Mayo Clinic Recommends Slow Speed of Weight Loss

As a general rule, I have heard that those wanting to lose weight should aim for 3 to 4 pounds per week - no more. The Mayo Clinic is recommending 1 to 2 pounds per week to preserve lean muscle tissue.

This from the Mayo Clinic:

When it comes to weight loss, slow and steady wins the race. Fast weight loss is usually followed shortly by rapid weight gain. Besides, 1 pound of fat contains 3,500 calories, so you need to burn 500 more calories than you eat each day to lose just 1 pound a week (500 calories x 7 days). If you're losing more than 1 to 2 pounds a week, it's either water weight or lean tissue you're losing, not fat. Weight loss of 1 to 2 pounds a week may seem like an agonizingly slow pace, but if improving your health is a long-term goal, the speed of your weight loss isn't important.

There is also countless other reasons to aim for a low speed of weight loss. Besides being the healthiest way to go about it, it also seems correlated with maintaining weightloss. At the extreme, there is also the concern with losing weight slow enough to allow your skin a chance to retract - a concern mostly associated with weight loss surgery.