Losing weight too quickly?

Answer

First of all, strong work!That’s about 2.8 pounds per week, which is pretty quick and risking a bit of muscle loss. In an ideal world, you would lose no more than 1% of your bodyweight per week(approx 2.3 pounds and the start or 1.9 pounds now) while strength training, and limit diets to about 10% of your bodyweight(19 to 23 pounds) at a time.But we don’t live in an ideal world, and your results are very good in ANY context.Let me place my advice for continuing as a hierarchy:

1. Strength training: if you aren’t already, now is a good time to start committing to a minimum of 2 1hr session of resistance training per week. This the absolute most important thing you can do for your healthspan and lifespan, as you are already a relatively healthy weight.
2. Maintanace break. From the scientific literature, we know generally that people do a good job losing weight, but struggle to keep it off. People who take maintanance breaks where they simply maintain their weight have better long term success, probably not for any physiologic reason, but because they learn to eat at maintance and can avoid post-diet regain
3. High protein diet. .8g/lb bodyweight to fuel muscle building process.
4. Cardio: just shoot for 8k steps a day, don’t overthink it and don’t overdo it. You can take up other forms if you enjoy them

If you can do all of these things in the context of your individual life, goals, and personal enjoyment, you will have lifelong success

Answer

It’s very likely that your rate of loss will slow down. It’s common for people to drop weight quickly at first — a good chunk of it being water weight. But then your body settles down to burn fat more slowly.

Myself, I lost 20 pounds in the first two months of IF, but then it took me the rest of the year to lose the next 20 pounds. For context, I’m 40F, 5’4”, SW 180 lbs. (I am not being aggressive at all about calorie deficits or exercise, so the slower loss is what I expected.)

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