500 calories a day = 1lb weight loss over a week?

[overweight Aries]

Hi, i'm just starting on calorie counting and kind of going it alone so just after advice. I was told that to loose a 1lb a week I need to create a deficit of 500 calories everyday for a week (by doing more exercise or eating less). This sounds ok to me, if I just cut out the crisps and chocolate I will be there.

My question is how are people able to loose like 4/5 or more pounds in a week? Going by the 500 calories for 1lb that means I need to try and get a deficit of 2000+ calories a day. It just doesn't seem possible. Any input would be appreciated, thanks.

 

[ast]

I can only speak from my experience of cambridge and lighter life, but in this case we have 500ish calories a day most of these are burned up on the day to day body works, e.g. breathing, meaning that the deficit must come from fat stores. On these diets you are expected to lose 3-4lbs a week with out extra exercise (if you do exercise you increase the deficit, there for more weight loss, but not always ). This follows the what you wrote above.
Hope this helps, like I said before I don't know about other diets.

 

[KD]

Assuming you mean a 500 calorie deficit, rather than 500 calories a day...........

My question is how are people able to loose like 4/5 or more pounds in a week?

This can often happen in the first week but a fair amount is water.

After that, the majority of people that lose that kind of weight each week, on a calorie controlled diet, are very overweight and so have a much higher metobolic rate.

A 24 stone young lady needs many more calories to get through the day, so if they go down to 1100-1200 cals a day, they are in a larger deficit, plus the fact that in the early stages, they are probably still losing water for a while anyway.

I don't think it's that usual to lose 4-5 lbs a week for weeks on end on a calorie controlled diet. There again...maybe a man can