6: “How Long Will It Actually Take Me To Lose Weight?" [ASK DR. ANNA]

How long does weight loss actually take? In this episode of ASK DR. ANNA, Dr. Anna tackles one of the most common questions she hears — and the honest answer might be the most freeing thing you've heard in a long time.

We live in a world of before and after photos, 30-day challenges, and transformation promises that have absolutely nothing to do with real biology. And for adults over 50, buying into those shortcuts is often exactly what sets progress back.

Dr. Anna breaks down what sustainable fat loss actually looks like, why the scale can lie to you even when your health is improving, and why the slow road is almost always the one that actually works.

Listen in to learn:

• Why transformation promises on social media have nothing to do with real biology
• The 1 to 2 pounds per week guideline — and why that math rarely works out perfectly in real life
• How a 100-pound weight loss journey actually unfolds without perfect weekly progress
• Why weight loss happens in waves — and what to do during plateaus and life events
• Why losing fat too fast almost always leads to faster regain
• The real difference between crash dieting and habits you can actually live with
• Why the scale can be misleading even when your body composition is improving
• How strength training and muscle protect your metabolism long term
• The long-term health risks of carrying excess body fat — and why that matters more than a number on the scale

Drop your questions in the comments below — Dr. Anna may answer yours in a future episode!

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Transcript

The Truth About Weight Loss Timelines

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A viewer recently wrote to me, Dr. Anna, how long will it actually take me to lose weight? And this is such a common question. I just had to make a video about it. Because if you're wondering how long it's going to take you to lose, I don't know, 30, 50, or 80 pounds, here's what it's not. It's not going to be that 14-day transformation that you see on Instagram or TikTok. It's not going to be lose 30 pounds in 30 days, promise from the supplement ad. And honestly, the real answer might surprise you. And knowing the truth is actually what keeps you from quitting when let's say you get to two months in and you're just not at your goal yet and you want to give up. I see people quit all the time just because their expectations do not match reality. They think that if I lose 150 pounds in six months, that everything's going to be amazing, then they get to the fourth month of working their tail off and they only lost 25 pounds, 30 pounds, and they feel so defeated and they just give up entirely. Now the cool thing is that I get to work with people and I see them succeed all the time once they understand what actually works and what actually is realistic for them. And these are the people that even exceed their expectations and surpass their goals. And that is for me the most fulfilling feeling ever helping somebody actually do that. Now, the risk is if you don't know what to expect, well, you're going to get discouraged and quit way too early. Hey, I'm Dr. Anna. Welcome to my series where I'm answering real questions I get from viewers like you. These are honest conversations. We talk about weight loss, real life, and not this perfectly curated version and all these fake answers that we get from commercials trying to sell us supplements or fitness apps. This is raw stuff. I am a medical doctor, but know that these are not formal medical advice discussions. I am not acting as your personal doctor here, right? I'm just a medical doctor giving you my personal take on things. But seriously, it is important. If you have personal health concerns, I cannot encourage you enough to talk to your own doctor, talk to your own healthcare provider. Your situation is unique. Okay.

The 1 To 2 Pounds Rule

SPEAKER_00 2:09

So here is where we need to start. The standard advice you're going to hear across the board is that fat loss and fat burning should have a specific general rate of about one to two pounds lost per week when you're doing a weight loss protocol. Why? We're going to get into this. Now, let me tell you about a client of mine. I worked with this lady and she ended up losing a hundred pounds in a year, way more than we both expected her to, all with very healthy approaches. She was following my online Mediterranean program. Now, she was shocked, and of course, I was thrilled for her, but it was amazing. She had come to the program and before that had told me she literally had tried everything on the market. Every program out there, every tracking app, every type of diet, she's done it all. And she was feeling very discouraged when she started, but she had been curious about the Mediterranean approach. She really didn't understand it that much. She found my program. It was amazing. So she went all in, she committed to the fundamentals, and of course she got these incredible results. But we need to talk about how the math mathed, okay? Because if we're using this principle of you can only burn, let's say one to two pounds of fat per week, well, let's think about this. That means you would need about 25 to 50 weeks, in other words, roughly six months to a year, just to lose up to 50 pounds of fat. So how did she lose 100 pounds in a year? Well, here's the reality: things are not cut and dry in science and nature and biology. So it's not always how it works

