Goal sabotage 53 to lose a kilogram( just over two pounds) every two weeks. Some of you, particularly men, will find this happens easily, especially initially, some will find it happens more slowly. In my experience of looking at many weight-loss programs over the years, whatever you have to do to lose weight faster than this will not be sustainable for the longer term. What you may not realize is that the first goal we all need to have is to stop gaining weight! What people often seem to forget in their quest to lose weight is that if we do nothing, most of us will slowly gain weight over our life. We are on the train to being even more overweight with every year that goes by. Just getting off this train is a significant achievement! In the‘ Course of Weight with Ageing’ graph you can see why a weight loss of 5 % is so important if we can maintain it. While it is hard to say what our weight might have been if we had not gotten off the train, a 10 to 20 % difference for most people seems a fair estimate. In a large, very well designed study of almost 50,000 American nurses, they found that the average weight gain over an eight-year period was 5.8 kilograms or nearly 13 pounds! 5 % Weight 15 % Course of Weight with Ageing Age