Stop saying “I want to lose 10 pounds”, say this instead.

Photo by Total Shape on Unsplash

After working in the fitness industry for almost 4 years I notice that a lot of people had similar weight loss goals like it was always the same amounts of weight.

“I want to lose 5kgs” or sometimes it was 10kgs if the person was a little bit and had more to lose, I worked in gyms in Dublin and New Zealand over those 4 years, hence the metric system.

Where people pull those numbers from I don’t know, I guess it’s just a round number or it’s just their goal which is fine.

Then they would say they wanted to lose it in a crazy short period of time and that’s when I had to work out the numbers and explain that, it’s not that it’s not possible, but you just probably won’t be able for it.

See the average person could lose 2–3% of their body weight in a month, which doesn’t seem like much but it’s a healthy amount and it’s doable, not easy, but doable.

The other key thing to notice here is that 3% is the same for everyone, it’s 3% of YOUR body weight.

This gets easier to calculate when you use pounds, like lbs, not the English currency (well done you’ve just confused everyone Philip).

If you’re a male and weigh 200lbs, losing 2–3% of that is 4–6lbs, which over the space of 4–6 weeks is achievable.