You should never lose more than a pound a week

This is the myth that I encounter most often. The reason for its stubborn persistence is probably because it’s repeated so often by so many different people, including doctors, dietitians, and physical trainers, not to mention all the everyday weight-loss ‘experts’. The explanations given for this rule vary a lot, but none of them are based on fact.

‘You’ll be malnourished, and you’ll ruin your health.’

Of course, the more calories you consume, the more likely you are to get enough vitamins, protein, and minerals. But someone who eats 3000 kcal in the form of fries, chocolate, and pastries is certain to get fewer important nutrients than someone who takes vitamin supplements and has a small, protein-based meal of 600 kcal. According to the National Post, people who overeat are more likely to have an unbalanced diet and to be deficient in certain nutrients. It seems paradoxical: few people would imagine that an overweight person could suffer from malnutrition, but it’s often the case. And I was a case in point: at the start of my weight-loss process, blood tests showed that I was suffering from iron, vitamin-D3, and vitamin-E deficiency. My blood pressure was also far too high, I had problems sleeping, and I suffered from exhaustion and constant pain.

I was able to redress all those imbalances during the first six months, when I had a daily caloric intake of only 500 kcal. My blood pressure went down to a normal level and my physical fitness improved just from losing weight, given that I wasn’t able to exercise. During that period, I was losing an average of 7 to 8 kg per month — four times the supposed healthy weight-loss limit. This shows that eating a lot doesn’t necessarily mean eating the right nutrients, and eating little doesn’t automatically mean malnourishment.

One downside was that my uric acid levels increased while I was losing weight, which raised the risk of an attack of gout. My doctor explained that this effect is possible when the body breaks down a lot of fat. With regular blood tests, reducing my uric acid levels using medication was not a big problem. And I was able to stop taking that medication after I lost weight, with no long-term damage done. Losing weight quickly is not automatically bad for your health.

On the other hand, being overweight is demonstrably damaging for your health. If I’d followed the advice not to lose more than one pound a week, then instead of being within the normal, healthy weight range after a year, I would still have been within the range of morbidly obese. That recommendation is plainly unrealistic for severely overweight people because many weight-loss strategies — like sport — aren’t practical for them until after they have already lost massive amounts of weight. Exercising with that kind of weight puts a lot of strain on the body, so it can make sense to lose a bit of weight first before putting more strain on an already over-strained body.

The situation may well be different for someone who just wants to lose a couple of kilos and is either of normal weight or only slightly overweight. In a case like that, it might be sensible to introduce a small deficit and adopt it as a realistic, long-term lifestyle change for the future. When my BMI reached about 24, I also shifted my strategy — towards slower weight loss with a focus on exercise.

I ate quite a lot, but I also did a lot of exercise, and I was only losing around 2 to 3 kilos a month. I don’t think it would have made sense to lose weight that way right from the start and so to force my body to spend more months massively obese, and put it under extra strain from exercising. I don’t imagine it would have been the death of me, but it would have exposed my body to more wear and tear and forced my joints and heart to work extra hard.

‘Losing weight too quickly ruins your metabolism.’

I’ve already dealt with this at length in the chapters about metabolism. You can’t ruin your metabolism!

‘If you lose weight quickly, you’ll put it back on quickly, too. If you want to lose weight permanently, you have to do it slowly.’

All the scientific papers I have read on the topic of maintaining weight loss reach the same conclusion: faster, greater weight reduction leads to better results in the long term. The probability of maintaining your lower weight increases, if you, (1) have lost it with a very heavily calorie-reduced diet, and (2) the amount of weight lost was large. Anderson et al. (2001), for example, concluded that the amount of maintained weight loss was significantly larger after a diet of fewer than 500 kcal, or sometimes fewer than 800 kcal per day, or when the amount lost was more than 20 kg, than with diets that resulted in slower weight reduction or an eventual weight loss of less than 10 kg.

