate great, worked out and never felt better.

1-1.5 pounds a week is perfect!

Sorry about the multiple posts… don’t know what happened there…

Like people said, it all depends.
I will only speak for my self, but here’s what I did, not feeling down, tired, or unhealthy (just my feelings, might be otherwise inside my body) :

I went for a weight loss of about 2 pounds a day for 4 to 5 days eating 500 calories per day and exercising 1 hour to 1.5 hours. Then back to 1000 calories for a couple of days and 1500 for a week (still exercising 1 to 1.5 hours). I would gain 2 to 3 pounds over the week after my 500 calories week. So that would make about 5 to 8 pound loss over a two to three week period. I found it easier to lose so much weight in so little time, and then try to keep thing stable for a couple of weeks.

Doing that over and over, I lost about 10 to 14 pounds per month. Over 6 months, that totaled to around over 70 pounds (33 kg to be exact).
In the meantime my body fat went from 32% to 13%.

I went from not doing any sports, to do triathlons. So basically I went from runnning 3km being really hard to run 21k in 1h45 now and I feel really good.

So loosing as much as I did and as fast is probably not healthy but I felt good all the way.

So I guess 1 to 1.5 pounds per week if totally fine.
I just found that losing weight “non stop” is harder because your body adjusts to your new lifestyle (be it eating habits or exercise) so it doesn’t respond continuously. This is why I ate very little for a few days, then back to normal. My body would react when I ate little, probably by burning more fat. Then going back to a more normal eating style, it didn’t take for granted that 500 calorie diet and going back to 500 would always be a “surprise” for my body, thus burning more fat.

Once again, I’m no nutritionist, and I would definitely recommend to get advices from one before doing something extreme with your body.

Good luck!

IronDave is onto something. Where I live, there was a Dr. Max that invented a weight loss plan that had fantastic results. His approach was to have three 500 calorie days a week (M,W,F) and the rest of the days have a sensible diet of low GI foods. He told everyone to buy the smallish size paper plates, have one protien about the size of your fist, and the rest of the plate was to be veggies. Nothing fried, and no seconds, ever. He also prescribed a fat blocker. He called the diet the Plano diet plan. He published it, I think I have a copy of it somewhere. Everyone I know that did did it lost weight, and 15 years later, they haven’t gained it back. Unfortunately, Dr Max contracted a disease and died doing charity work in Mexico before the diet could really took off.

I found the book on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B0006Y…=sr_1_olp_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228245486&sr=1-1