There is very little people who hasn’t tried losing weight fast, too fast through fad diets, fasting, overly restricting their caloric intake, and other such attempts at starving themselves into thinness.
There are two main problems with these approaches to losing weight.
First, they seriously jeopardize our health.
Second, such dieting are fundamentally counterproductive.
Ultimately, they don’t work:
- we loose fat, yes, but also a large measure of muscle
- we unintentionally lower our metabolism
- we set the stage for gaining fat increasingly faster in the future when we come off the diet, and thereby get caught up in perpetual dieting
- we receive inadequate nutrients in imbalanced combination
- we drain the entire body from energy
Fasting and very low calorie diets (diets below 500 calories) cause a loss of nitrogen and potassium in the body, a loss which is believed to trigger a mechanism in the body that causes us to hold on to our fat stores and to turn to muscle protein for energy instead.
Don’t use fad diets to loose weight!
No system on severe food deprivation is wise way to loose weight. Even on the total fast, because you’re loosing muscle and altering your metabolism, you’ll actually be loosing less weight in the end than if you ate 100o – 1500 calories of protein and good quality carbohydrate rich foods every day combined with exercise.
For example, weight lost on high fat, high protein diets like Atkins Diet is primarily water loss, and even that water is lost largely during the first few weeks. This weight is quickly gained back.