1-2 pounds a week is the medical benchmark. I speculate that some of that is based on observation:
It seems that many dieters start slowing down to one or two pounds week over time.
One of the major reasons this happens is that people start taking in almost a starvation level of calories. Especially women. This drastically slows down weight loss because the body is perceiving that you are starving it.
This is a curse also for women that are constantly watching what they eat. What they end up doing is lowerinf their metabolic rates because they consume so little food daily, and then adding fat every time they break down and eat more, like over a holiday.
It also makes it very hard to diet because they are already on a low calories diet daily. There is not much room for them to drop calories.
I usually tell people in that situation to add calories for a few weeks to their diets and work on the meal spacing. Especially if you can get them on a low carb diet.
For some reason you can take a lot more calories on a low carb diet and not put on weight. For example, when I am doing low carbs I have gotten to over 4 thousand calories a day and been sedentary without putting on fat. If I did that with carbs I would have blown up.
Quote:
Originally posted by Sistermadly
Some doctors (including mine) suggest 1-2 lbs a week, or 1% of your body weight per week. If you're heavier than 200 lbs, chances are you'll lose much more than 2 lbs a week. Larger people simply lose weight faster in the beginning, but as you get closer to an average weight, the losses slow down to about 1-2 lbs a week.
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