Given an integral polyhedron P subset of R-n and a rational polyhedron Q subset of R-n containing the same integer points as P, we investigate how many iterations of the Chvatal-Gomory closure operator have to be performed on Q to obtain a polyhedron contained in the affine hull of P. We show that if P contains an integer point in its relative interior, then such a number of iterations can be bounded by a function depending only on n. On the other hand, we prove that if P is not full-dimensional and does not contain any integer point in its relative interior, then no finite bound on the number of iterations exists.