crash diets

Crash diets are not a solution to weight loss. It involves drastically cutting back on the amount of calories and fat that you take in on a daily basis. Thousands of men and women follow crash diets every year in the hopes that they will lose a significant amount of weight in a very short period of time. However, crash dieting is an extremely dangerous way to go about losing weight, and can lead to yo-yo dieting and a number of serious health problems.

What’s happened to your body?

Rapid weight loss is the result of the body eating up its limited store of a certain carbohydrate called glycogen. This use of glycogen makes the body lose water; thus, the appearance of losing weight. But the truth is, the body is not losing any of its body fat, what you aimed to lose in the first place.

Health risks

- Crash diets are extremely hard on your overall mental and emotional health. You may find yourself feeling more irritable or depressed than usual when you are on a crash diet. Crash diet behaviours can be a slippery slope to acquiring an eating disorder like anorexia and bulimia.
- Long-term crash dieting can result in serious nutritional deficiencies, as a result of eating a poor variety of foods. Potassium and sodium deficiency is particularly dangerous. They play an important role in regulating the way that your heart beats, and if they levels become low, you could suffer from a heart attack.
- Crash diets are extremely dangerous for your vital organs. If your calorie intake becomes low enough, your body will even begin to burn the muscle tissue that makes up your actual organs in order to provide your brain with sufficient energy to function. This can result in serious health problems.

Yo-Yo effect

As you begin with crash dieting, protein from your muscles is being used for energy and you also lose muscle mass. Your metabolism (the rate at which you burn calories) is directly related to the amount of muscle you have, and your metabolism begins to slow down. Your body can maintain this decreased metabolism for a number of months, or even years, after a serious crash diet. The moment you give up on the crash diet everything will bounce back with a vengeance, because your slow metabolism can’t process the amount of incoming calories and, therefore, stores them as fat.