How Long Does It Take to Lose Weight?

One of the most common questions when summer days are imminent relates to time. How long does it take to lose weight after I’ve begun working out? Days? Weeks? Months? It’s a reasonable question, and we’re answering it today.

The thing about weight loss

On a physiological level, we lose weight through a calorie deficit – burning more calories than we’re taking in. The body’s natural functions (breathing, circulating blood, maintaining body temperature, and on) take between 50 and 70% of your daily energy or calories. This number will fluctuate depending on things like our genes, ages, body composition and gender. So while a big percentage of our everyday energy is already established, factors like activity level and nutrition can have an impact.

So long does it take?

Since everybody is different, weight loss really varies from one person to the next. If you’ve been mostly sedentary, and you start lifting weights three days a week and improving your nutrition, you’ll probably see noticeable results in the first few weeks.

Conventional wisdom tells us it takes a deficit of 3,500 calories to lose one pound of fat. A combination of exercise and high-quality nutrition can help you make that deficit happen. If your goal is to lose one pound per week, which is reasonable, you’d need to hit a daily deficit of 500 calories.

The best approach

Being mindful of your nutrition by limiting portion sizes and cutting out empty calories will go a long way to your weight loss goals. It’s also often the hardest part for many people. While they’re committed to working out three or four or five days a week with a personal trainer, or hitting the treadmill every morning, that resolve crumbles when it comes to what they eat or drink.

If weight loss is an important goal for you, the certified personal trainers at Framework Personal Training in Reno can help you with the intensity, consistency and efficacy of your workouts. They can also guide you in your nutrition choices, so that you’re supporting all your hard work in the gym with the kind of macros your body really needs. When you train hard and eat right, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how quickly you lose weight.