Dump your crash diet right now. It is a proven fact that dieting doesn't work. It never has, and it never will. The sheer numbers prove this. How many diets have there been over the last 20 years – 50,100? Readers are constantly plagued by enticing covers that promise "to take off 5 kilos in two weeks." If diets really worked would there be a need for an unending chain of new ones?
Have you ever wondered why diets don’t succeed? The answer is quite simple. What do you think about when you're on a diet? You are usually thinking about what you are going to eat when the ordeal is finally over. How can you possibly succeed on your diet when all you are thinking about is food? Depriving yourself is not the answer to healthy permanent weight loss. It usually causes you to binge later on, which complicates the problem. Deprivation and binging becomes a vicious cycle, and that's just one of the many problems with dieting.
Another reason is that dieting is a temporary measure, therefore, the results too are temporary. No wonder dieters are often heard complaining that a particular diet didn’t work for them. Confusion and frustration are rampant among dieters. Most of the diets contradict one another. One popular diet says to eat more proteins and less carbs. Another one says to eat more carbohydrates and very little protein. Can both be right? Yet another says to eat a small portion of whatever you like, but be sure to exercise. The most dangerous of all is the latest fad diet that substitutes drugs, supplements and nutritional powders for real food, in the absence of strict medical supervision.
If you are on one of these crazy diets, you may suffer from negative nitrogen balance (NNB). This means that your body is losing more Nitrogen than it is taking in. When this happens your body loses weight but not necessarily fat. During NNB, your muscles, kidneys, liver and other organs become smaller. Losing these kinds of tissue is dangerous as these are irreplaceable. Besides, someone who has maintained NNB through insufficient eating over a long period of time is more prone to disease and infection. NNB is a warning against starving yourself or experimenting with diets and formulas that are imbalanced and don’t provide your body with adequate nutrition
If a friend says, "I’ve lost five Kgs," ask five Kgs of what? Fat, muscle or water? Losing fat is good. Losing water or muscle is bad. The minute you drink water that you've lost, you regain the weight. Losing muscle is even worse. When you lose muscle your metabolism slows down. Why? Muscle mass is your body's furnace -- the more muscle you have, the more calories your body burns, whether you're sitting on a couch or working out in the gym. On crash diets, the body will go to muscle mass for nutrients before fat tissue. So even though you're eating less food, your body is burning fewer calories because it has less muscle to burn calories. And people wonder why they regain weight so quickly after dieting?
To prove you can't lose 10 pounds in 10 days, let's do some maths. A pound of body fat represents 3,500 calories. To lose one pound of fat, you must burn 3,500 more calories than you eat. For example, if you weigh 170 pounds and are a moderately active person, you burn 2,500 a day. If your diet contains only 1,500 calories, you'd have an energy deficit of 1,000 calories a day. In a week's time that would add up to a 7,000-calorie deficit, or two pounds of real fat. In 10 days, the accumulated deficit would represent nearly three pounds of lost body fat. Even if you ate nothing at all for 10 days and maintained your usual level of activity, your caloric deficit would add up to 25,000 calories (2,500 calories a day times 10). At 3,500 calories per pound of fat, that's still only seven pounds of lost fat. So if you want to lose fat, and that's all you should want to lose, the loss must be gradual -- from one to two pounds per week.
Now that you are convinced about the demerits of crash dieting. We, do have some good news for you. Weight Loss is possible provided it is undertaken in a sustainable fashion.
Most people who try any restrictive diet almost always regain the weight. Often they gain more. Every fad diet is nutritionally unbalanced in one way or another, and some are downright dangerous. Your body craves for carbohydrates for a good reason -- it's our body's primary energy source. Lose your main source of fuel and you can't think or move easily. It is natural that if you want to shed between 15-40 kilos, you’d want to do it in the quickest possible way. So you convince yourself that going on a crash diet will accomplish your goal in the shortest time. The only problem is that you may end up crashing your system, causing serious damage to one or more of your vital organs.
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