Weight loss isn’t an easy or quick journey, irrespective of the route you choose to take. So how long does it take to lose 20 pounds?
At some point or another, we have all wanted to lose weight, whether it’s a diet, intermittent fasting, jogging exercises or a mix of all the above.
Many weight reduction techniques that promise to help you drop 20 pounds in a matter of weeks or even days may involve hazardous practices like dangerous calorie limits.
How much time does it take to lose 20 pounds in a healthy way?
If you are overweight, losing 20 pounds may be sufficient to reduce your chance of developing chronic weight-related disorders like heart disease.
It will also help in changing the way you look. While it’s understandable to seek quick results, don’t plan on losing 20 pounds in a few weeks.
A 20-pound weight loss may take between 10 and 20 weeks to complete, according to your weight, gender, and degree of activity.
There are plenty, so let’s go over them. We’ll also go over important lifestyle decisions that, regardless of how much weight you want to reduce, can help you do it as quickly as possible.
How long does it take to lose 20 pounds through exercise?
You can lose weight by exercising in a few different ways. It increases your ability to burn calories while you are at rest and aids in the development of muscle.
Additionally, you can swap out fat for muscle to constantly burn more calories and appear thinner.
How long does it take to exercise your way to a 20-pound weight loss? The response is based on a number of variables.
Calories can be burned in a variety of ways throughout various exercises, and frequency is also important.
Considering this, imagine that you work out five days a week, burning 700 calories each time.
This increases weekly calorie burn by 3,500. Since one pound contains around 3,500 calories, losing one pound would take one week, and losing 20 pounds would need 20 weeks.
Despite being unlikely, it might be achievable to lose 20 pounds in less than a month.
It can be challenging because exercising demands energy to make sure that your workouts burn more calories than you consume each day.
Fasting can be incorporated into your weight reduction plan to speed up the process, but it will be more difficult to find the energy to exercise afterward.
You should be aware that the aforementioned strategy could seriously harm your health.
If you drop 20 pounds in one month, you run the risk of damaging your metabolism and losing muscle mass.
How much time does it take to lose 20 pounds through walking?
The human body is more complex than that. The truth is that you cannot predict with any degree of accuracy how much or how quickly you will lose weight.
How quickly you lose those pounds will depend on a variety of things besides walking.
However, by walking, you can calculate how long it will take you to drop 20 pounds.
Start going for daily walks for a week. weigh yourself on days 1 and 7. Make a difference calculation, and divide the outcome by 20 pounds.
You should be able to determine how many weeks it will take to reach 20 pounds from the response.
To sustain the same rate of weight loss, you may need to increase the amount of time or distance you walk as you lose weight.
For better understanding we can say that a 150-pound person burns the following after one hour of walking:
- 224 calories at a 3 mph average speed. If they lost 1 pound each day for 2.23 weeks, they would lose 20 pounds in 44.6 weeks.
- 340 calories at a fairly rapid 4 mph pace. If they lost 1 pound per day, they would shed 20 pounds in 29.5 weeks.
How long does it take to healthily lose 20 pounds?
Never drop more than 2 pounds per week of weight if you wish to take a healthier route.
If you lose 2 pounds per week, this implies it will take you at least 10 weeks to drop a total of 20 pounds.
By performing functions like breathing and blood circulation that keep you alive, your body expends a specific quantity of calories.
Depending on your age, weight, height, and gender, your basal metabolic rate, or BMR, can change.
This healthy and sustainable method will help you reach your goals in around 20 weeks if you chose to drop a pound per week.
If you work out daily, how long will it take you to lose 20 pounds?
Everyone moves at their own rate, is the straightforward response. Your metabolism determines how many pounds you lose each day.
The amount of sleep you get each night, your food, your exercise regimen, and your level of stress are all important lifestyle factors.
As a result, if your metabolism and other lifestyle factors enable you to lose 1 to 2 pounds every week, it will take you 10 to 20 weeks to reach your target.
Let’s say, for illustration, that you are 25 years old. You might burn
- 1 hour of moderately intense cycling burns 456 calories.
- Performing 1 hour of power yoga burns 399 calories.
- Running for one hour at a 7 mph speed will burn 656 calories.
- 1 hour of intermediate-level Pilates burns 258 calories.
- A one-hour aerobic dance workout burns 371 calories.
You would burn 3,192 calories a week if you cycled for an hour each day at a moderate intensity. You would need around 22 weeks to shed 20 pounds at that rate.
