Hello and this week we're talking about how fast you should try to lose weight.

I'm your host, Monica Reinagle, and this week we're talking about how fast you should try to lose weight.

A new paper in the British Journal of Nutrition asks whether the pace at which you lose weight

affects how much of that lost weight is fat as opposed to muscle and other things and the impact

on your metabolism after weight loss. To answer this question the authors pooled

the results of seven different studies in which two groups lost about the same amount of weight but at different speeds.

This is a question that I'm very interested in.

So I was excited to see a breakdown of this new study in a recent issue of the Nutrition

Examination Research Digest, a terrific publication affectionately known to subscribers as

nerd. For years I have been advocating slower weight loss as a better way to achieve sustainable

weight loss, which is really the only kind that counts and it's also the hardest to achieve. Part of my rationale for this

is psychological and behavioral. Diets usually involve a dramatic but temporary change in your behavior in order to lose weight quickly.

Once you've lost the weight, however, you tend to revert to your old habits and your old behaviors that lead you to regain the weight that you've lost.

Instead, I'd rather see you make smaller but more permanent changes to your habits

and your behavior and your

behavior and lifestyle. The weight does come off more slowly, but you're not just losing weight.

You're learning how to be someone who weighs less.

But another big part of my rationale is physiological.

Many popular diets are designed to produce weight loss at a rate of five or even 10% of your body weight per month.

And that's significantly faster than most people can shed body fat.

If you're losing weight faster than you can lose fat,

that means you're losing lean muscle, and that is not what you want to be losing.

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