The study published by Thomas et al. (2014) also shows that a larger initial weight loss was associated with better long-term results after ten years. Purcell et al. (2014) found no difference in the long-term success rate of a group who ate between 450 and 800 kcal per day for three months and one that lost weight over a period of almost nine months with a daily caloric deficit of 500 kcal (which is equivalent to a weight loss of about one pound a week).

The myth that losing weight rapidly means you will regain it rapidly persists, although the opposite appears to be true in reality.

Personally, I don’t think there is one general rule for everyone. Some people might feel better and more successful when they lose weight slowly but steadily. Others benefit from rapid results. I believe the psychological effect is paramount here. On a physical level, it makes no difference whether we empty our fat stores slowly or quickly.

Our physical bodies are not separately sentient beings that ‘get scared’ when we lose weight quickly. But our emotions do play a part in the process, of course. For some people, rapid change is frightening and difficult to deal with. Others, like me, need to see success quickly to remain motivated. In my case, the effect of rapid change was that I found it easier to compare before and after. The transition wasn’t gradual and unnoticeable, as it had been with my weight gain, which progressed at about a kilo per month, leading to a gradual habituation process and a failure to realise that my fitness level and my health were gradually worsening all the time.

While losing 7 kg per month, I was able to look back to the previous month and see a distinct change. I could see it in the mirror, but also, more importantly for me, I could really feel it, too. I experienced directly how weighing 7 kg less made it easier for me to climb stairs, and I could feel how much easier it was covering the same distance in March than it had been in February. I was now able to lie on my back again without feeling as if my upper body fat was pressing on my throat. It was enormously motivating for me to physically experience those unmistakable differences. It meant I could clearly envisage the even greater improvements that were possible in the following month, or in three months’ time.

If I’d forced myself to stick to the ‘only one pound a week’ rule, I would not have felt those effects. And I’m sure that, as a result, it would have been much harder for me to stick to my guns.

In this context, it’s good to examine your own psychological makeup: are you the impatient type, who needs to see results quickly and is willing to invest in achieving them; or are you more the type who prefers discrete, gradual changes so that you approach your goal more slowly, but without feeling that you’ve had to deny yourself too much? Of course, it’s possible that it might make sense to consciously choose one path or the other depending on your physical circumstances. Those who have medical conditions and need to eat certain foods might not be able to change their diet very much without negatively affecting their health, and so have no choice but to lose weight slowly. On the other hand, for me, it was important to remove the strain from my damaged knee as quickly as possible so that 80 kg of additional weight didn’t impose on the already injured bone for any longer than necessary.

‘Losing weight too quickly causes eating disorders.’

The previously mentioned Minnesota Starvation Experiment is often quoted as a warning against losing weight too rapidly by means of extreme caloric reduction, as it can lead to eating disorders, especially binge eating. The explanation put forward for this is that it basically inevitably causes uncontrollable urges to eat.

But is that really the case?

A recent study carried out by da Luz et al. in 2015 investigated this question by analysing previous studies on extreme caloric restriction. Their findings were mixed, but overall they discovered no proof that people who had no previous history of eating disorders developed them due to very low caloric intake. Among those who had been diagnosed with a binge-eating disorder, it was even found that extreme caloric restriction was able to reduce their symptoms. This led the authors to conclude that a medically supervised, extremely calorie-reduced diet can be helpful in treating binge-eating disorders.

My personal experience is similar. I was not a binge eater, but during the six months in which my calorie intake was restricted to 500 kcal a day, my appetite became very much smaller. Unlike previously, when I’d been able to eat at any time, those 500 kcal began to seem like a very large amount, and every incremental increase in my caloric intake felt like I was suddenly eating massive amounts of food. Unfortunately, the effect didn’t last forever. I remember how, when I’d reached about 1000 kcal a day, I thought, ‘Good heavens. Later on, when I’m just trying to maintain my weight and I’m eating twice this number of calories, it’ll be an enormous amount.’ Now, on exercise days, I eat far more than 3000 kcal, and it doesn’t feel like such an enormous amount. However, the time I spent on 500 kcal per day worked like a sort of ‘reset’, subjectively at least.

