Understand crash diet a little bit better and take care of your body
Nowadays everything must go faster, you need a faster phone, faster laptop which starts up in 2 seconds, you want to earn money faster, faster cars, faster planes and… faster losing weight.
You search the internet, ‘how to lose 5 kilos in a week?’ and in the google results you will find so called ‘crash diet’ where you drink loads of water and lower your calorie intake to 1000 or even 700 calories a day! But will it work?
Yes, you could lose an X amount of weight and maybe reach the goal of having your ideal weight, BUT what looks fine from the outside, does not mean its fine on the inside!
Crash Diet – Does It Work?
To understand crash diet a little bit better, you must understand that on average women need daily 2000 calories and men 2500 calories for the body to operate properly. When your calorie intake is higher than necessary, your body will store the calories as fats. And when you start crash dieting your body will still need the number of calories to operate but now it does not get enough calories from eating them. So, your body will now look internally where it can get its energy from, which is usually in exciting fats or even muscles. This means you will lose weight. But, when you keep this up for a long time, your body will adjust and will use less calories to keep your most important body parts working. You will start feeling lazy, hungry and quickly irritated during the day.
Alongside those effects, the intake of important minerals, vitamins, proteins and other important nutrients is lower, which means your body can not fully function properly and it will weaken your immune system.
Furthermore, when you have achieved your ideal weight and you start eating normally again, your body is still in the state of using less calories. This means you will have a surplus of calorie intake even if you eat the average advised number of calories, these calories will then be turned into fats again.
After a certain amount of time you will be back or even worse than where you started from and you will want to start dieting again. This phenomenon is call the Yo-yo effect. You quickly lose weight, and then gain it again. If you continue yo-yo-ing, it can damage blood vessels, the shrinking and growing can cause micro tears which could be the foundations of atherosclerosis or other heart diseases!
Crash diet can be dangerous
What I am trying to say, is that crash diet can be dangerous, and that losing weight needs to happen in a healthy manner! Furthermore, dieting isn’t the key to success, lifestyle changing, even if it is small changes, is the key to success. Now, you don’t have to go into full ‘go green or go home’ mode, but by changing just a few things such as reducing the amount of sugars in your current diet, increasing the amount of healthy, natural foods such as vegetables and fruits and adding some physical activity (even 1 hour a week has positive effects), you can already make some progress!
Take care of your body, because you only have one and you will need it for the rest of your life!
