How quickly can I lose 30 pounds?

How quickly can I lose 30 pounds?
By Martica Heaner, M.A., M.Ed., for MSN Health & Fitness

Q: I lost 15 pounds and have kept it off for three months. I'm 5 feet 7 inches and now weigh 167 pounds, but my ideal weight is 135 pounds. Is it realistic to try to lose five pounds a month? And what exercise can help keep me from getting flabby?

A: Be careful of getting attached to a specific number when it comes to your "ideal" weight. So many individual factors play a role in determining what your optimal body weight is that's it's hard to say exactly what the best weight is for you. And keep in mind that for many women, their ideal weight from a health standpoint may be more than their ideal weight from an aesthetic standpoint. (Women often think skinnier is better, but just as overweight people have higher risks of disease, so do underweight people.)

Although 135 pounds for someone who's 5 feet 7 inches is not technically underweight, 135 may be too low for you if you are big-boned and muscular. It's better to shoot for a range, and remember that scale weight alone doesn't give you an indication of your body composition, or the amount of muscle mass versus body fat that you have. A person can be muscular and have low body fat, but weigh on the heavier end of an "ideal" range, but look great because he or she is lean and firm.

In any case, 30 pounds is a lot to lose, and while it can be done, it requires a commitment and long-term lifestyle changes. You're right to aim for a slow rate of weight loss, and one or two pounds a week is considered to be a healthy pace. To keep yourself motivated, rather than focusing on the 30 pounds, aim for something smaller, like four or five pounds. Once you've reached that first, more easily achieved goal, set a new goal until eventually you reach your target weight.

Keep in mind that a few things may impede your progress. First, the closer you get to your optimum weight, the harder it may be to lose. This is especially true if your body considers your "optimum" weight to be one that's five or 10 pounds more than the weight you desire.

Also, the fact that you've lost a considerable amount of weight already will affect your weight loss now and going forward. You've lost fat from fat cells, but the fat cells still remain in your body. These fat cells are programmed to be filled, since fat is the body's energy supply. So when weight is lost, energy-preservation mechanisms kick in to attempt to restore the lost body fat.

It's unclear how much weight loss triggers this phenomenon, but it appears that when weight loss starts to plateau, often after about six months of weight loss, some biological triggers try to reverse the loss. Biochemicals are released in your brain and body that may affect your tendency to regain weight in a variety of ways: You may feel less full after eating, you may crave snacks more often, you may crave more fattening foods, and/or you may get hungrier sooner.

This doesn't mean that you will definitely gain the weight back, but it does mean that you have to continue with the smart eating choices and regular exercise to counteract these influences. The National Weight Control Registry, an ongoing research investigation that monitors people who have lost weight and successfully kept it off, shows that it can be done. And there are some weight-management strategies that most of these successful losers use to stay on the healthy end of the scale. On average, 90 percent of these success stories exercise about one hour per day (mostly walking), 78 percent eat breakfast every day, and 62 percent watch less than 10 hours of TV a week (that clearly gives them more time to be active).

To kick-start your weight loss, evaluate your diet and exercise program. Find ways to eat more healthfully, consuming fewer calories, and find ways to increase the amount of daily activity that you get, aiming to ramp up the amount of vigorous exercise that you do too (try inserting jogging sprints into a walk, or intervals of higher-resistance climbing on a cardio machine). Also incorporate resistance exercises with weights, which will keep you from getting flabby. Look for specific moves that you can do at home on the MSN Fit Zone.

Find all articles by Martica.
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Each of our experts responds to one question each week and the responses are posted on Mondays on MSN Health. We regret that we cannot provide a personalized response to every submission.
Martica is a Manhattan-based exercise physiologist and nutritionist and an award-winning fitness instructor. She has written for a variety of publications including Self, Health, Prevention, The New York Times and others. Martica is the author of seven books, including her latest, Cross-Training for Dummies.(Read her full bio.)