Safe Weight Loss

Weight gain usually happens over time, and all else being equal, with exercise and a healthy diet, weight loss tends to take about as long as it originally took to put on the unwanted pounds. However, for those who want to lose weight quickly – either because they are concerned about imminent danger to their health from excess weight or because they are impatient to trim their waistline for a specific deadline or important event – faster weight loss can be an option, if it's done right.

In general, health professionals agree that an average person can expect to lose about one or two pounds of body fat per week However, certain supplements can sometimes allow you to safely lose up to 3 pounds a week. This rate may not be consistent, however: People who have a significant amount of weight to lose may find that they lose weight more quickly in the beginning and then begin to see their weight loss plateau and decline as their diet continues. This is the reason the infamous "last 10 pounds" can be so maddeningly difficult to lose – over time, your metabolism will continue to adjust to your diet, and you may need to tweak your routine in order to start seeing results again.

Although many would prefer to lose fat at a faster clip – closer to 10 to 15 pounds per week or more – losing more than a certain amount of weight in a short period of time is unsustainable and may also be dangerous to your health. Extremely rapid weight loss is usually achieved by starvation diets do result in fat loss but also result in an undesirable loss of lean muscle mass. In addition, a significant portion of the weight lost in crash starvation diets is simple water weight that will return almost immediately when you begin eating normally again.

If extremely rapid weight loss of more than around three pounds a week is necessary due to acute health problems, there are options, but they should only be used on a doctor's recommendation. Bariatric surgery, otherwise known as gastric bypass, physically reduces the size of the stomach and severely limits the amount of food the patient can eat at one time. The weight loss that results can be significantly more than would likely be possible through diet alone, but such extreme measures only make sense for those who are severely obese. For the rest of us, one to three pounds of fat loss per week is a safe and achieveable goal.