How to lose 2 pounds of fat per week

Why is it that most of us make things a lot more complicated than they need to be?

For example, most people try many different things to help them lose weight and these usually take up lots of time and effort.

In reality though you only need to concentrate on the most important principles and put these in place to get all the weight loss results you would ever want.

To help you with this, I’ll explain one of those principles by showing you how to lose 2 pounds of fat per week.

Firstly, to lose one pound of fat you need to burn around 3500 calories more than you consume. So if you want to lose one pound of fat per week then you need to burn around 500 calories more than you consume each day.

Or if you want to lose 2 pounds of fat per week then you need to burn around 1000 calories more than you consume each day.

So let’s call these 1000 calories the calorie deficit. You need to reach this calorie deficit each day over the week to lose 2 pounds.

Let’s also say that you consume 2500 calories per day and that you are currently maintaining your weight.

Therefore, because you are maintaining your weight this means that the calories you burn are 2500 calories and the calories that you consume are also 2500 calories. There is zero calorie deficit.


How to get the 1000 calorie deficit

So, now you need to get the 1000 calorie deficit and there are 3 ways of doing this which are…

  1. With your exercise
  2. With your diet
  3. Using both your exercise and diet

The most effective way to lose weight and keep it off over the long term is to do plenty of high quality exercise while also making improvements to your diet.

So because we want to get the best results we’ll go for the third option as a way to reach the 1000 calorie deficit.

One way you could lose 2 pounds of fat per week is where you burn an extra 500 calories through your exercise each day and trim 500 calories from your diet. You have then reached the 1000 calorie deficit that’s needed.

As another example…

If you are new to exercise then it’s likely that you have a low level of fitness and can’t burn lots of calories through your exercise yet.

So to lose 2 pounds of fat per week you might decide to burn an extra 250 calories through your exercise each day and trim 750 calories from your diet.

And another example…

If you are happy to lose one pound of fat per week, instead of 2 pounds, then you only need a calorie deficit of 500 calories each day. So you could burn an extra 250 calories through your exercise and trim 250 calories from your diet.


A few words of warning

Here are some important side notes that I also wanted to include to help you avoid some of the most common mistakes and misunderstandings that people have…

  • Include exercise – It’s extremely important to include exercise, rather than just losing weight through your diet, because with exercise you’ll be able to maintain more muscle while losing weight from fat

Because muscle burn more calories than fat, you’ll find it much easier to keep the weight off after you’ve lost it

  • Don’t reduce the number of calories that you consume by too much – If you do this your metabolism will slow down due to your body trying to conserve energy. So you won’t burn as many calories and you’ll struggle to lose weight

Women shouldn’t go below 1200 calories per day, and men shouldn’t go below 1500 calories per day

  • Weight loss is rarely linear – Even if you have the same calorie deficit every day it doesn’t mean that you’ll lose the same amount of weight every week. Some weeks you will lose more weight than you expect, other weeks it will be less

This is due to things like normal daily fluctuations in weight, natural plateaus, and hormonal changes. However, over time this will balance itself out and you’ll lose weight at around the rate of your calorie deficit


Losing weight doesn’t have to be complicated

The whole process of losing weight can be broken down into simple steps that when followed make it a certainty that you’ll lose weight, keep losing weight consistently, and then be able to keep it off.

A key part of this is creating the right calorie deficit between the number of calories that you burn and the number of calories that you consume.

So overall, it’s best to concentrate on the most important principles like I’ve explained here. It will save you a lot of wasted time and effort, while also getting you much better weight loss results.

James Porter