Lets talk about extreme fat loss drugs and programs.

You see a lot of ads about some seemingly amazing programs become more and more popular - especially on the internet. You see someone claim that you can lose double digit pounds overnight, and it certainly gets your attention. But how safe is it?

Well doctors and the American College of Sports Medicine state that you should only lose a maximum of 2 pounds per week for safe, healthy fat loss.

Why is it unsafe to lose more than that?

Well the reason really comes back to people not understanding the difference between weight loss and fat loss. If you lose 12 pounds, but 8 of those pounds was due to water loss, then not only is that very dangerous, it's very temporary. When start to re-hydrate, you'll find yourself putting those pounds back on.

Its been proven that its almost impossible to lose more than 2 pounds of fat a week, without losing significant muscle or water, two very important components of permanent fat loss. Losing either muscle or water actually depresses your metabolism rate. So long term, you are going to put those pounds right back on.

The only time you might see yourself losing over 2 pounds of fat per week is if you are very overweight or obese. In this case when you start on a targeted fat loss program you might even see up to 3 pounds a week fat loss.

Now, you might be concerned and think that 2 pounds per week is too slow. I know you just want to lose all the fat right now, but if you don't use what's proven to work, you'll just keep following this cycle until you're right back where you started. And I'm sure you're sick of that happening.

But take a look at this from a different point of view by answering this question:-

How long did it take you to put the excess weight you have on your body?

It didn't happen overnight. It happened because of consistent habits that caused you to put on more and more fat.

All you have to do now is reverse that trend. You have to form lifestyle habits that sheds pounds. And in a year's time, that's 52 weeks, you could be up to 104 pounds lighter (that's if you have that much to lose). Now of course that's looking at it simplistically - it gets much harder to lose fat as you develop your body - unless you know what to do.

No matter, if you look at it like that, its not so slow is it? And the best thing is that if you follow this site about how to achieve that, that will be all permanent fat loss (not water or muscle loss). That's because you'll have the lifestyle habits to keep that fat off for the rest of your life.

You may think that you are going to have motivation problems and stay on task for so long. You may want to check our article on weight loss motivation tips. They take a slight different spin on 'traditional' motivation.

So our tip is that you make sure that you are wary of any program that claims to give you quicker weight loss than 2 pounds per week consistently. If you do decide to go for an extreme type program, realize that its probably going to be temporary because you might face some serious health consequences down the line.