It Takes a Deficit of 3500 Calories to Lose 1lb of Weight

It is scientific fact that you must create a deficit of 3500 calories to lose 1lb of real weight. Now if you stop and think about that figure it can transform your understanding of and achievement in weight loss for a number of reasons.

To lose 2lbs a week would require a deficit of 7,000 calories and 3 lbs a week a deficit of 10,500 calories. Now consider that the average person will burn about 500 calories in a 1 hour brisk aerobic workout. If you were to do this 4 times (a realistic amount for most people), that would be 2,000 calories per week.

Now add to this the savings you can make from food. For most people the recommended and realistic amount is to cut back by 500 calories a day giving you 3500 calories a week. To cut back more than this is difficult to maintain and rigidly implement and can lead to hunger and cravings. Now put the exercise and food together and you have 5500 calories per week or just over 1.5 lbs of weight loss.

From all this I hope you can see that to lose 1.5lbs a week consistently week in week out is actually a great achievement and quite a difficult thing to do. You have to be good with your food every day and you have to stick to the 4 aerobic sessions every week – all easier said than done. It also does not allow for the odd slip up and break out or social events like parties and weddings and certainly does not allow for alcohol consumption which at 200 calories a pint and 150 calories large glass of wine will quickly eat into these reserves. These figures will tell you that the margins are tight and a few small breakouts here and there can really ‘eat’ into deficit and so your results!!

It should also be clear from this that you cannot lose weight without exercise. If you were to take the contribution of exercise away then you would be totally reliant on your food and the margin for error gets smaller and smaller. Enter the critical missing key to weight loss, the most important key of all – your metabolism! This is the key that dramatically changes weight loss. This is the key that greatly stacks the odds in your favor. This is the key that makes weight loss easier and far better. It makes stunning results like 3 or 3.5lbs a week possible. It helps you lose weight from the right places and not the wrong places. It makes sure you get stronger and healthier as you lose weight. But that’s for another blog!