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Potential Effects of Crash Dieting on Health and Psychology
It’s nearly bikini season. Time to get rid of the excess weight you’ve been
carrying in your abdomen and buttocks. The solution? A diet where you lose
1-2 pounds per week? No, the crash diet! Lose 5, 8 or more pounds right
away. Look great in that tiny bikini. Crash diets do work! Providing, of
course, that you have the will power to starve yourself and you don’t expect
the results to last very long. So, what’s the harm? You’ve lost 6 pounds of
fat in one week and you’re on the way to fitting into that bikini. Well, you
haven’t really lost that much fat. You’ve mostly lost water. As you reduced
your carbohydrate intake, you reduced your body’s supply of glycogen and
eliminated some of its water. The fat is still there. Resume eating
normally, and you’ll regain the water weight.
Nutritionists recommend a minimum daily intake of 1200 calories. When you
drastically reduce this number or stop eating, you deprive your body of
vitamins, carbohydrates, proteins and nutrients that it needs to sustain
itself. While low-fat diets may be ok, a fat free diet is not. Your body
requires 30% of your daily calories to be from fats. If it doesn’t get the
nutrition it needs, your body reacts by becoming more efficient at storing
fat. Your metabolism slows down to conserve what little nutrition it’s
getting. When you start eating again, the body continues to conserve energy
for quite some time. As you eat more food, you will gain weight at a faster
rate.
Drastically reducing or stopping eating puts you at risk. Crash diets are
extremely dangerous for your heart, kidneys, liver, and brain because you
lose lean tissue around them. If you don’t eat enough, your body will
actually burn the muscle tissue of the organs themselves to provide your
brain with sufficient energy to function. This puts you at risk for liver
and kidney failure, heart attack and stroke and even death. Crash diets
cause extreme food cravings, causing you to gain weight. You may become
dizzy or uncoordinated. You will probably sleep more as your body conserves
energy. You may develop iron deficiency anemia, vitamin B12 or potassium and
sodium deficiency. The latter two play an important role in regulating the
way that your heart beats. If their levels become too low, you could have a
heart attack.
Long-term crash dieters frequently suffer from osteoporosis. Crash diets
severely limit calcium intake. As a result, calcium leaches out of the bones
in your body, making them brittle. As a result, many crash dieters may later
in life suffer
broken hips, wrists and other bones. You may lose your hair, have brittle
nails or your flesh may become grey. Your hair loss could continue as long
as six months after you resume eating normally again.
What about the psychology involved in crash diets? Let’s stick with bikini
season. It is our motivation to lose weight quickly. You buy the tiny
bikini, tell yourself that you’ll fit into it by the beginning of summer,
hang it up where you can see it as a reminder of what you’re working
towards, and reduce or stop eating. Everything should work out as planned,
but it usually doesn’t. Why?
We are creatures of habit. We like our routines, especially when it comes to
food. Trying to suddenly adopt a new, stricter diet is hard because it is
not part of our routine. It may be too different for us to adapt to it. If
we can see instant results, then we’ll have more impetus to stick to the
diet. If we don’t see the results we expected, most of us would simply put
the bikini in the bottom of the drawer and go back to our normal routines.
Like it or not, we can’t change our eating habits overnight. Crash diets,
moreover, may make you feel irritable, depressed or lead to eating disorders
like anorexia and
bulimia.
Dr. Catti Moss, spokeswoman for the Royal College of General Practitioners,
summed up the potential effects of crash dieting. She called it "a dangerous
approach” and noted that people who crash diet are “more susceptible to many
health problems, and they seem to have a reduced life expectancy because of
this.” The key to weight loss is proper nutrition and exercise. You won’t
get into that tiny bikini sooner, but when you do you’ll be a lot healthier.
References
Daily Mail (UK). (11 December 2007). Festive Slimmers put Health at Risk
with Crash Diets before Christmas. URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/dietfitness.html?in_article_id=501241&in_page_id=1798.
Epigee Women’s Health. (2008). Crash and Burn: Yo-Yo and crash Dieting.
Hearthstone Communications Limited. URL: http://www.epigee.org/fitness/crash_diets.html.
Goodwin, Dan. (2007). Creative Health For Life: Why Short Term Crash Diets
Don't Work!. EzineArticles.Com. URL: http://ezinearticles.com/?Creative-Health-For-Life:-Why-Short-Term-Crash-Diets-Dont-Work!&id=441893
Mosing, Lisa. (2006) A Crash Course in Crash Dieting. Lifescript.Com. URL:
http://www.lifescript.com/channels/food_nutrition/Nutrition_Tips/fad_diet_fiascos.asp?page=1.
Nuble, Charlene. (2006). The Reasons Crash Diets Can Lead to Hair Loss.
EzineArticles.Com. URL: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Reasons-Crash-Diets-Can-Lead-to-Hair-Loss&id=349462
Urell, Bill. (2005) Sweetie, Does This Dress Make me Look Fat? The Crash
Diet. Ezine Articles.Com. URL: http://ezinearticles.com/?Sweetie,-Does-This-Dress-Make-Me-Look-Fat?-The-Crash-Diet&id=80475.
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