Crash diets can decrease your metabolism, decrease your bone density, reduce your muscle mass, weaken your immune system, and cause severe mood swings. They can also cause hormonal imbalances, dehydration, adversely affect electrolyte and blood-sugar levels, and cause extreme fatigue. The more crash diets you go on throughout your life, the more you will experience these damaging side effects. More crash diets = more damage!
Crash diets will also affect your emotional and mental well-being. You may become irritable and obsessed with dieting. You do not want food to become your enemy. You should avoid any diets that cause an unhealthy relationship with food. You do not want to get into a guilt-overeating cycle of dieting, as it will sabotage your efforts and may cause depression. The more you deprive yourself of food, the more you will desire it. You will focus on it and think about it all the time. Extremely restrictive diets backfire because they actually make you crave the foods you're depriving yourself of. We recommend losing no more than 2-3 pounds per week. At this rate, you will still be able to eat the foods you love, in moderation.
When you're on a crash diet, your body thinks it’s starving and therefore, holds on to every calorie you eat. The little that you do eat goes into storage as fat because your body does not know when you're going to eat again. Even worse, the longer and more often you stay on an overly-restrictive diet, the more fat you store. What’s the solution to this vicious cycle? Eat more healthy foods more often. Eating small meals five or six times a day will stimulate your metabolism.
There are many physical and psychological reasons why crash dieting doesn't work. Even if you do manage to lose weight on an extreme diet, it’s mostly water weight that will come back faster than it came off. The fact is, it’s impossible to stay on a crash diet and it’s illogical to make temporary changes in our eating habits when we want permanent weight loss.
By cutting down your food intake too much, you deprive your body of natural nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, protein, carbohydrates, etc. We all know what will happen when the human body lacks nutrients, the risks of getting ill are higher. This is aside from generally feeling weak throughout the crash diet period.
In crash dieting, you are slowing down your metabolism, which is what allows you to burn fat and calories effectively and efficiently. You are doing the exact opposite of what you set out to do. You may not be gaining weight, but you aren't burning fat and calories either. When you eat normally again, you will probably gain some extra weight since your metabolism has been slowed down.
You might notice that you weigh less during your crash diet, but don't mistake this as losing fat. You are actually losing muscle mass and water weight. Losing muscle is not ideal because muscle helps to burn fat and calories, which increases your metabolism. Lean muscle mass helps you burn calories even while at rest, not to mention that everyone wants strong, firm muscles.
To sum it up, crash dieting will make you lose weight, but not the weight you want to lose, which is excess fat. It's an unhealthy way of losing weight and can start "yo-yo" dieting (lose weight, gain more, lose again, and so on). For the benefit of your health, you should never resort to crash dieting to achieve your weight-loss goals.
