Healthy Weight Loss for Permanent Change

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Key Points:

• People with very high initial body fat have to burn more energy to lose a pound of fat than people with lower initial body fat.

The prevailing weight loss wisdom is that you have to burn 3,500 additional calories to lose 1 pound of body fat.

A new model for weight loss indicates this is not the necessarily the case. A report from the National Institute of Health suggests that people who start weight loss with very high body fat have to burn more than 3,500 calories to lose each pound of fat.  Conversely, people with lower body fat can lose 1 pound of fat by burning less than 3,500 calories.

This model seems to codify what many of us have witnessed first hand -  thinner people tend to lose fat faster for a given amount of energy than people with higher body fat.

Reference:
What is the required energy deficit per unit weight loss?

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