How much weight should I be losing?

You should be aiming to lose 1-2lbs per week. This is safe, sensible and importantly it is more likely you will keep the weight off. It is not unusual to lose at a rate of more than 2lbs a week in the first few weeks – especially if you have a fair amount to lose. But this will level off, and what you are looking for is an average of 2lbs per week over the duration that you are losing weight.

Our system sets sensible calorie targets that allow for a balanced diet and are sustainable. The lowest our system will automatically set as an ongoing target is 1,400 cals a day on the expert advice of our consultant Dr Campbell. In his experience, trying to stick to a lower target for any length of time results in a higher drop out rate – your diet becomes much more restrictive and therefore harder to sustain. The secret of success is to maintain a reduced calorie intake over a period of time. This approach is far more likely to result in weight loss success – and importantly long term maintenance.

Very low calorie regimes and crash diets may initially result in a big weight drop, but initial weight loss will be largely water (especially in low carb regimes), and you will also risk losing lean muscle mass, sometimes even from areas such as heart muscle which has a potentially hazardous effect on helath. Losing muscle also has the effect of increasing the proportion of fat in the body – which has a negative effect on metabolic rate (muscle being a more metabolically active tissue than fat).

Plus drastic food reduction causes the body to go into 'preserve' mode and become more efficient about calorie usage, your weight loss won't ever go into reverse if you lower your calorie intake drastically, but you will get into a situation of ever decreasing returns in which your weight loss becomes less efficient. In other words the extra pain involved in terms of hunger / risk of nutritional deficiency etc is not worth it matched against the only small benefit you get in terms of extra weight lost. And when you do return to eating normally, your body will want to grab hold of the extra food and store it in case of another lean period! So the overall effect is a slowing of metabolic rate, increase in overall percentage body fat and less efficiency at losing weight!

It sounds like stating the obvious, but weight loss should essentially be fat loss with minimal loss from other sources like water and muscle. Effective 'weight loss' is all about gradual reduction – this way it will be mainly body fat.