This article addresses a simple, unavoidable, and in cases of extreme resistance painful fact, that being: why crash diets don’t work.
Despite what bright, loud, attention-grabbing ads from the TV to the magazine racks tout about so many pounds lost in so many days, the weight lost usually comes back in no time at all.
Weight lost quickly is most often water and carbohydrate (glycogen) loss, not fat. The body’s interpretation of this water and carbohydrate loss is that you are starving, and therefore it slows down its metabolic rate, in effect to help you live longer on less energy.
When you do ultimately start eating again (as, by definition, all crash diets end) the body believes the food emergency is over and determines its next best way to serve your longevity is to store this food you’re putting into it in case such a food emergency should arise again.
To put it another way, the effect of a crash diet is to keep the body always in a crisis management mode, rather than help sustain a healthy body weight. This in itself is bad enough, but it gets worse.
Glycogen loss is muscle loss, and since muscles are a critical part of maintaining an active metabolism, with less muscle, our bodies burn less calories. And when we burn less calories, we gain more weight.
To lose weight for good, lose weight slowly. Try to keep it down to only a pound or two each week. It may not feed your need for immediate gratification, but you can keep yourself excited and committed to the process by knowing that the results you achieve will be lasting.
To lose 1 pound of weight, equal to about 3,500 calories, find a way to cut out 250 calories from each day’s diet and find a way to burn 250 calories each day in exercise. That’s 500 calories per day: half in diet, half via exercise. The result: 1 pound shed each week. Double the formula for 2 pounds per week. But stop there.
If you do this, you’ll notice the program you set for yourself is actually quite reasonable and easy to stick to. Discipline isn’t hard when the steps you’re disciplining yourself to take are practical and realistic.
Take the concept of the crash diet out of your vocabulary and replace it with a far easier, more enjoyable, and more enduringly effective form of weight loss: behavior modification. Simple shifts in one or two behaviors can have dramatic and lasting effects on your weight.
Crash diets achieve false and fleeting results. They lead to frustration, disappointment, and despair. And in creating a feedback loop of a chronic stress-response in the body, can even be deemed dangerous. Stay away from them, for your own good.
Labels: Diet
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