I think we quickly get used to eating a certain amount, and we can have very different perceptions of changes to that quantity. If I’d reduced my intake gradually from my initial 3000 kcal a day, each of those incremental reductions would have felt like a permanent restriction. The effect of reducing my calories so drastically was that I experienced each increase as a huge luxury. So, once again, there is no general rule for how people will react psychologically to more or less drastic caloric reduction. For some people, the result could really be to stimulate their appetite, others might see a positive change in their relationship to food or to their perception of portion size.

‘Losing weight too quickly means your skin won’t be able to get taut again.’

As yet, there is little empirical research into this topic, but there appears to be no significant connection between the rate of weight loss and the skin’s ability to regain its tautness. Your skin also doesn’t stop tightening at the moment you reach your target weight. For months after, it continues to contract — in fact, it is easier for the skin to tighten at that stage, because it’s no longer being stretched by fat. In many cases, the sagging ‘apron’ of abdominal skin so often seen in people who have recently lost weight is not actually just made up of skin, but also fat. You can understand this easily if you pinch the folds and feel the mass they still contain. Pure skin is paper thin. In these circumstances, the skin is unable to shrink because it’s pulled downwards by the fatty tissue and gravity. The body needs to lose more fat before the skin has a chance to become tighter. Unfortunately, many people stop losing weight once they have reached a normal level, but they still have relatively large amounts of body fat and, if they don’t do weight training, very little muscle mass. Since the skin and remaining fat tend to be saggy, the visual result is rather ordinary, and sagging skin can also cause health problems, such as infections between the folds.

If for no other reason, the statement in the heading of this section seems illogical to me because fatty tissue has a naturally limp structure and so does not provide the skin with any support at all. Skin may be ‘filled in’ by fat, but that can’t be construed as ‘tightness’. The best way to make sure skin is as tight as possible is not to lose weight deliberately slowly, but to build muscle mass to provide general tissue support and a replacement ‘filling’ for the skin. It’s also important to leave the body with as little fatty tissue as possible to drag the skin down. An overstretched rubber band doesn’t regain its shape any better when it is slackened really slowly. The best way to let it regain its shape is to stop stretching it at all.

For those who are just overweight, rather than obese, sagging skin should not be a major concern. But those who have always weighed more than twice the normal amount should try to keep their expectations reasonable in this regard. It’s a bit unrealistic to expect a body’s skin to contract back to normal size within a year, after it has been stretched to more than twice its natural size.

When I published an article in 2015 that included an image of my belly, I got a lot of responses, including a few questions about my ‘rolls of skin’. My answer was that they were not skin, but ‘residual fat’, and that I intended to remedy the situation by losing more fat and training my muscles for the skin to ‘lie on’. At the time, I wasn’t completely sure whether I was correct in my interpretation. But I turned out to be right: now, at the time of writing, it’s mid-March, so a month after I published the article, and this is how my ‘rolls’ had developed:

The first two pictures on the left were taken in December 2013, when I weighed 145 kg; the middle photos (weight: 65 kg) are from February 2015; and the images on the right (weight: 63 kg) are from March 2015. As you can see, my skin eventually really did ‘lie on’ my muscles as soon as it stopped being stretched by any residual fat. This might not work for extreme amounts of sagging abdominal skin. But it’s clear that slightly to moderately saggy skin benefits more from losing additional fat and building up muscle than from slow weight reduction. From personal experience, therefore, I would say that the main way to get tight skin is a thorough process of fat reduction.

I assume that the reason losing weight slowly is thought to produce better results in terms of sagging skin is the longer comparison period. When someone loses weight quickly and makes a before-and-after comparison within a year, their skin will probably look slacker than that of someone who loses weight slowly and makes the before-and-after comparison after three years. But skin doesn’t stop getting tighter at the moment when that final kilo is lost. If the fast weight-loser makes another before-and-after comparison after three years, his or her skin will probably look much tighter.

There are several things that can help you to gain tighter skin after losing weight: