How much weight can you lose in a month? How about a week? What about a day? These are all questions and I’m going to answer in today’s video and believe it or not these questions aren’t as straightforward as they seem. For example, you could lose a ton of weight in a month but are you going to be able to keep that large amount of weight that you lost off? After all, what’s the use of losing weight if we gain it all back again? Generally speaking, its believed that the more weight you lose in a shorter period of time the more likely you’ll gain that weight back. So many trainers and fitness professionals recommend that you take a slower approach to fat loss. The accepted Norm for healthy sustainable fat loss is 1-2 pounds a week. For those of you looking to drop 30 pounds in a month, I’m sure this isn’t great news. But if you are looking to lose more weight than that, I wouldn’t exit out of this video just yet because I have a lot more information for you. At 1 to 2 pounds a week this means that since we have a little over 4 weeks every month, on average we’ll be able to lose 5 to 10 pounds a month and keep it off. After working as a trainer for a long time when I hear numbers like this I get pretty excited. A 5 – 10-pound weight loss in a month is considered an excellent result in my book. However, some of you may still want to lose weight faster. And you might have clicked on this video to find out what’s actually possible beyond the 1-2 pounds a week. Well, luckily we have crazy TV shows like The Biggest Loser to show us what’s truly possible when we kick Health to the curb. On this reality TV show, one contestant lost 100 pounds in 7 weeks. That’s a ridiculous amount of weight to lose in such a short time frame. Another contestant lost 34 pounds in a week. Again absolutely absurd. But there you have it faster weight loss is technically possible. The reason why I say technically and the reason why I call this absurd is that losing so much weight so fast is not only dangerous but chances of weight regain are huge. And if you don’t believe me just take a look at the percentage of people that regain their weight after the Biggest Loser is over. On top of that for the premiere of season 8 two patients were hospitalized after collapsing during a 1-mile run.

So even though it is possible to lose a hundred pounds in 7 weeks and it is possible to lose over 30 pounds in one week it usually isn’t applicable to regular people in the real world. And allow me to explain why. First of all most of the contestants on the Show start off extremely heavy. one contestant was even 526 pounds. Most of you are not starting off at such a high weight. Without getting too in-depth into the reasons why all you gotta know is that the higher your starting weight the faster you’ll be able to lose a larger amount of weight. But even with the higher starting weight aside, these contestants are forced to work out 5 to 6 hours a day while eating strictly supervised diets. That’s what gets them losing double-digits every week. I’ve been training for a long time and sometimes I would do double sessions in one day. Which would mean I would do a workout and then come back later to work out again. Maybe at the most, I worked out three and a half or four hours in 1 day. And I would never do that back to back for consecutive days. Also, my body was already in great shape to handle that kind of stress. But working out that much would still absolutely kill me. How in the world these people on this show are able to work out that much without straight up dying is beyond me. But something that you can be sure of is that the average person is not going to be able to maintain that kind of pace. Even the advance person will not be able to maintain that kind of pace especially because as you become more fit it’s harder to lose more and more weight. The risks of losing weight that fasts easily outweigh the benefits. You run the risk of developing gallstones, mineral deficiencies, and you can end up in the hospital like many biggest loser contestants from exhaustion. On top of that even if you don’t care about your health and you only care about your looks, well losing weight that fast, your looks will suffer too. You’re definitely going to lose muscle mass and there’s a much larger chance of having excess skin and stretch marks when you’re done.

Check out my client Stephanie’s transformation where he lost a whole bunch of fat.