"Crash Diet" A Dangerous Weight Loss Plan

Crash Diets or the Yoyo Diets

In trying to lose weight fast, a lot of people sort to “crash diets” or sometimes called as the “yo-yo diets.” This kind of diet plan forces you to drastically cut down on your calorie intake. This is not a good option when you want a long-term diet plan since it basically encourages you to deprive yourself from food. Can you live with that? Crash diets are dangerous. Its effect doesn’t last long since you cannot stand its restrictive approach.

During crash diets, your body slows its metabolism since it receives extremely low amount of calories. Since your body adjusts to its metabolism, it now burns fewer calories to supply the energy need of your bodily actions. If this continues, you are likely to get fat easily when you eat a little more after your diet. Your body’s metabolism stays slow for few months or even years even after your crash diet since you conditioned it to burn fewer calories.

So, before you get carried away by some unreliable testimonials that you find in the net or watch on television, read the consequences of this diet on the succeeding pages.

Health Risks of Crash Diets

Depriving yourself from food like what crash diets aim to teach you can cause life threatening ailments. These ailments can be long-term or short term.

Mental Health Problems

Crash diets are extremely hard on you both physically and emotionally. Aside from causing severe food cravings, you also get frequent mood swing. Crash dieting also makes you more irritable and depressed. This type of diet plan is also associated to developing mental problems like anorexia and bulimia.

Nutrition and Vitamins Deficiency

Because of the nature of this diet, you will not be able to get the right amount of vitamins and nutrients needed by your body. This results to malnutrition and some vitamin deficiencies like:

• Anemia or iron deficiency
• vitamin B12 deficiency
• potassium and sodium deficiency

These side effects caused by crash diets may lead to serious health problems. Anemia or iron deficiency can cause damaging effects to your heart due to lack of healthy red blood cells. You also get easily tired even with light physical activities since there is not enough oxygen getting into your blood. Deficiency in potassium and sodium may cause high blood pressure or worse heart attacks.

Organ Damage

Extreme low amount of calorie intake as proposed by crash diets lead to serious damage to your vital organs such as the heart, kidney, liver and pancreas. This is due to the reason that when your body needs energy to function and there is not enough, it actually burns the muscle tissues that make up these organs.

Osteoporosis

Since you deprive yourself from nutrients, you tend to get inadequate amount of calcium which is essential to your bones. This leads to osteoporosis, a bone disease that cause it to be brittle and prone to breakage. There are cases of crash dieters that experience bone injuries on hips and wrists due to osteoporosis.