Whether you’re thinking losing a couple pounds or more than 10 pounds, crash diets aren’t the way. You’ve probably come across several different crash diets because they seem to be everywhere. Some are old wives’ tales and others are found on legitimate magazine. They all, however, are ridiculous. For example, you can lose X amount of pounds in so many days by drinking cranberry juice all day or eat three bananas three times a day.
Crash diets are appealing because people unhappy with their weight want to lose it fast. So they think literally starve themselves. Sure the pounds disappear in the beginning. A person may even achieve their weight goals like losing 10 pounds in one week. However, hidden dangers exist when you try these types of diets.
1. Loss of muscle weight. It’s not normal to lose weight that fast. Thus, losing weight quickly also means that you’re losing muscle. Losing muscle isn’t a good thing.
2. Crash diets slow down your metabolism. When you try to eliminate pounds quickly your metabolism responds. It doesn’t speed up, but slows down. It reserves the energy stored as fat. Thus, once you stop eating or change your eating habits drastically, your metabolism goes into self-preservation mode. It looks toward the fat stored in your muscles to nutrients and calories that it’s not getting from food.
3. Nutrient deprivation. The diets deprive your body of important nutrients like protein, vitamins, carbohydrates and minerals. Therefore, with the combination of lack of natural nutrients and food increases your risk of become ill. For example, you may catch colds quicker because of a lower immune system. Regardless of if you become ill or not, you definitely feel weaker. You just don’t have the energy.
4. Crash diets actually cause you to gain more weight. Typically, you only stay on the diet for a short time. Once you return to eating normally, your body craves a higher amount of calories than before. For example, you may experience being hungry all the time. Most of the time, people think their metabolism is speeding up and they’re losing weight. However, it’s not. You’re actually gaining the weight you previous lost because your metabolism is still operating as slow as it did when you were dieting.
You may not want to hear it, but these types of diets aren’t the way to go. You can call them whatever you want crash diets or fad diets. Whatever name you use, the results are still the same. For a short time you lose weight. In the long term, you run the risk of succumbing to the hidden dangers associated with this type of dieting.
So the next time you look in the mirror, pick a New Year’s resolution or think you need to lose some pounds, consider alternatives. You can still diet, but do it healthy. Use a combination of exercising and eating healthier. You want to turn your metabolism into a fat burning machine that keeps weight off, not a sluggish machine that helps you pack on the pounds.