Are Crash Diets Healthy?

When it comes to quick weight loss, celebrities never ever fail to amaze us! This is especially true of the famous actress-moms who lost all of their pregnancy weight within weeks of delivery! How did they manage to do this? This question is often asked by women like you and me who are often told to rely on the good old exercising and eating a healthy, balanced diet to lose weight. Well, ideally, this is the path which anyone aiming for a healthy weight loss should follow. However, some of us, in our hurry to fit into that slim-fit skinny jeans or in our unbridled quest to look like our favorite celebrities, resort to quick-fix solutions, such as, following a crash diet!

How Does Crash Dieting Work?

As everyone is aware, in order to stay healthy and fit, a person needs to take a diet which supplies the body with the right amounts of all the required nutrients, vitamins and minerals. Crash diets, also known as fad diets, are based on the principal that a person should eat only a particular food group for a given duration, which will automatically stop the supply of some of the essential nutrients that the body needs, resulting in weight loss! So, you can see, there are crash diets that work i.e. help you in quick weight loss, however, they can have some serious implications on the body in the long run as they are depriving you of nutrients and some of them may even starve you! Here is a list of some of the popular crash diets:

• The Lemonade Diet
• The Chicken Soup Diet
• The Scarsdale Diet
• The Acai Berry Diet
• The Zone Diet
• The South Beach Diet
• The Special K Diet
• 3-day Diet
• The Cabbage Soup Diet
• The Raw Food diet
• The Grapefruit Diet
• Atkins diet
• The Negative Calorie Diet
• 3-hour Diet
• The Grape Diet
• The Hollywood Diet

Is Crash Dieting Safe and Healthy?

• As mentioned above, most of the crash diets deprive the body of food and essential nutrients like carbohydrates, fats, proteins, calcium, etc. This means that when a person is on a crash diet, he may suffer from weakened immunity and deterioration of health, making him liable to various diseases. Kidney stones, high cholesterol, lack of energy, these are some of the commonly observed negative health conditions in a fad dieter.
• People who follow one fad diet or the other, every now and then, may develop eating disorders such as anorexia, binge eating, bulimia, etc. Such people are unable to follow a regular eating regimen and hence become prone to these disorders.
• It is said that whatever a person eats, comes out through the condition of his skin and hair! A person who loses weight through crash dieting, is much more likely to develop conditions such as sagging skin, wrinkling and hair loss, compared to others who take a healthy diet.
• Crash diets, in the long run, contribute more to weight gain than weight loss! The reason behind this is that when a person is on a crash diet, he tends to eat less. The metabolism of the body, in this state, becomes used to burning lesser calories. That's the reason why, after a while, fad dieters often hit a weight loss plateau and are unable to reduce further weight.
• Crash dieting can have a negative impact on the mental state of a person too, especially once the person starts gaining back whatever weight he or she has lost, which is a very common phenomena since no one can live on the strange diets recommended by these fad diets lifelong! Depression, mood swings, fatigue - these are some of the commonly experienced negative fallout of crash diets.

Crash diets should not be followed blindly as they may lead to lack of energy and hasten the onset of diseases such as osteoporosis, caused by calcium deficiency. A person should instead, aim for healthy weight loss by exercising everyday and taking a diet of fruits, vegetables, lean meats, fish, healthy fats, eggs and other foods which provide the body with right amount of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, calcium, fiber, iron, and all the essential minerals and vitamins. Drinking a gallon of water everyday and staying away from junk and oily foods is the best way to achieve weight loss!