Let’s assume that you do pilates daily. Every week, you would burn 1,806 calories, or approximately half a pound. To drop 20 pounds, it would take you slightly about 40 weeks.
So, if you exercise every day, how long does it take to lose 20 pounds? Your amount of effort will determine!
The difference in men and women losing weight
Many people think that men have a bigger advantage when it comes to losing weight.
While males can just go to the gym and watch their weight fall off, women may find it difficult to lose even a few pounds.
Men have more lean muscles than women do, which explains this. Even while they are resting, they burn more calories. For more detailed information on this check out this article.
This explains why a male will lose more weight even if he cuts the same number of calories as a woman.
Therefore, if men and women follow the same diet and exercise routine, males will drop 20 pounds more quickly.
Risks of losing weight too quickly
Nothing good can come out of losing weight quickly. It may attain the desired results, but like they say, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
You have to give your body time to adapt to the new schedule and you also have to be very patient throughout this process.
Even though you might not want to wait a few months to drop 20 pounds, going slowly will enable you to maintain your weight over time.
Making sure that the majority of each pound you lose truly consists of fat can be accomplished by eating fewer calories than you require and following a slow-but-steady weight-loss regimen.
You will start losing muscle as well as fat if you severely restrict your caloric intake or starve yourself to reduce weight.
Therefore, while you’ll still notice a difference on the scale and lose 20 pounds more quickly, your metabolism will also slow.
Since you’ll naturally burn fewer calories throughout the day, you’ll need to diet more and more to keep losing weight or keep it off.
Losing muscle also increases the likelihood that you will appear “flabby” rather than fit, healthy, and toned when you accomplish your target.
The ups and downs of this journey:
It’s natural to experience some highs and lows while you lose weight, so don’t panic if your weight varies a little during your 20-pound weight-loss journey.
Your body doesn’t always shed a pound or two a week like clockwork. As your body gets used to your new diet, you can lose weight more quickly than you anticipated.
However, you can lose more weight than you anticipated in one week and none the following.
Don’t give up; try taking an average of your weight a few times every week and using that to determine how much weight you’ve lost over the previous few weeks.
It’s also typical to have a “plateau,” or a period of time during which you don’t lose weight.
When that occurs, reassess your calorie requirements while accounting for your new, reduced body weight.
By switching up your routine, you might “shock” your body back into losing weight.
Try a new cardio machine, enroll in a new workout class, or experiment with new healthy foods.
Make a timeline
The safest rate of weight loss is often between 1 and 2 pounds each week.
This entails lowering your daily caloric intake by 500 to 1,000 calories, which will result in an additional 3,500 to 7,000 calories burned each week, or 1 to 2 pounds of fat burned.
How much weight you lose will depend on a few things, such as how much time you can dedicate to exercise, how well you manage your food, and how many calories you burn presently.
Use an online calorie needs calculator, such as the one from the Baylor College of Medicine.
Enter your weight, age, height, gender, and level of exercise, then decide how many calories you want to reduce for weight reduction.
Just make sure you’re eating enough calories to maintain your health while losing weight, which is 1,800 for men and 1,200 for women.
What to do after?
Your weight-loss adventure won’t end after the 10 to 40 weeks it will probably take to lose 20 pounds.
To maintain your weight loss after reaching your target weight, you’ll need to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Use the adult energy calculator to determine how many calories you need each day because you’ll require fewer calories to maintain your new, trimmer figure than you did before the weight loss.
Being physically active helps you maintain a healthy weight, improves your mood, supports cardiovascular health, and reduces your risk of osteoporosis.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advise scheduling at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise or 75 minutes of strenuous cardiovascular exercise each week to maintain your weight.
In conclusion:
This isn’t going to be an easy journey so it is better to have realistic goals before you begin.
There will be days where you feel like giving up but you need to keep your eyes on the prize and hustle towards it.
Furthermore, it is always better to opt for the healthier route of weight loss.
Losing weight in a shot time in an unhealthy manner will help you achieve your goal, but can have dire health consequences in the future, so it is better to keep the bigger picture in mind.
Lastly, for diet related weight loss, you should always consult a nutritionist.
They will professionally guide you about your daily food intake and ensure that your body is getting all the required nutritions and minerals.
Thus, what is the time frame for losing 20 pounds? Well, it’s likely that you won’t meet your goal in less than a month.
The greatest strategy is to aim for 1-2 pounds per week. Accordingly, it will take you between ten and twenty weeks to lose 20 pounds.