How Many Calories Do You Need to Cut to Lose 20 Pounds?

This one is mostly math, which is the nice part.

A pound of body fat takes a little over 3,500 calories to remove. I round it to about 3,700 so nobody is surprised. So losing a pound of fat takes a deficit of roughly 3,700 calories, and losing 20 pounds of fat takes about 74,000.

It does not matter how the deficit shows up

Get that deficit over three days and you lose the pound in three days. Get it over three weeks and you lose it in three weeks. Your body does not care about the calendar. It cares about the total.

One catch: the scale does not only measure fat. Some of what you lose will be water and some will be lean tissue, so the number on the scale and the number of fat pounds you lose will not match perfectly.

Stop staring at the 20

I do not like looking at the full 20 pounds at once. It is too big and too far away. Look at today instead and ask one question: what could I change in my habits, my meals or my movement to create any deficit at all?

Any deficit moves you in the right direction. That is the whole game.

Keep the daily deficit around 500

For most people I do not push deficits much past 500 calories a day. Go a lot beyond that, unless you have a significant amount of fat to lose, and you start losing a higher share of lean tissue too. That makes it harder to hold on to muscle, never mind build it.

How long should it take?

It depends on how much you have to lose, how much you eat now and how active you are. A good rule of thumb is that most people can lose half a percent to 1 percent of their body weight per week. Whatever 20 pounds works out to for you is your timeline.

For an average body type, a realistic number is about 25 weeks. That is roughly a pound a week on average, with a few weeks where the scale refuses to move and a diet break somewhere in the middle for a diet that long.

Some people can go faster. If you have a lot more to lose, 10 to 12 weeks is possible, but it takes a much bigger deficit and it is hard.

Want a number that is actually yours?

Everything above is the average. Your plan should be built on your body size, how much fat you actually have to lose, how active you are and how you eat now. That is exactly what we set up on a consultation.

Built with Courage. Built with Consistency. Built Anyway.