How do you lose a pound healthily?

Healthy weight loss is a complicated subject. It can be difficult to do it healthily and losing weight isn’t always safe or the best way to stay healthy. Some pounds can be beneficial while others might be dragging you down.

The benefits of maintaining a healthy body by living a regular active lifestyle through activities like running are well documented, but not all pounds and calories are created equal.

“The benefits of gaining weight are overshadowed by the threat of obesity, yet they remain,” said Zsofia Zambo, a Toronto-based nutritional scientist. “For women, amenorrhoea [loss of menstrual cycle] can occur when there is not enough fat. Fat also cushions and insulates the body.”

“The benefit of gaining muscle mass is that you are gaining metabolic tissue which requires more energy to feed, reducing the need for fat to be stored,” continue Zambo. “In addition, gaining muscle will help you with your everyday exercises allowing them to become easier, and probably then more likely that you will continue to do it.”

Losing a pound of muscle and a pound of fat are not the same thing. Maintaining a healthy, lean, muscular weight can be beneficial to keeping off extra weight in fat. Lean muscle weight is metabolically active, meaning it burns extra calories each day on its own.

At the basis of it all, to lose pounds of weight in fat, an individual needs to put themselves at a caloric deficit, says Devon Guy, a registered dietitian.

“A calorie is a measure of energy you get from carbohydrates, protein, fat and alcohol in foods and beverages you eat and drink. You need energy to fuel your body’s physiological processes, but too many calories that cannot be burned as fuel will be stored as fat. Energy balance is a matter of calories in being equal to calories out. So, technically, if the calories you expend are more than what you are taking in, weight loss would be a result,” said Guy.

But there is a healthy way to lose weight and an unhealthy way. While losing weight your body still needs a certain number of calories, and some are also more valuable to your body than others. All calories are not created equal.

“A great way to help lose weight is to limit foods with ’empty calories,'” continued Guy. “These are foods high in solid fats and added sugars, and very low in nutrients such as desserts, soda and candy. Remember, we eat food to obtain essential nutrients for bodily functions, and having a diet rich in nutrients and moderate in calories is best to maintain a healthy body weight and prevent nutrient deficiencies.”

A healthy expectation can be to lose weight at about one or two pounds each week, or about 500 calories each day. Still, for an adult male, this means, at the very minimum, you still need to be taking in at least 1500 calories each day. For a female, this number is about 1200. But whatever your body type, creating a deficit larger than 500 calories per day can be unhealthy, and weight loss of more than 1 or two pounds per week is usually water weight and can be difficult to sustain and unhealthy, explained Guy.

“Limiting calories too drastically can result in nutrient deficiencies, muscle and bone density loss, hormonal changes, weakness, anemia, depression and slowed metabolism,” said Guy. “A healthy diet for weight loss is not too restrictive. I would recommend limiting added sugars and refined carbohydrates”