What are some negative side effects of losing weight too fast?

Question

like 50 pounds in 3 months? Or do you think that sounds about right?

Answer 1

First, for all of the "quick and easy" weight loss diet pill suggestions, remember, if something sounds too good to be true... it probably is, particularly if you have to pay for it.


On Yahoo!Answers I find certain questions being asked repeatedly which is simply a reflection of new people participating. A couple of common questions amount to "How do I lose weight," or more specifically, "How do I lose abdominal fat?" I have gotten very positive responses from my answers when I paused to reply (and now beginning to get "It works!" emails that are very gratifying. I like helping people)... so have recently decided to put a good solid answer on my Yahoo!360 Blog (September 10) that I can point people to. These are my thoughts as a physician and athlete.

Don't target losing more than about 2 lbs per week. If you try to lose faster, your body will go into "starvation mode" and get very stingy about burning calories while at the same time very efficient about storing any calories that you do provide. And it will make you feel awful.

There is no site specific way of losing fat... the old myth about working your abs to burn belly fat isn't true. To get rid of love handles, you need to lose overall fat. That happens with exercise and watching your diet. More on that below.

The most effective way to lose fat is aerobic exercise in the "moderate" fat-burning range, ideally first thing in the morning before you eat. When you wake your body is ready to burn fat and your levels of growth hormone are highest at that time. Later in the day it can take up to 30 minutes just to put your body into a fat-burning mode.

Another overlooked way to burn fat is by lifting weights. Skeletal muscle has very high caloric needs... almost twice that of adipose (fat) tissue. Put on a little muscle and you will burn calories all day even at rest. Be aware that skeletal muscle weighs more, so with this approach you may see your weight increasing while your body fat is melting away. Not realizing this often stresses folks who think they should be losing weight as a measure of fitness. Forget the scale, look in the mirror and you will be happy.

To lose a pound of fat, you need to eliminate about 3500 calories. You can do this by burning more with exercise or by modifying your diet to reduce intake. If you do a Google search on say, "swimming calories" you will quickly find a website with tables of calories burned for a given exercise. You can use such lists to estimate how many calories you are burning up with your routine.

For diet, keep a diary for a couple of weeks counting calories, grams of protein, and grams of fat intake. It is easy with online sources of nutritional information (type the name of the food and calories into the Google search engine) and packaging labels. That will let you quickly figure out where the fat is coming from in your diet.

Fat gives you 9 calories per gram. So take the number of grams of fat, multiply by 9, then calculate what percentage the fat calories are of your total daily calories. Restricting the calories from fat to about 20% of your total intake is ideal for a maintenance diet... that isn't overly restrictive. Of note, you need some fat in your diet. For instance, the body uses fat to produce hormones. Once you have a picture of how to modify your diet, you can drop the diary and just go back to it occasionally if you are wanting to tweek things further.

There is a subset of questions that goes further and asks about "How to get a six-pack?" The answer is the same. Six-packs are 20% abdominal exercise and 80% diet. There is one caveat... abdominal muscles will form in the position that you work them, so be certain to pull them tightly toward your spine while doing crunches, etc. Also, during most lifting, the "core is active" which means that you should be stabilizing with contracted abs then too. Fail to do this and the abs will form, but bulging outward and the result is not attractive.

If you are trying to build muscle as a way to lose fat, then you may need to increase total calories and specifically your protein intake. I target about 0.8 g of protein per pound of body weight each day when actively building. That is far more protein than most people need in their diets.


Aloha

Answer 2

Well, people on the Biggest Loser are losing 10-15 lbs a week and do just fine. People with gastric bypass lose almost that fast and that's the whole point of the surgery.

That's why I picked the Kimkins Diet because you lose really fast and it doesn't cost very much.

Losing slow doesn't help. People join Weight Watchers and that's slow and they regain their weight all the time. How many people do you know that have done WW, Jenny Craig and the others but gain the weight back? Losing slow isn't the answer.

I'd rather lose fast and be motivated by buying new clothes every couple of weeks! Check out the site, see for yourself.