How 100 Pounds In A Year Happens

SPEAKER_00 3:48

exactly in real life. But with this client of mine, we noticed something. Her weight loss journey was not linear. It wasn't that she lost two pounds a week times 52 weeks, and that's how she got to 100 pounds off. No, in the beginning, the body, and this is what she experienced and what typically happens, the body tends to lose fat quickly when you start to change things up, especially if you're committing to healthy fundamentals. You can start to burn a lot of fat fast. Maybe at some point you'll kind of get to a stuck spot or you'll hit a plateau. And then you just have to change things up, but you will eventually start to see progress again. So, for example, some weeks what can happen is let's say you lose three pounds this week, then the next week nothing happens. Then some other weeks you actually gain a little weight. Maybe you had a vacation, holidays happened, you got sick, you weren't eating as much, work got stressful, you were hungrier, different seasons of the year depending on where you live. People literally can experience being hungrier in the winter, less hungry in the summer when it's hot. Life happens, right? So we need to be flexible in our thinking about the trajectory of our weight loss. The math overall gives you a ballpark range, but real life is way messier for all the reasons I just said. So we can expect things to often take longer than the calculator will tell us.

Why Progress Comes In Waves

SPEAKER_00 5:10

But here's what nobody tells you about speed. If you lose fat too fast, you'll probably gain it back even faster. So the truth is that the slower you go, the more likely you are to keep it off. This is the part that I feel like nobody understands, but it's always the case. I've been working with people for a while now. And when I'm in my clinical work, in my doctor's office setting, or if I'm working online with people, it's always the same situation. The people who do the slow burns, they end up winning in the long run. So I'll tell you another example. This is a classic situation. A woman who did a very low calorie program, she told me before she ended up working with me, she did this one kind of diet.

Crash Dieting And Weight Regain

SPEAKER_00 5:55

She lost 40 pounds in three months. It was amazing. She loved it, but it was a very restrictive type of a diet. And so she didn't want to keep going with it and ended up gaining back 50 pounds the following year. So think about what happened. She lost 40, then she gained 50. Over the long-term horizon, like 18 months. What happened? Well, she actually gained weight. That's not what we want to be doing. If we're trying to lose weight and we do diet programs and we work our tail off and we're doing all these restrictive things, ultimately we don't want to end up gaining weight in the long run. That's not the goal. Versus she started working with me and we were doing it completely differently than crash dieting, and we gave ourselves a lot more time. So 13 months later, she kept the weight off that she lost. And she had lost, I think in total, about 37 pounds at this point, something like that. So similar to the amount of weight she lost in the crash diet, but the difference is in the long run, she didn't gain back anything. She kept it off. And why is this difference even there? Why do we see this happen? This phenomenon is so classic. Because when we build habits that we can actually live with, we can live with them, right? By definition. So using healthy fundamentals, we can learn how to eat at restaurants, handle holidays, cook meals. And this person that I worked with, that was exactly her experience. She liked holidays again. Christmas was always her favorite. And she had to avoid a lot of her favorite things around Christmas time when she was doing all of her crash dieting. But lo and behold, since we were doing an actual diet together, instead we were just doing healthy fundamentals, things like the Mediterranean approach, she regained her holiday spirit and she could enjoy the things she loved. So that mattered a lot. And I think that that's honestly the best part of it. So slow, I know it feels frustrating at the moment, and nobody wants to hear this answer, but it is actually building the foundation that can last. And the goal with weight loss is to not lose weight to then regain it. That is the worst possible outcome. Instead, we want to lose weight and keep it off. This is why crash diets, extreme restrictions, cutting out entire food groups. Yes, I know that they can help people lose weight. I see it all the time. But in the long run, they're not sustainable approaches. Your body will fight you back hard and you might even be miserable while you're doing it, which is the biggest travesty of them all. This is the number one roadblock I see people have and that I talk to my patients and clients about all the time. This is why I said I have to make this video because this is super common. So, of course, you want to lose weight in a way that you can actually live with for the long term, with forever, ideally. Not just

Fat Loss Versus Scale Weight

SPEAKER_00 8:40

in a way to hit your goal weight super fast. But here's the thing the goal weight is also something that trips up a lot of people. And in fact, I actually recommend against this for people I work with because it misses the main point of keeping the weight off in the first place. Here's what most people struggle to understand. When we say weight loss, we're not just talking about any weight loss. We're talking about fat loss. And there's a difference there. We want to target not just any kind of weight, but what we call body recomposition, allowing our body to burn fat while preserving healthy, lean tissue things like muscle. So, of course, with that being said, you can understand why the scale cannot tell us the whole story.

