i am hearing two different things. one source tells me that a healthy weight loss is 2-3 pounds a week. but then im hearing that you can lose super quick, and a lot, when you first start out. is that normal? is that healthy? how much is it? why does it stop falling off so rapidly?
why do you lose so much weight so fast at first? is that healthy?
Posted by admin on August 2nd, 2011
Posted in weight loss surgery 
The rapid initial weight loss that happens on a lot of fad diets is not actual fat loss.
There are a lot of things in the human body that have weight: fat, muscle, bone, water, organs… Lose any one of these and you’ll “lose weight” according to the scale, but the scale doesn’t tell you which one you lost!
When you start a restrictive diet, your body starts draining the glycogen (its main source of energy) from your muscles to make up for the energy deficit you’re causing by eating less than what your body needs. Glycogen is a molecule that carries water with it. When the glycogen is gone, there is significantly less water in your body. Less water = less weight. Sometimes 10+ pounds less weight.
This isn’t really healthy, but it’s not terribly damaging either. You won’t be happy and your diet might be setting you up for vitamin deficiencies or outright starvation, but glycogen depletion in itself isn’t necessarily an outright bad thing. However, as soon as you start eating normally again, you will gain 100% of that weight back because your body will restock your glycogen stores, meaning that the water you lost will be replaced. Remember that losing water weight does not change your size at all; you won’t look even slightly skinnier because you didn’t lose any fat.
It’s counterproductive, it’s starting on the road to bad health, it’s not worth the suffering that the diet will inevitably cause.