Why a Crash Diet is Actually an Unsafe Choice

If you are looking to lose a large amount of weight very quickly, the temptation to go on a crash diet can be significant.  After all, many of these diets seem to offer fast results.  The truth of the matter, however, is that a crash diet can wreak havoc on your body and health, and even foil any future attempts you make to lose weight.  At best, crash diets will lead to more weight-gain long-term. At worst, they can mess up your heath permanently.

Crash diets work by severely limiting the amount of food you take in and offer to your body as fuel.  While burning more calories than you take in is the secret to losing weight, most crash diets require you to eat less fuel than your body requires to function.  This is counter-productive, as at this point you stop fighting Fat and start fighting Nature – and Nature will win every time. Your body has many millions of years of evolution to protect it from starvation – in these (comparatively) affluent times, a diet is not something your body understands on a biological level.  it is programmed to preserve life, to hoard fuel, always anticipating a harsh winter or a drought. A diet causes all these hard-wired built-in instincts to kick in. If you body stops receiving adequate nutrition, even short term, it basically assumes you’re starving to death, and does all kinds of things to save every precious calorie – such as slowing down your metabolism (making you feel cold by drawing heat away from your skin to your core), or hoarding weight, or even – in the case of long-term starvation such as anorexia – growing more hair on your body to preserve heat, and cannibalizing its own bone, muscle and tissue to ‘burn’ to provide life-giving heat. 

That’s the science begin it –  how does that affect you, and your desperate need to get into that gorgeous dress before the prom/ office party/ wedding? The trick in long term, permanent weight loss is not to starve your body, but to give it enough nutrition and calories to keep it running, but not enough calories to store.  if you constantly crash diet, you’re in essence ‘programming’ your body to believe you are living in a time of scarce food, and with each diet the body learns to become more and more efficient at hoarding fat – to your annoyance.  Seen in this light, you’ll see how even one crash diet can significantly damage your future ability to lose weight.

In addition to this, any crash diet selections may also include diuretics or dangerous high-intensity workouts that can actually create chemical and electrolyte imbalances in the body.  This can not only affect your mood, but may put dangerous strain on your liver, kidneys, brain, and heart.  To put it simply, a crash diet is harmful to your entire body, period.

If you really need to lose weight quickly, then you need to get started on a healthy regimen long before the time you need the weight to be gone.  So plan ahead for the sake of your health.  There are many online calculators you can use to work out roughly the number of calories your body needs each day to function, but then work out to ensure that you are still burning off more than you take in each day.  This will ensure that your body has the proper nutrients and hydration required to properly function, while offering you the ability to lose weight in a way that is entirely healthy, safe, natural, and sustainable.

A crash diet is a temporary solution with dangerous side effects.  Changing your routine slowly but effectively allows you to lose weight safely and above all permanently, without the significant health risks a crash diet presents.