Fitness Expert Jason Walder On Safe and Effective Weight Loss

Editor’s Note: I don’t know about you, but the increasingly warm weather has me thinking about the beach, and the beach has me thinking about swimsuits, and swimsuits have me thinking about fitness (or, in my case, lack thereof). To this end, I’m happy to report that Fairfield County fitness expert Jason Walder, of Walder Fitness, will be contributing to Hamlet Hub on that subject. And he is taking questions! You can email your fitness-related questions to him at Jason@walderfitness.com.

By Jason Walder

A question I am often asked, especially with summer just around the corner, is “how many pounds can I safely take off per week?”

The answer may disappoint those who want to shed pounds quickly, but safe and effective weight loss should not exceed between half a pound and two pounds per week.

To lose weight safely, you have to create a caloric deficit, which means you need to burn off more calories than you take in. One pound of body fat is equivalent to about 3,500 calories, so to lose two pounds per week, you would need to create a deficit of 7,000 calories per week. Combining a nutritious, low-calorie diet with regular exercise three-to-five days a week should effectively create that deficit.

For those tempted by the instant results crash diets promise, keep this in mind: consuming fewer than 1,200 calories per day is considered a starvation diet, and this compromises your nutrition and deprives your body of energy. Further, when you starve your body, it goes into preservation mode, holding on to every calorie you intake rather than burning it.

To understand how this can disrupt your weight-loss efforts, remember that there are two kinds of fat—essential and non-essential. Essential fat is needed in times of starvation. It's what our ancestors survived on in times of famine. Non-essential fat is the fat we want to tap into when we are looking to shed some weight and become healthier. This fat constitutes two-thirds of the total fat on our bodies (with essential fat accounting for the other one-third).

All fat is burned in the muscle tissue. Starvation diets cause muscle to be used for the energy not being ingested through food. When we starve ourselves, we will lose muscle because it's the most readily available, expendable source of energy. Since our bodies are "programmed" to hold onto fat for survival during famine, when we starve ourselves, our bodies try to hold onto that fat and give up muscle for caloric use. Since muscle is our "fat burning machinery," muscle loss will result in a slowed metabolism. In this case, one's body will simply go into a catabolic state. Then our bodies tend to "hold on" to our fat stores.

And if you manage to lose more than two pounds per week with a fad or crash diet, this will probably only offer short-term success. Those lost pounds most likely result from losing water weight or lean muscle, rather than fat, and when you resume a normal diet, those pounds will probably come right back on.