When will you reach your goal weight?
A real date, at a pace you can keep, with the slow weeks already counted. It's hard to stay with a plan when you expected eight weeks and it's going to take twenty. Knowing the honest number up front helps.
Your result shows here
You'll get the number of weeks, the date on the calendar, a second date with real life built in, and the daily deficit it takes to start.
Why two dates
The first date assumes every week goes to plan. Nobody's does. There's a vacation, a stomach bug, a stretch where work eats everything, a plateau that lasts three weeks for no reason you can find. I add about 25 percent to the clean estimate because that's about what real life costs, and clients who plan for it don't panic when it happens.
Why the pace is a percentage
Two pounds a week is a modest pace at 300 lb and a brutal one at 140 lb. Setting the pace as a share of your bodyweight scales it to you, and it slows as you get lighter, which is exactly what happens in practice. The last ten pounds take longer than the first ten. That's normal.
What happens after you get there
In a three-year trial, people who lost the weight in 12 weeks and people who took 36 weeks had regained about the same share of it by the end. Speed didn't change how much came back. Keeping it off is its own job, and a pace you can hold trains the habits for it.
What to do this week
Run the maintenance calculator, take off the deficit shown here, and set protein. Weigh in most mornings and average the week. Judge it on two weeks. If you'd rather have someone else run the numbers and the adjustments, that's online coaching.
Can I go faster than one percent a week?
You can, for a while. Faster than that usually means losing muscle along with fat, being hungry enough to make bad decisions, and training badly. Very-low-calorie diets exist, and they're done under medical supervision for a reason. For the rest of us, a steady pace with a protein target gets to the same place with less damage.
What if I have a deadline, like a wedding?
Work it backwards: try each pace and pick the one whose second date lands before your deadline. If no pace gets there, aim at the weight you can reach by then and be happy with it.
Where do these numbers come from?
The pace as a share of bodyweight and the 25 percent buffer are my coaching defaults. Fast versus slow loss: Purcell et al., Lancet Diabetes Endocrinol 2014. The "five to ten percent" checkpoint for big changes: Wing et al., Diabetes Care 2011, where losing 5 to 10 percent of bodyweight over a year improved blood sugar, blood pressure, triglycerides and HDL cholesterol in more than 5,000 adults with type 2 diabetes, with bigger losses helping more.
Does the calculator account for muscle gain?
No. It's a scale-weight estimate. If you're lifting and new to it, you may gain a little muscle while losing fat, and the scale will move slower than the mirror. Take progress photos and waist measurements alongside the scale so you can see it.
The plan behind the date
The 4 Boring Pillars guide is the system that gets you from today to that date without a crash diet. Free, 38 pages, with the studies behind each pillar.
Ready to build the plan?
Book a free 30-minute call. We'll go over your numbers, what your week looks like, and whether coaching is the right fit.