For the average person, how much weekly fat loss is reasonable/safe while maintaining one’s muscle mass?
I ask that because I want to shed some fat off of my frame but I don’t want to go into so much of a deficit that I sacrifice some of my muscle mass. I’ve heard some say one pound, others say two. Also, would a low/moderate carb diet be best? As ever, there is the party-line answer and the real-world, trenches answer. I’ll give both. Standard-issue fitness lore will tell you that you can (and, implicitly, should) shoot for losing a pound of fat a week. The average clipboard-jockey in the too-tight, brightly-colored polo at your local Pump-It-Torium will tell you that if you want to lose fat, you should cut out 500 calories a day and over the course of a week you’ll accumulate a caloric deficit of exactly 3500 calories, which is, conveniently, the number of calories in a pound of fat. Pumpy will also likely tell you that 500 calories equals a Snickers bar and a beer, a bag of peanuts and two cans of Mountain Dew, or seven cashew nuts, forty-seven Peanut M&Ms, and four Cheezy Fish, and so
