Crash Diet

by dave[ie]

What is crash diet?
Crash diet is a diet which involves restricting the calories intake in the food. It is done to achieve a quick or rapid weight loss. It is different from starvation as in crash diet involves taking (eating or drinking) of minimum calories required by the body. It is not meant to last for more than a week.

Crash diet should be limited as much as you can. As it involves minimizing of calories intake in the food so the amount of fat you take on daily basis also reduces. So your weight may reduce quickly but may professionals and dieticians recognize this as a very risky way of losing extra weight. Crash diet can be paired with starvation diet and other quick weight loss methods like taking diet pills and extreme exercise routines that can be harmful for the body.

Do crash diet work?
It will do wonders for you in first week. You will lose a lot of weight. Men and women have found that they have lost around 5 pounds or even more during first few days. But this weight loss can be considered as ideal or true weight loss as most of the weight that you lose is water weight. Most of the glycogen (type of glucose) gets burned to due to low calorie diet and absorbs all the excess fluid in the body.

Also the weight loss won’t last for a long time. As days will go on the amount of weight loss will decrease and you will reach a point where your weight won’t be reducing any further. Most of the crash diet people are known to gain all the weight back as the most weight lost in water mass. Also your weight may also fluctuate a lot due to continuously changing diet.

What effect it have on the body?
Every individual will have different metabolism (rate at which body burns calories). During crash diet the body will adjust itself as it will be receiving low amount of calories. So the body will adjust to burn very few calories to perform all the necessary body functions. The body has the ability to maintain this decreased metabolism for number of months or even years. So the body will gain weight even if you take fewer calories more as your metabolism rate has reduced a lot.

What are the Health Risks of It?
It will have both short-term and long-term health problems. These problems can be either mental or physical.

Mental or Emotional Health Problems
It has deep effect on mental or emotional health. Crash diet will leave cause you extreme food hungry. You are more like to have conflicting mood when crash dieting. You will also tend to be more bad-tempered or depressed than usual. It will also have serious mental health disorders like eating disorder anorexia and bulimia.

Nutritional Deficiency
It will make you restrictive and you will be unable to eat healthy food. It will cause nutritional deficiency like iron deficiency anemia, vitamin B12 deficiency, potassium & sodium deficiency. Out of these potassium & sodium deficiency is most dangerous as these are responsible for proper nerve and muscle function. They are important for regulating heart beats and low potassium & sodium levels can cause heart attack.

Vital Organ Damage
It can damage your vital organs which rely on energy from carbohydrate intake. The crash diet causes you to reduce the calorie intake in the body. This can lead you to have live failure, kidney failure, and heart attack or even suffer a stroke.

Osteoporosis
Long-term crash dieters suffer from this disease osteoporosis that causes your bones to become extremely fragile. This happens due to low intake of calcium in the body.

Avoiding Crash Diet:
It is better to lose weight by proper methods than to crash diet. You should speak with your doctor or dietitian before deciding your weight loss program. It is important that you don’t reduce intake of calories too fast as it will have bad effect on the body. Choose healthier food option rather than junk food and see your weight will reduce in proper way and not affect your body at all.