Crash dieting fads: the skinny on them
In our image-oriented world, crash dieting fads come and go with the seasons: they promise fast results and seem to have a great deal of followers who earnestly attest to their effectiveness, some of them being celebrities and stars that help them become a trend.
Most of the time, these diets rely on a “scientific” explanation for their efficacy, singing the praises of a determinate food or demonizing a group of them. They offer a straightforward plan for weight loss and promote it as the ideal or maybe the only way to lose weight.
Enormously reducing your food intake makes your body drop pounds indeed; however, most of this weight is actually water weight, and as such it is easily regained once you go off the diet. Fat is harder to shift: it takes 3500 kcal to burn 1 pound of fat, which in turn requires a consistent caloric deficit (typically it is recommended that you try to lose only 1-2 pounds per week to ensure you’re targeting fatty tissue and not just fluids).
Therefore, any extremely low-calorie diet will yield short-term results if you stick to it – this being the first hurdle to deal with when it comes to crash diets, since consuming so few calories throughout the day alters your hormone levels and can cause mood swings, besides setting the stage for greater caloric intake down the road. They may also be impractical or require that you sacrifice social gatherings due to a lack of “approved” food options.
The kind of deprivation these diets foster takes its toll psychologically, especially if it’s extended in time, leading people to cheat on the established plan and gain weight that they then try to lose by depriving themselves even more, creating a vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting that most of the time results in an even higher amount of weight than at the beginning of their weight loss attempts.
Eating a limited group of foods or a limited amount of them also leads to low nutrient intake, which alters your metabolism and creates essential vitamin and mineral deficiencies that will later on damage your hair, skin and nails, and may cause low bone density or anemia due to calcium and iron deficiencies respectively, among many other side effects. Furthermore, the reduction in potassium and sodium can upset the balance of these minerals that are key to normal nerve and muscle function. So what should you do if you want to lose weight quickly and keep it off? First of all, you have to accept that keeping the weight off requires lifestyle changes and your diet cannot be the same it was when you began putting on weight; if you had a poor diet or a sedentary life, going back to it will create the same results. After this, you can look for a plan that reduces calories but fulfils your nutritional requirements. You can enlist the help of a nutritionist to find out your specific physical needs and how to best tailor your meals to meet them.