In my previous article we discussed your weight goal and how to find it. We also touched on the need for diet and exercise combined to lose weight. In this article we will discuss crash dieting and why it may actually cause you to gain weight in the long run.
In the United States crash dieting is a multi billion dollar industry. You see the ads on television each and everyday trying to sell you the latest diet supplement or quick loss program. Do these programs work? Absolutely! And these marketers get rave reviews from their customers. At least initially they do, but you find that frequently these customers gain their weigh back as well as more weight.
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A lot of your initial weight loss is water loss. You diet and lose 10 pounds in one week and you feel great. All is well in the world and then you stop losing weight. What has happened? Your body has adjusted to your low calorie intake and is now shutting down. It has decreased your metabolic rate to preserve itself. And the body will burn the lean muscle mass to preserve the stores of calories it needs to survive and those calories are in the fat stores.
Another thing that happens with the quick weight loss diets is that your body burns the lean body mass and thus needs fewer calories to sustain your weight. Let's look at an example. Betty needs 2500 calories to maintain her current weight. She decides to diet and goes on a 1000 calorie per day diet. She loses weight but approximately 60% of her weight loss was lean body mass. So in the two week period she lost 20 pounds and 12 pounds of it was lean body mass. Now as we discussed in the last article lean muscle burns 30 to 70 calories per day so her body now needs 360 to 840 calories less per day to maintain.
Now she goes back to her 2500 calories per day of food intake. Using a conservative figure of 360 calories less per day her body needs she will gain 1 pound every 10 days on the 2500 calorie diet she was used to. So now even though she is doing nothing more than she did before her diet she is gaining weight again.
So as you can see the quick weight loss diet may not be good from the point of regaining the weight afterwards. You must also realize that during the dieting phase you may be depriving your body of much needed nutrients and vitamins. Fast weigh loss has been associated with the development of gallstones and you may experience lose skin from the loss of body mass while your skin has no opportunity to shrink.
In our next installment we will discuss the change in diet to help you lose weight.
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