Trying to shed body fat is a strange thing, as it can be difficult to know what your monthly weight loss should be. After all, most of us would like to lose as much weight as possible, but there is such thing as dropping the pounds too quickly.
Therefore, if you’re doing things the healthy way, it’s natural to want to know how much monthly weight loss you should be expecting. Should you lose a handful of pounds or should you be aiming for a whole new body with every thirty days that go by?
As with virtually everything to do with your medical wellness, the best source of information for your personal needs is your doctor. Discussing your monthly weight loss and how you want to achieve it is a great first step to knowing just what is right for you. You’ll be able to find out just which techniques you should be using for your unique body’s needs.
In order to achieve monthly weight loss goals, you’ll likely need to change your eating habits, activity level and perhaps other issues such as stress management and sleep habits. Working with your doctor to discover how you can best do this is a good way to ensure the process will be healthy and long-term.
The amount you can drop and the amount of monthly weight loss you actually should achieve isn’t necessarily the same thing. For most people, an average of a pound or two of weight loss per week is considered to be the best healthy rate. That would mean between 4 and 8 pounds per month.
That said, the number changes from one person to the next. It may also be different depending on your method of weight loss. After all, if you plan to incorporate a lot of physical activity into your monthly weight loss, this could change your numbers around.
The reason is that while you will be burning fat, you may also be building muscle. Muscle, like fat, weighs something. The average bathroom scale will only tell you how much you weigh in total. It doesn’t tell you how much body fat you’ve lost. Therefore, if you gain a pound of muscle but burn a pound of fat, it will appear as though you haven’t lost any weight. Changing body composition can make it look as though you’ve:
The truth is that you may be burning through considerable amounts of body fat. It’s just not registering on the scale because you’re gaining mass in muscle, for example.
Often, that will make weight loss look erratic from one week to the next. In this case, your monthly weight loss record may be far more helpful than your weekly total as it will take into account sudden larger weight drops as well. It’s not uncommon for people whose body composition is changing to see zero to one pound of weight loss for two or three weeks, then suddenly drop four pounds, for example.