Another Mini Question - 1 pound per day? How?

[Toadie]

Hello!

Forgive another question so soon, but I'm having a lot of trouble understanding the notion that a person can lose one pound of fat per day on Mary's Mini (I'm posting this in MWL because the Mini is an offshoot of that.)

If a pound of fat = 3500 calories, but the body burns carbs and protein first before buring fat, a simple deficit of 3500 isn't likely to burn a full pound of fat.

I really don't understand how it works. Can someone enlighten me? I've been doing the Mini for two days, and perhaps it's my imagination, but my clothes seem looser today, and my pants keep slipping down!

I've gone a bit too far on the starches, not enough greens and yellows, but I still feel a change. Can anyone please explain this to me? I'm male and nearly 32, so I figure I have a slight advantage on burning fat, but if we're getting all these carbs, how is the body going to burn fat when it uses the carbs first?

If anyone can explain I'd be EVER so grateful!

Best of luck to everyone!
Toadie

[Faith in DC]

all diets, and Marys Mini is a diet, makes you lose quick at the beginning. You aren't only losing fat. I don't think it's physically possible to lose consistantly a pound a day either. Maybe some folks who have a larger amount to lose may sustain that pound a day for a few weeks.

[Bambie113]

Hey Toadie,
I have no idea what the answer to your question might be but I'd love to know. Why not post this over in Jeff's forum and see if he can come up with an informative answer?
Let us know!

[Toadie]

I do have a lot to lose, 80-100 pounds would be nice. I'm 6'4" and weigh about 330, though I'm not sure how much to lose because I have a VERY large frame (I'm just a big guy in general.)

I'm hoping that the only positive to being so heavy is that it means the pounds will drop faster, at least to start with.

I'm into day three, and my belly fat is more, I dunno, "jiggly." Less dense if you see what I mean. My face seems a little thinner too.

I don't feel like I'm getting enough calories, but I'm not overly hungry and I'm not exhausted or anything, so maybe my body is burning fat stores to compensate.

Who knows...it's all so confusing!

[erin]

hi toady , i 'll try to help if i can.

if you currently weigh 300ish pounds then you had most likely been consuming in the neighborhood of 4000 calories per day to maintain your weight before you began the mwlp. done correctly ( without going hungry), the mwlp will end up being around 1500-1800 calories per day for the average person. this means you would be reducing you daily intake by around 2000-2500 calories per day.

initially, you will use up all of your stored glycogen (about 1 days worth of calories plus 2 grams of water for each gram of glycogen because this is how the body packages it ) which for you will equal around 2.5 additional pounds of weight loss.

if you do the math you can see that someone your size can expect to lose up to 7 pounds in the first week of the mwlp and ~ 3-5 pounds a week after that. this is all without any formal exercise. if you add in a daily walk of 30 minutes at a moderate pace (3 mph) you will burn an extra 300-400 calories and lose an additional pound or so per week. of course, the longer you diet the less you will lose because your resting metabolic rate will decrease as your weight does.

as for your confusion about burning carbs instead of fat, if you ate 1600 calories a day and and around 1200 of those were from mwl legal carbohydrates (used preferentially by the body for energy and brain function), you are still burning ~1800 calories a day of stored fat (and a little bit of muscle, but it is just the extra muscle your body had to make to carry around that 330 pounds!)

please keep in mind that this is just hypothetical and real world weight loss doesn't always follow the expected course.

from what i have read here on the forums, the average person who follows the mwlp can expect to see a weight loss of between 2 and 3 pounds per week. smaller people tend to average slightly less and bigger people slightly more.

i hope this makes a little sense, lol !

~ erin