Is 3 kg in two weeks slow?

On day two of the plan I got a message saying he still had not lost any weight.

Day two.

Two weeks later he had lost 3 kg, and he wrote again. This time the other way round: he thought it was too little, said there was too much food in the plan and that this should be moving faster.

I am not making fun of him. This reaches me so often that I know the script by heart, and I understand where it comes from. When you decide to change, you want to see the change. If it can happen this week, even better.

The first few days tell you nothing

Let me explain what the scale does at the start, because it fools a lot of people.

When you cut calories, the first thing to go is water. Your muscles hold energy inside them, glycogen, and every gram of glycogen holds on to about three grams of water. You empty the stores, you lose the water that came with them. That is why so many people see two kilos gone in week one and get excited. In week two it slows down and the disappointment arrives, without the person realising that a good part of what they lost in week one was water.

On day two there is really nothing to see. Fat comes off in grams. What the scale shows you that day is water, the salt from last night's dinner, whether your gut is full or empty.

The pace I work with

Half to one per cent of body weight per week. For a man of 90 kg that is somewhere around 450 to 900 grams.

I did not invent the number. It is what is recommended for natural athletes in preparation (Helms, Aragon and Fitschen, 2014), and it is the range where you lose fat without taking muscle with it.

So 3 kg in two weeks sits above that. Above, not below. And part of those kilos was the water I mentioned earlier, so we do not even know how much fat he lost. Only after three or four weeks does the line start telling you anything.

Then there is the complaint about the food. He talked about having too much food in the plan as if that were a fault. I see it the other way round. Losing weight while you eat well is the best place you can be. It means you still have room to cut later on, when this slows down, because it will slow down. If you cut everything in week one, what is left to give two months from now?

This has been measured in athletes

They took 24 elite athletes, all doing four strength sessions a week, and split them into two groups. One lost 0.7 per cent of body weight per week. The other lost 1.4, so twice as fast (Garthe and colleagues, 2011).

Both groups lost fat, that they did. The difference showed up in lean mass: it went up 2.1 per cent in the slow group and stayed the same in the fast one. They went twice as fast to end up with less muscle than the others.

What usually happens when you force it

Now the part I see day to day, the part that is not in any study.

Of the times food was cut further to speed the process up, 90 per cent did not end well. And it was always because the person insisted, never because I wanted it.

What happens is always similar. First the fatigue. Then the hunger, the kind that nothing settles and that has you thinking about food in the middle of your workday. And the weight coming down at the same pace as before, or close to it. So you are eating a lot less to get the same thing. Two weeks like that you can handle. Three months you cannot, and what usually follows is the person dropping everything, not just the cut.

This is not a lack of willpower

There is something I really want said here, because I see people beating themselves up over it.

In 1950 they published a study run during the war, in Minnesota. They took 36 healthy men and put them on months of very little food (Keys and colleagues). They lost around a quarter of their body weight. Beyond the numbers, the rest was recorded too: they thought about food all day, collected recipes, bought cookbooks, dreamed about food. They got irritable, lost their sex drive, and pulled away from people.

That was an extreme, and nobody working with me goes through anything like it. I am telling you because it is the clearest picture of what too much restriction does to your head. If on a tight diet you find yourself thinking about food constantly and with no patience for anyone, that is the diet talking through you, and it passes once the food goes back where it belongs.

And there is what comes afterwards. That American television show where people lost enormous amounts of weight: they lost 58 kg on average in 30 weeks, and six years later they had put 41 back on. Their resting metabolism was still around 500 calories a day below what you would expect for their size (Fothergill and colleagues, 2016). Another extreme, but it shows you where rushing tends to lead.

Adjusting the plan is our job

You do not have to work out whether the plan is doing its job. That is my work and the nutritionist's, and it is what we look at in your numbers at every update.

If something is not moving the way it should, we are the ones who change it. And you can be sure of one thing: nobody here has any interest in keeping you on a plan that gives you nothing. Our work lives off people feeling good, seeing progress and being able to hold on to it.

What I ask for is your side. Follow the plan as it is and tell us what you feel: hunger, tiredness, sleep, training with no strength in it. That matters to us and it feeds the adjustments. Cutting food on your own to speed things up is what does not help, because from there we stop knowing what we are measuring.

People who lose it slowly usually only have to lose it once.