Answer 3

Losing weight too fast is a myth since you do not control it. Some people want to know how much weight per week is safe to lose. Others want to know how much weight they will lose sticking to a certain program. There are lots of people who repeat what they have heard but no reliable sources say that only a certain amount is safe to lose. You can drink too much water, eat too much, exercise too much and fast too long (an MD fasted a fat guy for 8 months and he died). But you can not sleep too much! Why? Because you do not control how much you get only how little you get. You cannot force yourself to sleep if you do not need it.

So you do not choose how quickly you lose weight. Your body decides that. So only your body knows how much you will lose. It will only allow you to lose what is safe. One guy under an MD's care lost 180 pounds in a year fasting on weekends. So some lose quickly on a bad weight loss plan and others lose slowly on a great weight loss plan. Make sure to eat foods with nutrients for skin, like omega-3 fatty acids, to avoid loose skin, when you lose weight.

Answer 4

Losing Weight Too Fast

by Clifton Azok

We have all seen the commercials, quick - easy weight loss.

The AMA conducted a long term experiment on losing weight. They tracked two groups of weight loss participants. The first group lost weight at a moderate pace. The second group lost weight at an accelerated pace.

The results were almost black and white. The group of participants that lost weight at a moderate pace kept the weight off for a five year period. The group that lost weight at an accelerated paced regained the weight.

The second group not only regained the weight within the five year period, but also added more body mass.

Here in lies one difficulty to losing weight. A moderate weight loss pace requires a patient, consistent effort of 1-2 lbs lost each week. For a person needing to lose twenty lbs, this would be a 10-20 week effort. For a person needing to lose one hundred lbs, this would be a 50-100 week effort. In either case, most people do not have the foresight or patience to lose weight at a moderate pace.

Can you live with 1 lb of weight loss in a week? This answer will dove tail with your overall long term result: success or failure?

Remember, 99% of people that lost more than 3 lbs in the first week of dieting experienced long term failure.

(AMA study of weight loss participants)

Answer 5

Thats way to much weight, it will come back.
You have to make lifestyle changes and change how and what you eat. It is better to lose around 3 pounds per week. Keep cut of veggies in the fridge so when you get the munchies you can grab that instead of something bad. Use fat free dressing as a dip. Also if you can walk 20 mintues a day that will help alot. Good luck to you

Answer 6

When you have a huge, sudden weight loss your brain readjusts your body. Basically, the brain says, "You know, we sometimes have times in our lives when we don't have much food, so when food is available again we need to eat as much as we can, and store it very fast in the fat cells." When you're done losing weight, and you go back to your old lifestyle, your body makes you very hungry, and the fat comes back very quickly, and in fact, you gain more than you lost.

Second, the "side effect" is that you still haven't learned a healthy lifestyle. You're still not eating right, you're still not exercising, and then you get upset 'cause you are overweight. You see, a "diet" isn't something you "do" until you're "done." It is a lifestyle change. You learn to eat differently, and balance off calorie intake with exercise. Until you make that lifestyle change, you're gonna be overweight.

Answer 7

Make small, gradual changes and over time, they will have an extremely powerful effect on you.

Check out http://www.obesitykills.iconfessional.com . The guy there is an ex-Marine, like myself, and he's putting together a program for himself in his blog that will get him back into shape. It will work for pretty much anyone and he's doing it all publically.

He's not selling anything, just sharing what he's doing as he does it. He's hoping for encouragement and motivation from his readers.

Hope that helps.

Answer 8

Losing muscle tissue rather than fat. The usual guideline is 1-2 lb/wk, but extremely obese people put on a strict diet will lose faster. 50 lb in 3 months does, however, sound a bit extreme if you weren't that overweight to begin with.

Answer 9

The maximum weight that can be lost safely by a person is 1-2 kg a week. Any faster weight loss could adversely affect your health, and you could regain it quickly after you stop the weight loss program. More information on a weight loss diet and exercises available at http://tinyurl.com/jax5h

Answer 10

Enroll in an active artwork class, such as sculpture or maybe ceramics.

Answer 11

Baggy clothes hide your whole body and encourage lounging around. So regardless if you're relaxing at home, wear fitted clothes to help keep you on track.