What it takes to Lose 10 KG of weight in a Month?
When most of us start on a diet, we desire to get quick results and sometimes setup very unrealistic goals. I answer a lot of questions on Quora. Last week I came across the question “How to lose 10KG of weight in a Month” and I thought how would someone be able to achieve such a rate of weight loss. I soon realized the absurdity of such a target and decided to write this blogpost to just show you how difficult and dangerous such an endeavor will be for your body. That being said, there are certain special situations where this rate of weight loss is possible and I will point that out later in the article.
The science behind weight loss is very simple. If you spend more calories than what you eat, you will lose weight. The general rule of thumb here is that to lose 1 pound of weight you need to eat 3500 calories less than what your body needs. 10kg is about 22 pounds. So to lose 10kg you need to eat 22 times 3500 calories or 77000 calories less than what your body needs. Since this weight is to be lost over the period of a month you need to eat 77000/30 or 2567 calories less than what your body needs.
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The total daily calorie needs for an average woman and man are 2000 and 2500 calories respectively. Do you see the issue here? An average woman needs to be eating negative 567 calories daily while an average man need to eat negative 67 calories daily to lose 10kg in a month. These negative calorie requirements can only be obtained if we increase our daily calorie expenditure. Generally speaking, to maintain normal body functions a woman must take a bare minimum of 1000 calories daily while a man should take 1500 calories daily. Going by this requirement a woman should spend 3567 calories daily exercising, while a man should spend 4067 calories.
Now let us look at how much should one exercise to spend 3500 calories. As a rule of thumb, running a 5K race spends about 300 calories (NOTE: It could be more or less depending on your bodyweight and pace, this is just a ball park number for demonstration). To spend 3500 calories you will have to run 58K, which is equivalent to running 16 kilometers more than a full marathon. So put it simply, in order to lose 10KG of weight in a month, you will be running a marathon on 1000 to 1500 calories daily. Try doing this just for a week and your body will just fall apart. This clearly shows the absurdity of aiming to lose 10kg in a month and how dangerous this will be for your overall health.
A more reasonable approach will be to spend about 250 calories exercising and then eating 250 calories less daily. This will put you in a daily calorie deficit of 500 calories. In a month you will have a total calorie deficit of 150000 calories. In this situation you will have lost 2kg in a month, which is a reasonable rate of weight loss. You can stretch it a little bit and spend 500 calories exercising daily and then eat 500 calories less. Under such a situation you will lose 4kg in a month. Going any faster than this will be too much of a stretch and cannot be sustained for more than a week or so. So do yourself a favor and set up a more practical goal of losing 2–4kg per month.
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I mentioned in the beginning of this article that there could be a special situation where you can lose 10kg of weight in a month. This special situation involves the shedding of a lot of water weight. A lot of athletes who compete by the weight category use this. These athletes gradually remove all the salt and carbohydrates from their diet. They also take diuretics and decrease water intake. This significantly decreases the water retention in their muscles and there is a drastic decrease in their body weight. Such athletes can easily lose more than 20 pounds in a few days following this technique. However right after weighing in they go back to normal diet and gain all of their weight back.
You might have seen a lot of commercials where companies guarantee that you will lose 5 pounds in the first week while following their diet. These companies are also using the same technique. These meals they offer are low in carbs and salt. As you go from your normal diet to their diet, you drop your water weight pretty quickly and hence lose 5 pounds in the first week. Things get harder from the second week though, as now you will be losing the real fat, and cannot sustain the same rate of weight loss.
Desiring quick results is the inherent characteristic of humans. Hope can be very motivating to get us started on our journey to achieving our goals. Most often though, we highly underestimate the amount of effort it will take to achieve our goals. This is not necessarily a bad thing as many times, this is how we get started. The problem comes when many of us give up on realizing the reality. If you feel like that, then go back to old story of hare and the tortoise. Slow and steady wins the race. Keep taking baby steps and you will get there. When the going gets tough, the tough gets going.