Body Recomposition With Strength Training

SPEAKER_00 9:25

So I want to tell you about this other person I worked with because I think this drives the point home really well. I worked with a guy once. He came to be super frustrated, and he had been working out very consistently for six months and knew the gym thing. That was really not his problem. He was eating okay and thought he was doing everything right, but he had, quote, only lost 15 pounds and he felt like a failure. And I asked him to kind of walk me through some numbers and we talked details, and he had dropped two dress shirt sizes. And people were asking, hey, you look good, you lost weight. And he was kind of frustrated with that because he, in his mind, thought, I actually did lose a lot of weight, and he was very frustrated about this. The scale really hadn't moved as much as he had expected, but he was actually doing it right. He just needed a little bit of reframing. We talked about this concept of body composition, and it turns out he had changed the percentage of his body fat so nicely while he actually gained a good amount of muscle. Now, he still had some more weight to lose, so he wasn't like donning a six-pack suddenly, and maybe that was why he felt frustrated. But overall, he actually was doing a lot of things really well. And we talked about this. Muscle weighs a lot and you gained muscle. So, of course, the scale didn't move dramatically. It doesn't mean you didn't do things correctly. This is something that we learn from bodybuilders and weightlifters is this concept of body recomposition. And I think when it comes to talking about weight loss as a topic, unfortunately, this is not discussed enough. So I want to make sure you guys understand this. Body recomposition is the phenomenon of sort of recalibrating which type of tissue

Muscle As Your Metabolism Engine

SPEAKER_00 11:10

your body has on its habitus. So if we are increasing what we call lean tissues, things like muscle, that is going to help us in the long run to maintain fat burning because it's actually the engine of our metabolism. It's the thing that helps us burn calories and fat, even when we're at rest, even when we're asleep. Instead, the fat tissue on our body is not really doing anything to benefit us. And in fact, it's actually doing a lot of harm. So the big driver of fat loss is actually having enough tissue, muscle, for example, that's helping boost our metabolism. That's the irony. Muscle that this guy built is what was helping him maintain fat loss. That's why so many people were saying, like, wow, you look so good, all this stuff. But he couldn't understand it because the number on the scale didn't reflect what other people were telling him. That's okay. So recognize if you're strength training while you're losing weight, while you're burning fat, that is the best possible thing. Yes, the scale might move slower for you, but again, we're not really chasing just a number on the scale. We want to think about our long-term health trajectory and how to set ourselves up for success, especially for when we get older, because we need to preserve our muscle mass. This is like so, so important. I cannot convey it enough. Plus, this is often key for protecting against diseases. Now, I'm a doctor, so this is actually what I care about the most is I want to help people protect themselves against, especially all these chronic diseases, heart disease, the number one killer, people getting heart attacks and strokes, super scary stuff, people getting diagnosed with lots of different types of cancer. We know a lot of cancers are actually linked to obesity. People getting high blood pressure, high cholesterol, that's putting them at risk for some of those other diseases, people getting type 2 diabetes. I don't want to make this a boring conversation for you guys. So we're not going to get into the weeds about all of those different disease states, but there's no question about it that having too much fat on our body puts us at risk for a lot of diseases. So the idea is we want to burn the fat tissue as much as we can if we're holding on to too much, if we have a lot of extra fat on our body, so we can protect our health. It is really kind of simple, not necessarily easy to do, but it's simple. This is really, really key that I can't drive home enough.

Getting Started And Next Questions

SPEAKER_00 13:28

So even if you are just starting out and you have been stuck for a while and you've tried these crash diets and you've lost weight but you've regained it and you're not really sure where to start, don't worry. This is literally why I have my healthy After 50 Academy. This is why I make free content online. I want to help you guys get started. If you're not exercising at all and you're scared about this conversation we're having about the muscle tissue, and you don't even understand what you should be doing next, it's okay. There are things you can do, even if you're an absolute beginner, and I have a lot of resources for you. Now, I want to hear your other questions that you have about weight loss. I think this one was kind of a common one of how long does it take? And the long story short is it takes longer than you think, but that's actually a good thing. Drop your questions in the comment section below so I can make more videos answering your weight loss questions with just the full explanation. I'm holding nothing back. And at this point, you're gonna see the timeline for weight loss, for example, is not linear. And that's okay. Weight loss can happen in waves. It can have points where you plateau, it can have points where you feel stuck. And if you're building muscle in the meantime, maybe the scale won't move that fast, but your body can be recalibrating. And that is very powerful. So everybody always wants to know, of course, ah, what foods are the best to eat? Should I eat enough of this? How much of that? Should I avoid this food? I do have a lot of other videos in this series where I'm addressing some of your key questions about specific foods, other weight loss topics, and more. You're gonna love those other videos. I'll see you over there.