There is a fine line between exercising weight management and going on a drastic weight loss program. You know you are in a lot of trouble the moment you mix up the two. While weight management programs serve to make you a healthier person, dramatic weight loss programs could turn out to impair your health in more ways than you could possibly imagine. The more common name for a drastic weight loss program is a “crash diet”. The crash diet appeals to those individuals who are in a desperate need to shed extra pounds of fat from their body or to appear ridiculously thin to comply with society’s standards of beauty.
When you go on a crash diet, you are basically attempting to take a shortcut to a chiseled physique. If there is anything that life teaches you, it is that shortcuts are never the right way to go about doing things. There is a reason why doctors and nutritionists advise people against crash diet. Since they are the health experts, they are well aware of the dangers of crash dieting.
To say that crash dieting is not good for your body would be a horrible understatement. There are documented cases of people developing fatal illnesses due to the consequences of crash dieting. Crash dieting can kill you and turn your body into an irreparable mess. Here’s more information on the adverse effects of crash dieting on the human body:
1) Insufficient Calorie Intake
There is a difference between lowering your calorie intake and forcing yourself to have an insufficient calorie intake. The latter can prove to be a serious health hazard. The human body requires a certain amount of calories to function properly and remain healthy. In the absence of these required quantities of calories, the body will become vulnerable to malfunction and disease. When you go on a crash diet, you are basically taking in a fraction of the calories that you need to live a healthy life. That alone tells you how dangerous crash dieting really is. If you keep up with the crash diet routine, you will end up feeling incredibly weak and fatigued. There is no point in being thinner and more attractive if you can’t even get up from your bed and perform your daily chores.
2) Dehydration
People who go on a crash diet lose a lot of their body’s weight during the initial days of dieting. This drastic weight loss can be attributed to a significant loss of water from your body. Letting go of the water from your body can place you in a state of severe illness. Water is needed to carry out countless cellular functions inside your body. The shortage of water leads to dehydration. If you continue to remain dehydrated, then you are likely to end up in the hospital sooner rather than later.
3) Deadly Exercises
It is said that regular exercise sessions hold the key to a person’s fitness. This is true for everyone other than the person who is crash dieting. Strenuous exercise accompanied by crash dieting is a deadly combination. Since your body and vital organs are being deprived of an adequate supply of nutrients, the physical exercise will exert great stress on them. You could say that your vital organs will “run out of breath”. In certain cases, this can lead to permanent organ damage as the body starts burning muscle tissue to replenish the energy stock. Heavy exercise during periods of crash dieting could be disastrous for your heart.
4) Decline in Mental Health
People who are on a crash diet tend to constantly crave food and think about food. Doing this every single day can force a person to develop anxiety and severe sadness. The sadness can soon evolve into depression if there are other factors involved. The lack of calorie intake can also compromise a person’s concentration, memory, and overall brain function. Underperforming at work/school and having an inactive social life are traits of the crash dieter.
5) Vicious Cycle
If you are obese, then you should definitely concentrate on losing those extra pounds as soon as you possibly can. However, crash dieting should not be your medium to regaining your health. This is because crash diets are not sustainable in the long term. You simply cannot stay on this diet for any longer than a few months. If you do, then you bear the risk of ending up in the hospital with a deadly illness. Crash dieting is a mentally tiring, emotionally draining and physically unhealthy way of life. Once you get fed up with the inadequate food consumption, you will go back to your old ways.
This will lead to dramatic weight gain that will prompt you to crash diet once again. Eventually, you will be trapped in a vicious cycle and you will be no further away from obesity then you were at the start.