Personal training blog

How long does it take to get fit and lose weight?

You want to get fit and lose weight. You want it fast. But how long does it take to get fit and lose weight – in a healthy, sustainable and hopefully permanent way?

Popular magazines (especially for women) promise amazing results in a very short time. Social media is filled with before and after photos showing transformations that took just a week or two. Mainstream media is also guilty with that promise of life changing results in no time at all. “Lose 10lbs in 2 weeks” cries the headline.

Are these claims true? How long does it take too get fit and lose weight?

The answer is obviously different for different people and depends on many factors. What is your starting point? How much time are you willing (or can you realistically put into) a fitness and weight loss quest? How hard are you willing to train? How big a difference are you aiming for?

All of these questions will influence the answer to the question. At Diets Don’t Work our general guideline is 6 weeks. This is how long it usually takes to see good shape change, weight loss and fitness gains. But as above, many factors are at play. Here are some of them.

The worse off you are the faster the gains will come. The law of diminishing returns means that if you are already very fit, improvements will be hard to get. An olympic sprinter, for example, would need to train for a year to gain just 0.5 second improvement over 100m. But the good news is that the opposite is true. If you are very unfit, gains will come quickly. In 6 weeks it might be realistic to go from being able to run for 30 seconds to completing a 5k run.

The harder you train the faster the gains will come. This may seem obvious, but many people still seem to believe that turning up at a gym and pottering along on a cross trainer while reading a book will reap the benefits. Training harder – sometimes for less time – will see faster results.

Sticking to the plan will speed things up. This isn’t just about ‘trying hard”. It’s about detail. Keeping track of your actions is key here. So keeping a nutritional log, a food diary or using a fitness tracker will all help to make sure that you are sticking to the plan and will make sure that you lose weight and get fit in the magic 6 weeks….or less!

Being prepared for a plateau will help you achieve your goals faster. As per the diminishing laws point above, even if the gains come quickly at first, it’s likely that you will have an off week at some point. The key is to be ready for this and to adjust accordingly. It might be an idea to start tracking nutrition more honestly or to change your training plan.

Charting progress will keep the quest on track for a 6 week success. A graph with your weight on that you put a line on every week; keeping track of measurements; doing a set fitness test – push ups in one minute or a bleep test for example – and then repeating it every couple of weeks. Take a photo of yourself every week and compare them. Chances are you will see improvements. At best, charting progress will provide much needed encouragement when you see how far you’ve come. At worst it will indicate that you need to change some things as progress has slowed.

Are you having fun? Yes getting fit and losing weight can feel like hard work, but it will be even harder and slower if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing. If going to the gym isn’t your thing, perhaps look at a team sport or group activity instead for example.

Get a personal trainer – paying someone to take care (as much as possible) of the above points will definitely help with speed of progress.

Why is getting faster results bad? You can lose weight quickly as promised by many diet plans. This is especially true if you are starting from a very heavy weight. But once you go beyond the advised 2lbs of weight loss per week, loss of lean muscle mass, hormonal imbalance, nutritional deficiencies, mood swings and failure all become likely. Attempting to get fit really quickly will also increase chances of injury, overtraining and mental/physical fatigue, all of which increase chances of failure.

So give yourself a chance, stick to the 2lb per week rule, train at a level that is challenging but sustainable for you. Do all of that and in 6 weeks you will be smaller, lighter, fitter and healthier.