First Week Of A Diet, And What To Expect?

So just a quick update on my diet after the first week. I’m down 3.5lbs and have lost 1cm from my waist, so I’m off to a decent start. Feeling pretty good and training is going well with the new split.

As I’m now into my second week, I wanted to share my own personal experience and insight into what you might expect when you first start a diet and how you might want to track your own progress.

Starting with weight loss, as I said I’ve lost 3.5lbs this week, which can be fairly typical for a first week, in fact it’s not uncommon to see a dramatic loss of up to 6-7lbs depending on your body weight and starting position. However, don’t get too excited and be fooled into thinking that’s fat loss, coz in the first week of a diet it’s actually very unlikely that that’s the case.

There’s a few reasons why this might be; firstly if you think about when you start a diet, you are coming from either maintenance calories or a calorie surplus, so your body will likely have more than enough energy to sustain itself in an initial deficit without needing to start using significant amounts of stored bodyfat for fuel.

What will happen though, is as your calorie deficit starts to negatively compound over the coming days, your muscle glycogen levels will start to deplete somewhat, especially if you are training really hard and lowering your intake of carbs. When you lose glycogen, you also lose water, in fact for every molecule of glycogen stored within the muscle cell, there are 3-4 molecules of water, so as glycogen levels drop, so does water, which would account for some of the weight loss you will see during the first week of a diet. As glycogen levels start to deplete further over the coming days and weeks, your body will start to switch to using stored bodyfat for fuel to make up for the deficit.

Secondly, if I use my own example, I have just dropped my food from 3600 calories to 2400. That’s a 33% reduction in total food going through my system every day, which can also account for some temporary weight loss.

This brings me on to tracking and why you shouldn’t just rely on the scales. Weighing yourself on the scales on any given day can give readings that can be out by plus or minus one or two pounds, due to factors such as stress, sleep, food intake the previous day, sodium and hydration levels, and monthly cycles. It’s also the reason why people who only weigh themselves once a week can get upset when their weight has stayed the same or gone up, even though it’s possible that they might have lost fat but gained water. A better way to use the scales, is to weigh yourself more frequently through the week and take an average score and compare the average of one week to the average of another week, which will give you a much more accurate picture of what’s going on.

This is why it’s always a good idea to use a second form of measurement to track fat loss, so for me, I always like to use a tape measure around my waist as that’s typically where the majority of fat accumulates for me, but you can also use chest, arm and leg measurements. If the tape measure is going down, but the scales stay the same, then I’m not really too bothered, but if both stay the same, then that might indicate that things may not have progressed that week.

Now that’s not to say that scales are wrong…in fact even though they can be out from day to day or week to week, over a longer time frame, they will still show a reliable downward trend if fat is being lost. Lastly, if you do use the scales, try to be consistent in how and when you use them, preferably first thing in the morning, before any food and before you get dressed.

Hope this is has been useful, as always don’t forget to like, or leave a comment below.